eaim
eaim on Hacker News
“Investigation takes time”
They have been “investigating” for a decade. It’s simply spy vs spy & that's it. If that sounds skeptical, fine. Nothing wrong with with skepticism. It’s healthy.
Haha! “Nobody can spy unless it’s us.” Touché! (Best uttered while spying on the world through a prism.)
Their reputation notwithstanding, it makes little difference if all they are doing is taking notes or passing along statements, rather than digging & getting answers. That’s the forgotten duty of true reportage & journalism.
They don’t get a free pass as a “trustworthy news organisation” just because what they report isn’t wrong, if they also aren’t reporting anything useful.
All is vagueness. It’s popular! Why bother with evidence when agencies / governments / media can simply make vague statements about threats & security? Oh & of course we can’t supply evidence because that would threaten our security also. Circulus In probando
Good commentary, well & clearly stated!
Sorry but I’d have to disagree: There are plenty of people working on cosmologies that don’t include the Big Bang, or that do include it but only as one facet of a larger theoretical framework.
As for not being able to imagine how you explain the CMB without the Big Bang, well, there are plenty of good arguments being made here that put to paid that “limitation.” As well, think of the Michelson-Morley experiment. In that era, no one could imagine how light could propagate through space without the presence of a medium permeating that space.
I’ll venture one step further. Dark Matter is to current cosmology what the aether was to 19th century cosmology.
All said and done, the current state of cosmology (whether one falls in with mainstream theories or not) is a mess. It has so many addendums, codicils & caveats that one has to be almost a type of lawyer of physics to be able to navigate it.
We await our new Einstein. Our new Heisenberg. Our elegant theory of everything; or as one science writer put it: The universe on a T-shirt.
If the Bullet Cluster had offered not hypothetical but empirical, incontrovertible evidence for Dark Matter, at this juncture we wouldn’t even be calling it Dark Matter anymore.
Sorry but that’s an intellectual dodge. A verbal fiddle. Saying it is a “name for something” doesn’t make the fact that it’s a hypothesis disappear. One is simply positing the need for more “Russian dolls” inside the Russian doll one has hypothesised to begin with.
Ah, understood, thanks. Sorry about that.
@astro123
The following excerpt is the crux of the author’s argument regarding DM, & it points to the dark elephant in the room that a lot of physicists are bothered by but don’t want to discuss:
“It's perhaps worth stopping to ask why astrophysicists hypothesize dark matter to be everywhere in the universe? The answer lies in a peculiar feature of cosmological physics that is not often remarked. For a crucial function of theories such as dark matter, dark energy and inflation, which each in its own way is tied to the big bang paradigm, is not to describe known empirical phenomena but rather to maintain the mathematical coherence of the framework itself while accounting for discrepant observations. Fundamentally, they are names for something that must exist insofar as the framework is assumed to be universally valid.”
@astro123
Sorry my comment uploaded before I was done. It is an error to state that there is evidence for dark matter. There is no evidence for it other than that as a hypothesis it adds support to a larger cosmological theory; that of the so-called Big Bang. But that is basically a circle in the proof. A tautology.
@astro123
There’s a tautology in your critique. You’re attempting to suggest that there is evidence for dark matter. There isn’t. Dark matter is a theory, one that has not yet produced empirical evidence to support it (& perhaps cannot ever do so.)