LoBaron
Posts: 4776
Joined: 1/26/2003 From: Vienna, Austria Status: offline
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ORIGINAL: Kayoz In the words of Carl Sagan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." - and despite DM working fairly well to fudge the answers, it has no experimental data to back it up. You might as well replace DM with "grumpkins", and you'd have as much proof. That's the way science works, unfortunately - no proof, you got bupkis. Right you are, but you definitely are misunderstanding the level of developement here. We are, technologically, on the lower end of the ladder where confirmation of DM predictions are possible. But we already do have a sufficiently developed theory to make predictions and perform rough comparisions to empirical data. Up to now these comparisions yield positive results on many different scales. The DM theory is successful because it was developed to tackle a single issue: The fact that the center of galaxies rotate too fast if only gravitational forces of baryonic matter was involved. Now, the really interesting part is: You can already model several other effects this theory has on our universe, and the results are stunning. Not only does it explain the winding up of galaxy centers (the reason for the theories developement), it also enables us: - to simulate the clustering of galaxies so that it matches reality close to perfect - to explain gravitational lensing in galaxy clusters and relative motions in those clusters - to explain fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background as has been measured by extremely accurate methods And this is pretty neat for a theory which initially should adress a very specific issue. quote:
Let's step back to Copernicus and his "concentric circles" theory. It worked quite well in the calculations, given the accuracy of observations available to them at the time and the understanding of our solar system. That did not, however, make him right. DM is in the same boat - it may work well on paper, but there's no evidence to support it (as there's no evidence to support concentric circles) - so despite how well it may look on paper, that doesn't make it RIGHT. That's how science works - proof, experimentation and and reproducible experiments confirming the theory. DM has NONE of those. No experimental proof to show it exists, no real theory as to what it is (stuff with mass, but that we can't detect, can't measure, can't quantify - why not just call it "god"?) If its ok with you I will just skip the Copernicus part because its rather polemic. Admittedly, we have not up to now been able to prove the existence of a single WIMP (or particle DM is predicted to consist of). If you want to call it god, please feel free to do so. You would probably have called the Neutrino god as well? It was predicted as a byproduct of radioactive beta decay by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930. It was also predicted that it would be very hard to identify because it was predicted to have extremely low mass and be electroneutral. In this specific case it took nearly 25 years to find traces of its existence. Have patience young Jedi... Fact is, there are many nice predictions the DM theory makes which would come in VERY handy in current understanding of our universe. And don´t forget, it explains something which is hard to explain otherwise: The fact that galaxies rotate faster at the center than they should as long as current theories without addional DM are involved. There are other theories which are able to do the same. But: none of them explain anything else, and all of them have severe problems to be brought in line with existing, extremely reliable, and often confirmed theories, like relativity or the current gravitational models. And there are no other alternatives in sight. And galaxies DO rotate faster than they should... Makes you think, no? quote:
DM has had a big hole shot in it's torso. Maybe it'll prove not to be fatal to the theory - or more likely, it'll be consigned to the boom closet that hold concentric circles, ether, the turtle and so many others. Is it just me or is that statement more likely to be from a politician than from a scientist?
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