• How Do We Know Dark Matter Really Exists?

    From Chris M. Thomasson@21:1/5 to Dr. Jai Maharaj on Fri Jul 27 20:46:46 2018
    XPost: sci.physics, sci.astronomy, alt.politics
    XPost: talk.politics.misc

    On 7/27/2018 4:23 PM, Dr. Jai Maharaj wrote:
    How Do We Know Dark Matter Really Exists?

    Written by Ashley Hamer
    Curiosity, curiosity.com
    July 25, 2018

    Ever since the late 1960s when Vera Rubin and Kent Ford
    discovered that galaxies don't behave the way they should,
    scientists have been looking for the mysterious substance
    behind that behavior. That theoretical stuff is called dark
    matter, and while it's invisible to telescopes, it has
    mass, which means it can show its might through the force
    of gravity. Of course, that's all theoretical. Some might
    even say it's a little too convenient, as if scientists
    just came up with a magical substance that makes the math
    work. What makes us so sure that dark matter is even a
    thing?

    Hold Me Closer, Tiny Particle

    "People ask this question a lot," said Katie Mack, a
    theoretical astrophysicist at North Carolina State
    University who studies dark matter. "You know, maybe dark
    matter is just a fudge factor or something." But for
    astrophysicists, dark matter is much more than that.

    If you go back to high school physics class, you may
    remember that the more mass something has, the greater its
    gravitational pull. If galaxies were only made up of the
    stuff we can see, there wouldn't be enough gravity to keep
    them together, much less to keep the stars in the sparse
    outer edges orbiting just as fast as those in the center.
    In fact, scientists reckon that normal matter makes up less
    than five percent of the universe. Dark matter seems to
    make up a whopping 27 percent. (The rest is a mysterious
    force called dark energy.)

    Continues at:

    https://curiosity.com/topics/how-do-we-know-dark-matter-really-exists-curiosity

    Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
    Om Shanti
    http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj


    <sci-fi warning!>

    I wonder if dark matter can possibly be loosely related to the 3d
    equipotential gravitational field. It is hard to draw a 3d
    equipotential, yet easy in 2d. In the 2d version we just take the
    perpendicular field, easy. In 3d, there are infinite choices of what
    might be a perpendicular line, harder.

    Fwiw, one of my highly crude solutions is to plot three points in a
    field line, then take the surface normal of the resulting 3d triangle comprising said points. Then we create the next segment of the field
    line using this normal. It can create renderings like:

    https://plus.google.com/101799841244447089430/posts/PU1rRsaEUzK

    The mysterious lines in purple are the experimental 3d result of my
    little hack solution for an equipotential field. The lines in red and
    greed are the actual field lines.

    The lines in white are the unit cube.

    </sci-fi warning!>

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  • From Mr. B1ack@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 28 17:31:56 2018
    XPost: sci.physics, sci.astronomy, alt.politics
    XPost: talk.politics.misc

    We DON'T know that "dark matter" exists ... and after
    a good decade+ of very expensive looking we STILL can't
    find any.

    What we DO know is there's some effect in play that
    at least LOOKS like what you'd expect from clouds
    of invisible matter.

    But "looks like" and "is" are different things.

    On the other hand, "dark ENERGY" really seems to
    exist. Only one source of energy can appear to come
    from everywhere all at once - a higher-dimensional
    reserve ... bleeding in like sunshine into FlatWorld.
    Likely the 'big bang' isn't done banging yet, the
    effects are just being spread across a much larger
    3-D space now.

    So, on the plus side, physics isn't "over" - there
    are things we still don't understand. Maybe Einstein
    didn't go far enough ? Maybe there's a theory that
    will turn relativity into a "special case" just as
    relativity did to Newton ? Maybe this is all some
    alien video game with a "fudge factor" added so the
    sim would keep proceeding as desired ? So many
    exciting possibilities :-)

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