Most of our theories about the universe are based on evidence from secondary, tertiary, etc effects. It's often the best we can do.
I don't think you'd find anyone who would object to the idea that "our theory is incomplete" ("all models are wrong", etc), so it seems like your main objection seems to be that we've given a name to a family of theories that attempt to explain the phenomenon we've grouped under "dark matter".
> I think it's far more likely that our theory is incomplete rather than some whole new class of invisible matter/energy being conjured into existence just to counter-balance our 1) wrong equations and/or 2) wrong observations
It's rather human to make an estimate of likelihood based on how long ago something was conjectured to exist :) Moreover "wrong equations" and/or "wrong observations" are part of the very theories attempting to explain our current state of knowledge.
> So many non-scientists think dark matter is proven. It isn't. It's nothing but pure conjecture.
Actually, usually the issue with these discussions are with scientifically literate folks who read a Scientific American article on dark matter in 1998 and have engaged with that as a strawman ever since. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it is odd to me how many people are convinced they're bringing light to the darkness with these kinds of comments.
You're thinking of dark energy, the net effect of which is to change the overall expansion profile of the universe as a whole. Dark Matter was first proposed when galactic rotation profiles failed to meet theoretical expectations -- matter far from the center of each galaxy had a higher velocity than it would if visible matter had been the only factor.
> I think it's far more likely that our theory is incomplete rather than some whole new class of invisible matter/energy being conjured into existence
Occam's razor (the simplest explanation tends to be the right one) suggests that a new unobserved particle is more likely than abandonment of F = GMmr^-2 . This doesn't mean the equation must be correct, it's a question of reaching for the low-hanging fruit.
> So many non-scientists think dark matter is proven. It isn't. It's nothing but pure conjecture.
First, nothing is ever proven true in science, only false. Second, dark matter is more than pure conjecture, since there is observational evidence. A pure conjecture would be an idea about reality having no observational support at all (unicorns, Bigfoot). Dark matter is a hypothesis crafted to explain observations, but so far there's no persuasive theory to explain it, and no observations of candidate particles either.
And as for your last sentence, trust me I understand the scientific method, and how proof, evidence, and fact interrelate with knowledge. Nice philosophical observations, but having nothing to do with this discussion.
What I'm saying about Dark energy/matter, is that there is also an INDIRECT relationship there. It's not just a special invisible mass and invisible energy. It's a fundamental misunderstanding about what spacetime is. I think the "dark" quantities are every bit as much an illusion as the "light bending" illusion created by stars.
On the contrary, it actually bends. Spacetime curvature is a real, not an apparent, effect.
"Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve." -- John Wheeler
More on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring
That's the distinction i was attempting to point out, when I said if mankind had visually noticed star-induced 'lensing' (before Einstein explaining what to expect) we would have ASSUMED the light itself was bending, and that space was 'flat' (unbent). Thinking space is flat and light is bent (the opposite of what is true), would have been the same kind of blunder we are making today believing that Dark matter/energy is actually real.
Space is curved, and the light passing through it is also curved. That was the point of my link to the Einstein Ring page -- to show that light is in fact curved along with space.
The first important confirmation of GR was an experiment conducted in 1919 that showed curved light paths of starlight passing near the sun, observed during an eclipse.
If you happened to be located near a black hole, at 1.5 times the radius of the event horizon, by looking along a tangential path, you would see the back of your own head, regardless of which direction you looked. The reason? Light is curved along with space.
It's not accurate to say, as you are doing, that light always follows straight paths. It is accurate to say that light follows the curvature of the space through which it passes.
> ... would have been the same kind of blunder we are making today believing that Dark matter/energy is actually real.
Try to avoid moving ahead of the evidence. The present evidence is that dark matter and energy are real, again following Occam's razor. But I can't say these things are real as a matter of concluded fact, and you can't say they aren't. No one knows, and science requires us to wait for observation and theory to sort it out. Science doesn't progress by proclamation, but by way of theories that resist sincere efforts at falsification.
Apropos: https://youtu.be/b240PGCMwV0?t=37
Ah, the encyclopedias are wrong. That may be true, but only if you meet your burden of evidence. You cannot meet your burden of evidence, and you show no sign of even trying.
Quite false. You're overlooking the fact that photons are the carrier particle of the electromagnetic field, which takes the form of waves in space -- waves that change direction without the application of forces. An optical lens changes the direction of photons without exerting a force. So does curved spacetime. These are examples of hundreds of things about physics that contradict your outlook.
Also, masses respond to gravity by changing direction, and gravity is not a force: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/140-physics/the-the...
Again, at 1.5 times the radius of a black hole, looking tangentially, you would see the back of your own head. So even in this local frame of reference, light has taken a curved path along with curved spacetime. In other frames of reference, light is obviously not traveling in straight lines. In fact, it can be argued that light never travels in straight lines -- that would be true only in a universe without any mass at all.
You could argue that water always travels along straight lines inside a pipe and never changes direction, and in the case of the pipe itself changing direction, you could argue that the water is always traveling in a straight line from its own perspective inside the curved pipe, but having said that, people would see your ideas for what they are.
> Any physics professor will understand precisely what i'm saying, and all agree.
You appear to have forgotten I have already disproven this with my John Wheeler quote: "Mass tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells mass how to move." As with masses, so with photons. If masses could travel at c, they would take the exact path photons do -- curved ones.
You're pairing space and matter, then time and energy, and comparing them as though these entities are naturally paired in current theory. They aren't. Space and time are elements of spacetime, matter and energy are interchangeable by way of a rather well-known equation, but these things don't arrange themselves as you're trying to do.
> And as for your last sentence, trust me I understand the scientific method, and how proof, evidence, and fact interrelate with knowledge.
So you didn't say, "So many non-scientists think dark matter is proven. It isn't. It's nothing but pure conjecture."
Nothing is ever proven in science (falsified, yes, proven, no). And dark matter and dark energy are both more than "pure conjecture," a domain reserved to notions lacking observational evidence.
Come on. Is it so hard to say "Oops I mixed them up"?
Troll alert. Space and time are elements of spacetime, they are an integrated whole, a fact first pointed out by Einstein's math teacher Minkowski. When Einstein first read what Minkowski had written, he said, “Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.”
Only later, after learning tensor calculus and beginning work on GR, did Einstein understand what Minkowski was going on about. But in those days people were interested only in getting it right, not posturing as right even when they're wrong.
You aren't debating physics.
Please don't resort to name-calling, regardless of the language used by fellow commenters.
In the days of Usenet, before there was an Internet, this sort of language was regarded as neutral and informative -- it's not abusive when it's accurate. But the Politically Correct movement in social media is seeing a revival, such that even accurate use of these terms is regarded as counterproductive.
In the Usenet era, some individuals would strive to earn the label, and applying it would save people a lot of time trying to engage in constructive conversations with people who were manifestly unable to rise to the occasion.
Bottom line -- it's possible to take PC to a pointless extreme. And I'm hardly the first to make this point.
Fair enough, but this begs the question of what constitutes incivility. If present trends continue, telling someone that they're wrong will be regarded as uncivil behavior. To avoid censure it will only be possible to assert that they've posted "alternative facts."
I happen to agree that incivility represents a real problem in social media, and we've seen many sites abandon their discussion groups because of uncivil posts and people. But I think the argument can be made that definitions have changed as well as behavior.
> That goes back to Usenet as well.
Not really. Having posted there for many years, I can tell you from direct experience that the perceived threshold of incivility has changed completely. One need only review posts from that era to see the point that definitions and standards have changed.
But this is now, and an argument about what was once acceptable doesn't seem particularly persuasive even to me, especially now that we have an embodiment of incivility running the country.
No matter how egregious the behavior of your fellow commenter, it's never okay to resort to uncivil language ourselves.
My main issue is that the bullet is anomalous in multiple ways, and dark matter doesn't explain the heat issue. If it did, then it wouldn't be useful as an explanation for the rotation curve problem in other galaxies. I feel that a more parsimonious explanation would cover both the lensing and the heat.
You're right. Collisional matter that dissipates radiatively completely explains the heat issue: many of the individual components of the dust and gas in the galaxy clusters came close enough to each other to interact electromagnetically, trading off their momentum-energy for momentum-energy in photons and other products of scatterings. Ordinary intergalactic gas and dust from the two clusters got squashed together and the squashing made it hot enough to glow.
In the standard cosmology (\Lambda-CDM), CDM is cold dark matter that is collisionless, does not dissipate radiatively and does not feel electromagnetism even in very close quarters. So it does not heat up, and its momentum is only influenced the gravitation sourced by the components of the colliding galaxy clusters (which includes the dark matter itself), with the result that the "clouds" of dark matter in each cluster sail right through one another and past all the ordinary matter, with effectively no deflections of their trajectories.
The result is that gravity (measured by lensing of background objects) points to a hot cloud of dust left in the middle of the collision, the stars and other denser visible ahead of that debris, and two mostly-transparent regions leading the way ahead of the visible matter.
> the bullet is anomalous in multiple ways
It's a bit more accurate to say that there are questions still unanswerable by observation of the bullet cluster alone, and that searches for other cluster collisions are likely to provide further partial answers.
In particular, further observations will favour or disfavour different numerical simulations of large scale structure formation under the standard cosmology. However the variables most directly tested align roughly with whether cold dark matter is almost wholly particles similar to heavy sterile neutrinos or almost wholly particles like axions, rather than whether particle cold dark matter is there at all. Even TeVeS proponents aren't especially optimistic on that latter point (e.g. Angus and Diaferio, two prolific TeVeS-as-relativistic-MOND researchers, in their 2012 paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.6231.pdf starting at the bottom of page 23).
The bullet cluster is hard to explain without some form of dark matter.
This depends on how you look at it.
In the standard cosmology we define a preferred frame wherein an observer will see the matter (that's in the most general sense of "not the gravitational field", so it includes atoms and their components, photons, and various types of dark matter (e.g. neutrinos, which are "hot" dark matter, since they move relativistically and do not experience electromagnetism)) content of the universe as homogeneous and isotropic. This is physically reasonable since along every unobscured line of sight we see a lot of galaxies of various shapes, "tilts", sizes, surface brightnesses, and spectral lines. Observations also lead us to conclude that there is a relationship between redshifting of the spectral lines of common types of galaxies (and common radiative occurrences within them, like type A supernovas), and the change of the other observables (angular size on the sky, luminosity, etc.) that correlate with greater distance. This in turn led to the discovery of the Hubble "constant", and provoked ever deeper field telescopic studies to prove its value.
So if we assume that along every line of sight, including obscured ones, we have much the same view of many many galaxies at a variety of distances, we can make a variation on the Friedmann equation that parameterize several things that would lead to the observables of galaxies when we model their known (and unknown) components as a set of perfect fluids.
We can take the Hubble "constant" and put it into a Robertson-Walker vacuum spacetime. RW spacetimes can be grokked by dimensional reduction. Consider a cylinder that we slice (foliate) along its axis into a set of infinitesimally thin circles stacked on top of each other. We describe the radius of each circle with a function r(h) where h is the height of the circle from the base of the cylinder. Where r(h) is constant, we have a cylinder, but if r(h) increases with h, then we have something like a cone balancing on its apex; r(h) can describe a wide variety of shapes. For an 3+1 RW spacetime that is similar to our universe, we foliate on the timelike axis and define a function a(t) where t_0 == now with the spacelike coordinates set on a chosen observer (us here on Earth, for example). "t" counts upwards as we go into the past from t_0, and a(t) goes to zero as t increases. "t" is the lookback time and a(t) is the scale factor. The chosen observer is the special observer mentioned above, who sees the matter of the universe as isotropic and homogeneous at the largest scales. The most useful coordinates on such a spacetime are comoving, that is each gravitationally bound galaxy cluster stays at the same coordinates at every time t.
If we mix together the Friedmann equations, the Lemaître idea of spacetime having a zero radius at some large lookback time, and the RW spacetime that can model that, we get the FLRW model of the standard cosmology. We take the RW case where there is no extrinsic curvature, that is, when we foliate on the timelike axis each spacelike hypersurface is spatially flat; that is similar to saying that when we slice up our dimensionally reduced solid along its height, we get a set of circles of the same radius (i.e. a cylinder rather than a cone). We absorb the expansion parameter into a(t) as another of the fluids.
We then consider two types of fluid: those that dilute away as t -> t_0 -> future and those that do not dilute away. The former is "matter", including dark matter; the latter is "dark energy".
When we consider them as components of an action, diluting-away fluids are attractive and non-diluting fluids are repuslive. When we consider them in terms of the matter tensor T in General Relativity, the diluting-away fluids have positive pressure and the non-diluting fluids have negative pressure.
It's important to return to the point that this model has a preferred frame, and that translating the non-diluting fluid into "the same for all observers in all frames of reference" physics leads one to assume that dark energy is just a feature of the Lorentz-invariant vacuum. So dark energy arises in the cosmological model but corresponds to the ground state of the empty-of-matter spacetime in frames of reference other than the preferred one picked out by the cosmological model.
That is, the statement that "dark energy drives the expansion (via negative pressure or repulsion)" is frame-dependent, and thus observer-dependent, and with a change of frames of reference (and even a change of coordinates on the preferred frame), the statement becomes untrue. What is true in all frames is that there is an intrinsic property of space in an expanding spacetime that has a constant energy-density no matter how large a volume of space is considered.
The exact equation of state of dark energy is an area of active research and also tests to make sure that the assumptions that inevitably lead to it (isotropy at huge scales, homogeneity, spatial flatness, redshift-distance relations and other things implying expansion) are not blown up by evidence from ever finer observations.
So it's not so much a 'label' as a phenomenon whose microscopic details have yet to be discovered.
There are lots of those in physics, and we've had a good century of probing the microscopic details of phenomena discovered at the end of the 19th century and since, so this shouldn't really be causing anyone sleepless nights.
So if someone asked me what's my 'evidence' that gravity or light-speed are not universally constant, my answer is simply: "The evidence for dark-energy/matter, is that exact same evidence". There should be some wave-function (possibly resulting from what we call a big bang), in terms of G and C, that once integrated out over the current life of the universe, will yield precisely that positions and velocities of the galaxies that we currently observe. To me it seems far less likely that there's an entirely new set of particles we cannot see, despite the Standard Model of particles being proven correct out to 40 decimal places.
Dark energy it is a property of empty space that does not dilute away as more space appears in an expanding universe. The only way to abolish dark energy is to eliminate the expansion of the universe. It only has a "fundamental field strength" in particular chosen frames of reference in which one can represent it as a field with a constant energy-density. The comoving frame of the standard cosmology is one such frame of reference. However, in most other frames this energy density vanishes, and when that happens a general relativist will decide that the energy density was an artifact of the choice of frame of reference or system of coordinates and ditch the word "fundamental".
Now, there are lots of ways we can complicate the action S_{\Lambda-CDM} in a Lagrangian formulation of the standard cosmology by introducing further repulsive terms into it beyond constant * \Lambda (as in the Einstein-Hilbert action or an expansion of it) or L_{repulsivematter} in a parameterization, and indeed there have been numerous attempts to do so. However, short of eliminating the expansion of space at all times and in all reference frames there is no way to get rid of a repulsive, non-diluting, non-concentrating (when time-reversed or if the critical density of the universe turns out to lead to a contraction of space in the future) term.
But in the standard cosmology, we have \Lambda, which is just the cosmological constant, i.e., dark energy is a property of the ground state, which is the vacuum. When there's more vacuum, there's more dark energy. Mathematically, we start with an action that leads to the standard write-down of the EFEs. Physically, this matches observational tests at large scales, which is convenient because the standard write-down of the EFEs is almost the only way to match observational tests within our solar system (c.f. the parameterized post-Newtonian formalism).
> gravity or light speed are not universally constant
What exactly do you mean by "gravity ... not universally constant"? In particular, what do you mean by gravity?
In General Relativity speeds are something that are extremely hard to talk about except in the local neighbourhood around a single point. In fact, many general relativists would argue that talking about "universal" speeds violates the spirit of general relativity. However, if our universe continues to be modellable as a smooth manifold with a Lorentz metric, we get a sort of quasi-universality of "c" in that at every point one can construct an infinitesimal region of spacetime in which "c" is a parameter in the action of matter and takes on the same _locally measured_ value in each such region for an observer in that region. There is ample evidence that favours this up to energy scales accessible to us on Earth and visible with observational platforms on and near our planet.
There are certainly metric theories other than GR that allow for different sources to couple to different metrics, but most of these have to undergo a phase change to an effective single metric with universal coupling in the early universe or we would see clear evidence for them (in particular, the distribution of heat in the early dense phase of the universe still has to produce the Standard Model at lab energies and also stars and galaxies and labs). Some productive and well-regarded physical cosmologists have proposed these types of theories, even recently (e.g. Afshordi & Magueijo), and they explictly reject a universal value of "c" (in particular c approaches infinity in their model's extremely early universe).
But in the standard cosmology we have General Relativity, and we don't vary the value of G or of c when grinding through the Einstein Field Equation; we take those values as given to us by nature, and have no evidence for them varying in the observable universe (and a pretty substantial amount of evidence against such variations, in particular including petabytes of spectroscopic data from objects in the sky).
> "There should be some wave-function (possibly resulting from what we call a big bang), in terms of G and C, that once integrated out...
I'm sorry, I don't understand this. Could you explain further?
> To me it seems far less likely that there's an entirely new set of particles we cannot see, despite the Standard Model of particles being proven correct out to 40 decimal places.
Dark energy is not particles. As I said above, it's a feature of the vacuum, and the most fundamental feature of the vacuum is that it is empty of particles. A tl;dr here is that we don't know what creates more space rather than less space, but we know that when more space is created there's more dark energy in the comoving frame but not more particles.
Are you thinking of dark matter here, rather than dark energy? If so, we already have hot dark matter in the form of neutrinos. Neutrinos are "hot" because they move relativistically, and thus are prone to carry momentum far away from galaxies very quickly. Cold dark matter is "cold" because it moves non-relativistically and so the momentum CDM carries lingers in place in and around galaxy clusters. While it would be convenient if CDM were like heavy neutrinos, there is no reason in the standard cosmology that CDM has to be particles at all, or even just one species; the only requirement is that it be almost entirely collisionless and non-radiative so that we don't see it and so that it doesn't release its trapped momentum (e.g. by converting some of it into hot dark matter or light or standard model particles).
Finally, the Standard Model is mute on gravity, and yet you -- made up of Standard Model particles -- are feeling it right now. So I'm not sure how your argument about the correctness of the Standard Model fits with your argument.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6338
in which Schrödinger (in 1918!) describes, "matter in the large essentially as a compressible fluid of constant density at rest under a constant spatially isotropic tension which ... must be equal to 1/3 of the rest density of energy".
The notation is old-fashioned, but check out Schrödinger's paragraph at the bottom of Harvey's page 5 !