Re:New dark matter map reveals cosmic mystery
by pdonis on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:53PM
(#27310092)
> what do you think is more likely, there is this matter out there that no one has been able to find in decades of searching, or the mainstream assumptions/math on gravity are wrong/incomplete?
You are mis-stating the real issue here.
The distribution of matter is already a free parameter in our current theory of gravity, General Relativity. GR in no way requires that all matter be visible to humans.
The "no one has been able to find" thing is not a problem for GR, it's a problem for the Standard Model of particle physics, which does not contain any particles that dark matter could be made out of. But most physicists already believe that there are more kinds of particles than the SM describes, we just haven't figured out how to make them in accelerators so we can study them in a controlled experimental fashion, and we haven't figured out any "smoking gun" signature that will tell us if such particles exist out there in the universe. "Dark matter" is really just a name for those kinds of particles that are already believed to exist anyway, we just can't detect them with the technology we currently have. But the technology we currently have is very limited.
So the real question you should be asking is, what do you think is more likely, that there are particles that aren't included in the Standard Model of particle physics--which is already believed to be the case anyway--or that General Relativity is wrong in its description of the dynamics of galaxies, even though this is a domain in which GR has already passed stringent experimental tests with predictions accurate to many decimal places?
You are mis-stating the real issue here.
The distribution of matter is already a free parameter in our current theory of gravity, General Relativity. GR in no way requires that all matter be visible to humans.
The "no one has been able to find" thing is not a problem for GR, it's a problem for the Standard Model of particle physics, which does not contain any particles that dark matter could be made out of. But most physicists already believe that there are more kinds of particles than the SM describes, we just haven't figured out how to make them in accelerators so we can study them in a controlled experimental fashion, and we haven't figured out any "smoking gun" signature that will tell us if such particles exist out there in the universe. "Dark matter" is really just a name for those kinds of particles that are already believed to exist anyway, we just can't detect them with the technology we currently have. But the technology we currently have is very limited.
So the real question you should be asking is, what do you think is more likely, that there are particles that aren't included in the Standard Model of particle physics--which is already believed to be the case anyway--or that General Relativity is wrong in its description of the dynamics of galaxies, even though this is a domain in which GR has already passed stringent experimental tests with predictions accurate to many decimal places?
I'm going with the former.