There's a theory out there that our universe is a pocket universe inside of a supermassive black hole. My relativistic gravity is pretty rusty and was shaky to begin with. If that theory isn't pure fantasy, and we were a pocket universe, and large masses were spinning above the event horizon, we'd experience forces from those objects, right?
I'm still kinda fond of the Flatland theory myself. Us poor 4 dimensional beings can't figure out how to build tools that can take 5 dimensional measurements, so we see weird behavior we can't explain.
What if our sense of scale is off and the universe isn't curved we're just orbiting a black hole 10x the mass of the visible universe. It's not expanding that's us travelling through the gravity well at 99% the speed of light relative to it.
My pet hypothesis is that the universe we experience is on the surface of the singularity of our black hole. This neatly explains some things:
- The Great Attractor would simply be the volume deeper in singularity. The cone of influence for the entire universe tends towards the center of our singularity.
- Dark energy, and the varying quantity of it, would simply be the amount of matter falling into our black hole. It would naturally start as a large amount (consisting of our parent star/mass) and later see variation as matter falls into it.
- Dimensionless physical constants may have been fields in the parent universe. As an infinitely small point, our universe singularity would resolve a continuous gradient to a single value. Our child universes would have a single value of gravity, for example, which could change over time (but would be constant across the universe as they changed).
I've got a huge list of interesting consequences, but as an armchair physicist it's probably all quack science :)
Maybe you already know all this, but to other curious readers:
The great attractor is about 200 Mly away. Directly behind it, 600 Mly away from us, is the Shapley Supercluster, towards which the great attractor is itself moving. In the opposite direction is a underdensity, called the "Dipole repeller", and between the two, where we are, is a "dark flow".
Someone is probably going to vote your comment down on the premise that Cthulu is unhelpful to the conversation. They shouldn't: it's not any more fantastic than the various laymans' pet theories here which have, for some indecipherable reason, been upvoted to the top of the discussion, despite having no connection to real physics whatsoever.
In a more serious note; i actually think the imagination and fantasy they is born in alot of people after reading about the mysteries of the universe is responsible for a many physics grad.
Taking things /seriously/ is, imo, what keeps people out of stem. Stemmers are, if anything, fantasy rich and colorful people, physicists in particular!
Im glad not many people chose to downvote me too :)
Part of the problem with that is that we'd see an uneven amount of expansion. We'd see lots of it along the axis between us and the supermassive blackhole (towards and away from), but roughly perpendicular to it we'd see a ring/plane of matter going roughly the same speed as us towards it. Instead we see an equal expansion in all directions. Now I don't know what kind of scale that might change at though so maybe it's possible still with a seriously large one?
Generally I've chalked these feelings up to a certain type of existential dread. Described in this article[1] fairly well.
Kind of reminds you of the total perspective vortex from the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. Truly, on a universal scale even the most important and impacting human on an earth scale does about as much as a neutrino interacting with us.
The one I'm terrified of is the switch where the laws of physics all change at the speed of light. We will simply cease to exist and not even see it coming.
Nah you’d never see it coming and have no prior for believing in it, so not scary. What is scary: a super intelligence alien race enveloping all matter into Dyson swarms. You’d see stars shifting into uniform infrared emissions in an expanding sphere at nearly the speed of light. Suddenly the stars go dim... and then it reaches you.
Well, that gets into game theory stuff, though. For example, one could say that logically any aggressively expansive intelligent species on that scale should take the position of being friendly and supporting to lesser-advanced intelligent species by default, as a way to encourage other more-advanced species than them to take the same position.
The real danger would be a super but unintelligent race doing the same (think "giant space ants"), since they wouldn't have philosophy department chairs.
Depends where it happens. The speed of light is quite slow relative to the size of the universe. So Higgs field collapse could happen a long way away and take millennia to reach us. Perhaps as the collapse propagates across the in universe it meets some huge energy event which pushes the Higgs field up again and rescues matter.
You would see effects of tidal forces in the scenario you described, I think.
The other thing is, if it's not curved then you still need to explain Mercury's orbit precession (43 arcseconds per century is it?). This is not an easy thing to do
Have things along these lines ever been seriously investigated as a possible explanation for dark energy and the phenomenon observed here?
It doesn't necessarily need to be your exact hypothesis, but if you generalize it and look at our universe (just our observable universe, or perhaps "the whole thing" in some sense) as possibly being a small object in a much vaster medium, perhaps a medium we could never directly access or observe, what implications could that have, and what could it potentially explain? Perhaps even a medium abiding by a completely different kind of physics.
Yes, most of the random "what if" ideas put forth by laypeople have been investigated and either ruled out by theorists/experiments lists or are non-falsifiable.
Not to offend anyone here, but unless you have a solid grasp of the theory, nobody here is going to be "solving" the mystery of dark matter
You never know. Doug Forcett made an almost perfectly accurate guess as to the inner workings of the afterlife while stoned.
For those unaware, it's from the show The Good Place. Good fun for me, highly recommend it.
Edit: Apparently a joke with the meaning of "you never know who might get lucky and have an interesting insight" was... disliked. My thoughts on being able to have insight from anywhere come at least partially from the (somewhat recent) story of physicists that noted a connection between eigenvalues and eigenvectors (iirc) that mathematicians did not (after many years). Sometimes, insight comes from the outside.
Think of it like this: how many degree-level lectures can you give in physics as compared to whatever your profession is? Now imagine what someone who knows as much about your profession as you do about physics sounds like to you.
Half my questions on Physics stackexchange are so naïve they’re not even wrong, they are so bad they get closed as nonsensical. Looking at past exam papers, I could probably get a grade B in A-level physics (A-level is UK qualification taken at age 18 between secondary school and university currently used to decide which university you go to).
The other half of my ideas are right, but actual physicists tell me they’re “obvious” and “not worth writing about”.
The fact that pretty much all thoughts from people outside the field are either obvious, false, or nonsensical... doesn't invalidate the idea that flashes of insight can come from anywhere. I get what you're saying and agree the odds of it happening are pretty much zero. But sometimes even things with a probability of pretty much 0 can happen. The eigenvalue thing is an example of that, in my opinion.
A layperson could unwittingly trigger a cognitive leap by asking naive questions. A la Feynman saying he can't explain magnetism in a way that I could understand it, the effort could spark an insight or novel angle.
> disproportionately popular among armchair theorists compared to other fields like math or chemistry.
I’ve heard this before, but I wonder how true it is? I know my experiences are just anecdotes, but I knew a guy who was convinced the Hotel Room/Bellboy/Missing Dollar problem “broke maths”, and I’ve had countless frustrations with family members promoting homeopathy and acquaintances talking about chemical X being “one atom away from being bleach” like that doesn’t apply to water.
I’d be interested if anyone has done a real analysis of rates of armchair nonsense by sector.
Weren't (some)new super conductors discovered by just trying a bunch of crap already on the shelves in the labs once the concept existed?
Anyway, I just thought every device we make to measure something, there's some event the blows the scales. So what if you really just make shit up where does that go?
I like the other commenter defending the post about Cthulhu, It's just as made up as what I posted. Perspective is healthy.
I think people don't like your post because your example is from fiction and is therefore not insightful as to whether or not layman speculation can provide value.
Physicists providing an insight into math is absolutely not what I was talking about - I was talking about lay people providing an insight into theoretical physics.
To suggest that theoretical physicists are lay people with respect to math is silly. Also, I don't understand what you mean by a "connection between eigenvalues and eigenvectors" as the two seem quite obviously connected a priori?
I understand that, and understand this likely falls into the unfalsifiable category, but when everyone, even physicists, are grasping at straws, laypeople don't have many options other than to throw around random "what if" ideas. It's fun.
I doubt that hypothesis is actually true, and it may never be testable, but it's also true that a lot of things believed to be untestable eventually do become testable.
It can be a bit exhausting when online physics forums get crowded by people who clearly have no understanding of physics asking for an explanation of whether their "pet theory" makes sense.
I don't know why, but physics seems to be a much more popular target for these type of people than any other field.
I can definitely understand that. I wouldn't post such ignorant armchair speculation on a physics forum. But on HN? Why not?
Meta-physics is inscrutable (unless something leaves the realm of meta-physics). What's the harm in speculating about it? Like the simulation hypothesis, for example.
I understand it touches on real things here, like dark energy, but it's just dumb fun to try to conceive of if anything could lie beyond the universe and what it could possibly be if there is anything. It's likely forever unfalsifiable, but in some sense that's what makes it a fair subject for laymen. If it were testable, then you have to leave it to the professionals.
I know I have zero understanding of physics. I don't have any attachment to this or any other speculation. I'm not a crank or something. But it's impossible to not wonder about the nature of reality and the formation of the universe, you know? The fact that it's unknowable within our lifetimes, and probably forever, is the driving factor.
I like seeing how real physicists answer this question, too, in interviews and podcasts. They always hedge it with "of course this is wild speculation", like everyone should. I see I didn't really hedge my initial post, which was a mistake. This was a random thought triggered by that other post, not something I actually believe whatsoever.
EM redshifts alone would invalidate that hypothesis. It doesn't matter how fast you travel, EM redshifts follow specific laws that we cannot see breaking at any point observed in the universe.
It is more likely that physical laws have localised variations that we cannot tell from any discernible distance. Maybe pockets of vacuum do shit that we cannot fathom and if we observed it, we'd break the code for reality.
I've always wondered about the relationship between the future observable universe and black holes. Since space is expanding, far away objects that we now see will eventually move away from us faster than the speed of light so there would be no way to get at them any more. This seems similar to dropping yourself in a black hole: when you cross the event horizon you won't be able to get back to the objects outside of the black hole, unless they're dropping into the black hole too. Also, the bigger the black hole you drop yourself into, the less you'll feel it because the tidal forces become smaller. I wonder what you would see if our galaxy and surrounding galaxies were dropping into a super big black hole. Would the black hole take up more than 50% of the celestial sphere? Would everything then be moving away from us at an accelerating rate?
Right, it would seem that they should only be moving away in one direction, and eventually we'd even see a difference between the forward and backward direction. However, I've heard people claim that eventually, all directions go toward the singularity?
That's once you're inside the black hole, and not entirely true; "past" points outwards. I'll admit it's close enough to true.
Which is not to that's how it would look. Photons are also falling, so you'd still be able to see the external universe even if the apparent direction it's in isn't traversable. (The photons are coming from the past. See above...)
I don't think that grasps space-time as one thing and why black holes are so mental. The event horizon is where the past no longer points outwards, that path is broken. There's no direction in space or time with which to point your space engine to escape. No time you could travel to were that is restored.
If string theory is correct, there are a number of higher dimensions, the existence of which would influence gravity at short distances. The idea is that some gravity leaks away to the other dimensions. This is a function of distance, so at short distances less gravity has leaked, and gravity should be stronger. Efforts to find this effect haven't turned anything up yet, though.
Actually just to nitpick, even if we could find one string theory that works, remember that it's "only" math. Meaning that it could totally work to describe a phenomenon without having any physical reality to it.
Even if it predicts observation, like Bohr's model of the atom did, you have some degree of abstraction between the model and the physical implementation, so to speak.
And that's the ultimate problem of string theories: even if we crack some math model, if it can't be observed directly, we just don't know. Quantum mechanics currently sit in-between the purely theoretical (where we do have a model that works, minus gravity, if applicable at that level) and the barely observable (we can infer, a lot, but not much in the way of actually seeing things; although I think nowadays we've crossed that bridge anecdotally enough to be confident but don't quote me on that).
Therefore, string theory models may require higher dimensions in the math to hack the problem, but it doesn't mean these actually exist — like Clifford's algebra, Geometric Algebra, you reason with 4-dimensions to treat 2D (x, y) problems, and 8-dimensions to treat 3D problems — but that's just the math, and the beauty of that is indeed to "unify" other algebras which become essentially subsets.
It's really important to keep that in mind when "gunning for" string theories, or seeing them as "explicative", interpretable. They're really not, at least not now, and possibly ever due to their construction. In truth, it's more about brute-forcing the issue (kinda like current deep learning?), hence the wild ranges of "possible solutions", from 11 to 26 dimensions (some go in the hundreds in suggestion) because they're basically trying to use computers to identify dimensions wherein our universe "fits" quite well, and derive what we don't know (e.g. quantum gravity, or whatever that means in the "promised dimension level"). At a "basic principle" level, that's what string theories are after. It's pure math, it's crazy smart, it's really elegant and almost godly, noble because it requires the state of the art of our evolution and technology; but like quantum mechanics the "interpretation" will not be delivered with the equation, and it may never mean anything to us.
Iirc, LIGO confirmed that there was no leakage from/to other dimensions, hence that we can safely reason (at least on this problem) within our current 4D manifold.
It doesn't (cannot, really) state about the possibility that our universe, though self-contained in 4D, might be floating in a higher-dimensional space, like a 2D surface would float in 3D (and could be internally very consistent).
String theory, by the way, might not prove or disprove any of that (see my other reply to parent).
I vaguely recall that the observable universe looks a lot like foam. And even more vaguely, that maybe this reflects inflationary expansion of random fluctuations in the early universe.
So maybe this apparent connectivity over implausible scales just reflects the fact that stuff used to be much closer together.
Edit: There's a great sequence on inflation in Takashi Miike's "God's Puzzle".
We used to think so, yes. But our telescopes have improved a lot since then, and we're now able to see with much more detail, our 3D positioning is better too.
We've recently observed that the universe, at the largest scales of what's observable to us, looks like this: https://i.stack.imgur.com/lFnDf.jpg
That's what I meant by "foam". And remember that those are ~2D slices. In 3D, there are voids, with thin intervening walls, and stringy stuff where walls intersect.
It's dark matter that probably defines that structure. And so that dark matter could be moving, in coherent patterns at extremely large scales. But there's nothing necessarily supraluminal about it. It could just be moving in the same patterns that it did when it was hugely smaller. But then, I have zero clue about how conservation of angular momentum works during inflation.
If that were the explanation, we wouldn't expect to see perturbations in cosmic scale motion propagating supraluminally.
Oh sorry I didn't catch that (not a native speaker). When thinking of "foam" I see a uniform, homogenous noisy structure and I was pretty sure this was the name given to our former such view of the universe. My bad! (although I'd say, if "foam" is used to described these pictures, it's a pretty bad choice of adjective by scientists imho. "Galactic tissue" or "tissue-like walls" makes more sense to the layman imho).
Indeed, it's not "probably" dark matter, it is by the very definition of what we call dark matter. It's important to keep that in mind, when we name unknown phenomena it's just a 'placeholder' so to speak. Like X. So X explains the motion of galaxies, and we intuitively called X dark matter. Assuming there is an X, then there is dark matter (what it actually is is another question, could be "white energy" or fluffly creatures from the 6th dimension for all we know, but we call it dark matter for now).
So based on this, I always wonder: is it our observation or maybe interpretation thereof that's flawed? Are there 'effects' that make us see and infer things that are slightly 'off' maybe? (like the discrepancy with dark energy measurements for instance, it appears recently that there might not be accelerating expansion and the increasing redshift is due to errors in our calculations, i.e. we created "dark energy" out of a mistake and now it's possibly going to "disappear" as an idea because it's not needed anymore to explain anything).
As for inflation etc. These are also mathematical concepts that fit the observation, the clues; it however might not be the only possible model that works, we also might not have a correct interpretation (layman words) for it. Like we've got QED/QCD and we're still unable to describe in layman terms because it's illogical, paradoxical. Sometimes our idea of "simplest interpretation" is just that, an idea, and reality is a bit more complex, even if the simple equations may work as terms simplify (see how we "add" zero-value or unit-value arguments to some equations in physics to solve the math, it really begs the question if the "thing" you add actually exists, speaks of a real phenomena). I know Einstein was pretty unhappy about the picture painted by Λ... ;-)
About supraluminal anything (I assume you mean speed > c), I personally don't think it wise to postulate things that physics rule out explicitely. Inflation doesn't do that though, since it's spacetime expanding and that's not constrained by c.
I'm no physicist, and foam is just my analogy. I could have also said bread, because it's basically foam. Or even soap bubble foam. And yes, biological tissue, which is fundamentally an emulsion of oil in water.
That's a great point about dark matter, that it's just a placeholder. There could be stuff that only interacts through gravity. Or it could just be that there's a constant gravitational force that dominates at large distances.
TFA describes evidence that such properties as galactic rotational axes are correlated on extremely large scales. And if there are connections, they must be something that we can't see. So "dark matter" is the obvious candidate.
The other issue is how stuff can be correlated over distances that are too great for forces at the speed of light to correlate them quickly enough. Although TFA doesn't explicitly say that, I can't think of what else about those connections is so surprising. Given that the large-scale structure is so well known.
That's what got me thinking that inflation could account for it. I was thinking of stuff like shedding of vortices from rapidly moving objects in fluids. As they expand, features that arose at small scales in the boundary layer expand to far larger scales. Indeed, to scales that are large enough to be puzzling, if we had observed them in isolation.
That's simple minded, I know. But then, I'm no physicist.
I'm no physicist either. Maybe I wish I were, though. And no, your ideas here are everything but simple-minded, imho. On the contrary, being a non-expert lets you play with things with much more freedom than otherwise (like sci-fi authors), and then actual physicists can take over, sort out the testable and go with their own gut feeling.
(note: I assume TFA = Trend Filtering Algorithm, please correct if I'm wrong).
> galactic rotational axes are correlated on extremely large scales
I think "correlation does not imply causation". While this is a plague in economics, psychology, sociology, biology (non-exact sciences), it also applies in physics. We really don't know in this case, we just observe what you said but "correlation" is bias that typically hinders actual research, experiments — it's the idea that you'll see what you want to see and even design the experiment to show it, which is a very slippery slope, basically a form of "confirmation bias".
I want to stress that I in fact agree with you, in sentiment and analysis, but I'm just voicing my internal "devil's advocate" voice here: mental models and frameworks that are wrong, and not only make my intuition thus false, but deeper than that prevent me from seeing other solutions, from 'forking' every step of the way according to new data.
I guess I'm prefacing my conclusions here:
- there is no "dark matter", there is X that explains a bunch of discrepancies between theory and observation. Each such discrepancy could be explained by a different X (Y, Z...) or a sub-part of X (like mass relates to gravity, but also density, thus heat profile, etc).
- there is always a "fundamental correlation" between literally everything (aren't each and every organ of our body, every inch of this Earth the literal 'children' of supernovae and neutron stars explosions and black hole cataclysms?)
The hard part is to find first-degree (i.e. direct) relations, of the kind described by physics equations. It's not always discrete and binary, but it can be done — for instance I can tell you that "hunger" among the population is as certain a path as it gets to revolution. Not sadness, not lack of freedoms, not violence physical or mental, not even cataclysms have a firmer grasp on rebellion than the empty stomach of our children. It's as direct a path from A (hunger) to B (revolution) as you can get, statistically in all of history (you have days before people rebel, a very few weeks at most).
The alignment of galaxies are obviously related to something, which might yet leave individuals otherwise independent — like metal rods align, each of their own "volition", with a magnetic field; there is no correlation between the rods but rather a macro phenomena. Functionally a vector space wherein rods exist, not a function from rod i to rod j for any (i,j). Galaxies might work this way too — this is my intuition. No spooky supraluminal action at a distance, just a "gravitational polarity X" that averages to orienting space locally at large-enough scales. At a higher scale in 3D, it's probably more about tangents lines (i.e. said "polarity" is of the flow, the streams of galaxies, possibly "dark matter" which is a Y here, possibly distinct from the X phenomena) than a macro-universal sense of rotation (although it's a perfectly valid solution too, indeed many symmetries are broken for our cosmos to exist, namely anti/matter, causality, or chirality.)
Rotation discrepancy could be related to X and/or Y or yet another Z phenomena (my money is on the supermassive blackhole in the center, which I think we're not fully understanding all effects yet, far from it, but meh it's bias and subjectivity on my part).
[Btw, since you seem to like this kind of discussion, I'd strongly recommend you follow Anton Petrov on YouTube[1]. He's a wonderful young scientist who makes short 5-15 minutes videos on new astrophysics / astronomy papers every day or so. For me, it's just the best way I've ever had to 'quickly' keep track of the latest observations and theories, while hearing the explanation and questions of an expert. Dr Becky[2] is another newcomer in the field of intelligent vulgarization, and she's on a path to awesomeness as well.]
I've been into these things since my teenage years (late 1990s) and it's incredible how much more observation we have now, how much more material there is to think about. It's a truly great time for space amateurs.
I agree about the "correlation does not imply causation" plague. It's especially problematic for purely observational sciences, where experiments are impossible or unethical. Prototypically for epidemiology, but also for astronomy and cosmology. And yes, it's a slippery slope, even for experimental sciences.
I get what you say about the alignment of metal rods in magnetic fields. So yes, there could be some gravitational polarity over extremely large scales.
I see that I was getting stuck on the idea that changes can't propagate faster than light, no matter what the mechanism. But now I get how arbitrarily separated stuff can be similarly affected by a given source. For example, there was a recent article about hot gas "sloshing" in a galaxy cluster.[0]
Yeah, the faster-than-light topic is actually a very, very tricky one, even for seasoned astro-peeps it seems.
I didn't mention PBS Spacetime[1] but it's probably the best place to start for best-in-class high level mojo in astrophysics. Tons of back-catalog. Really great quality production. Less 'newsy', more 'substance' than the other two I mentioned (these are my trio on the topic).
Case in point: they do a fantastic job at explaining, notably time shenanigans. They basically made it click for me, notably for FTL (Faster-Than-Light) space expansion, cosmic inflation, etc. Fantastic-everything about them, can't recommend enough.
One thing, though: my best way of framing the FTL limit is in terms of a speed limit (c) to transfer "information". This is why entanglement is a valid principle, it does not violate c because entanglement cannot be used to transfer information faster than light[2].
So "structure" can change arbitrarily fast, from the perception of its objects, its contents; but "information", the contents, the objects, they are bound by c and all the rules actually defined by said structure.
I really don't know if that's the correct view, but it seems to work to explain (actually rule out) most light-speed paradoxes, so...
In these pictures[1], each individual 'dot' is a whole galaxy's worth of dark matter (and here[2] are said galaxies).
So you may view galaxies as "neurotransmitters" of the universe, maybe. Or hormones. The big luminous nodes are the neurons, where all 'dark matter synapses' converge.
Perhaps what happens when over the short course of a few billion years, some "life" is taken from one node to another, is just a cosmic neuron doing its thing. Perhaps said life is just the equivalent of some positive ion charge, and it ends up blowing up the node into a huge black hole and that's just the universe doing "two minus one" (cataclysmic event = "remove 1" from the neuro-galactic graph, just the time of a thought.) Maybe treants had it right all along.
This is exactly what I thought. Sorry to not be able to comment more usefuly... I was looking for a comment already stating my idea before writing it down and i found it here.
Yep, not bad, but not in an epic sci-fi way like, say, Hyperion Cantos. It's funny and witty, kinda like a dramedy-political-thriller that just happens to be based in space.
Is this really that surprising? I thought that the CMB distribution of matter displays a proto-structure that matches with what we observe today, meaning the large scale structure and congruent behavior we observe is just the result of the initial distribution and motion of matter in the early universe, rather than some mysterious force or effect we have yet to explain.
Or, it doesn't require mysterious force or effect - it could just be an emergent property of how matter interacts. For instance, basic rules of atomic forces lead to complex behavior in the aggregate, such as life, foam, planets, etc. Not sure why this wouldn't apply to universal size structure as well.
Right, but those forces and effects drop off with distance. The alignments we're observing are many, many, many orders of magnitude too far dispersed to be explainable by known forces.
It would be like finding a few dozen planets floating in interstellar space hundreds of lightyears away, much further away than the nearest stars, but on analysis finding that they all happen to be rotating around our sun even though our sun's gravity is utterly overwhelmed by the gravity of other objects much closer to them.
The same is true of a skin cell in your foot vs in your ear. You'd find remarkable similarity even though there is no apparent reason they would be similar until you comprehend the superstructure.
The idea is that the similarities across vast amounts of space would not be due to first order effects from forces, but rather much more complex and subtle interactions over time that happen to have structure rather than being purely random, just as life emerged from seemingly random interactions in primordial pools.
Well of course it seems likely some form of interaction at some point in the past or present is behind these effects, we just don’t know what it was or is. If that’s all your saying, sure.
so, kind of like a "cosmic inertia"? that would explain it. although I find this problematic explanation in the sense, every force in the universe stems from a shared origin all the way down to big bang. how do we draw the line between what is emergent and what is inherent? inherent being the cosmic inertia.
edit: come to think of it, nothing is inherent about the universe except for anything before the big bang; and there we go into the realm of quantum foam, string theory, if I am not mistaken.
Indeed, or the result of some specific starting conditions in the early universe.
But I must assume that these cosmologists have already considered and discarded that. I'd just like to be able to read more about why that guess doesn't fit what they're observing.
'Starting conditions in the early universe' is too vague to actually consider properly. To rise to the level of even thinking about accepting or discarding it, we'd need to know what sort of conditions we're talking about, how they might lead to what we're observing, and preferably also how they might have come about. It's a class of possible explanations, not an explanation itself.
One thought that occurs to me is that large-scale structures like sheets and black holes with parallel axes of rotation could be the result large directional explosions soon after the big bang rather than the result of a large force acting now.
I think we should be careful when explaining things in universe by tying it all the way back to big bang. I was discussing about this in another comment below. Then I wrote a thought piece about it here;
https://medium.com/@suphievrakzade/abstraction-layers-for-th...
There would have to be objects or structures already there to explode. That just doesn't fit with current models.
This may well point to there being more structure or asymmetry in the very early universe, but things that can explode being present there is a pretty extreme version of that.
While I'd note one doesn't necessarily need an set explanation for such directional explosions to formulate decent theory (look at dark matter, etc), I think electromagnetic forces often produce highly directional effects.
There are large-scale anistropies in the universe, and the origin of symmetry-breaking at cosmological scales is an unsolved problem. Either a force or type of matter is unaccounted for / incorrectly modeled, or the big bang was not symmetrical.
Evidence? Observations from our point of view (including readings from space, still fairly close, on scale) are limited to our current position etc. So how can we really tell if it's just not curvature of space and blackholes that distort our point of view and readings? Interesting anyhow, but perhaps a bit soon.
Stargate Universe in this case, as Destiny was launched to collect data all across the universe, because the Ancients had identified a pattern in the structure of the universe...
Not just "the structure of the universe", the Ancients identified structure in the cosmic background radiation.
The episode that revealed this aired within a month of a real-world discovery of a pattern in the cosmic background radiation [0]. Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as enticing as what was in the show.
Plasma filaments and other plasma structures can manifest long-range attractive and repulsive electromagnetic forces proportional to d^-1 instead of d^-2. So if those forces are operative at galactic and intergalactic scales (between plasma structures) and we’re not fully taking them into account, then we may be overlooking the most powerful organizing mechanism in the universe.
It seems that periodically there is evidence showing that the universe is this or that and yet nothing is and it will never be concrete because it's impossible to find the root of the universe. I see it as a more philosophical question. I think we should be more focused on exploring the universe, not understanding it.
A long-term motion of large structures of dark matter may be one explanation. We still don't know too much about dark matter except it plays central role in building the cosmic web.
I hope James Webb Space Telescope will not fail to operate and its launch will not be delayed again (the project is 25 years old).
This makes sense. Our roads look like arteries. The universe is fractal. So it makes sense that there are arterial-like structures connecting galaxies.
If space is a form of matter that does not interact with any known mechanism, then it may as well as not exist.
Of course, future generations will find some sort of new matter, or some form of new interaction, but what you're saying doesn't mean anything for our world today.
I'm no fan of Vice, but newspapers are understood to have different sections, and different sections have different standards. As long as the science section is OK, then it's fine (for a newspaper).
I'm going to be optimistic today and assume this due to the relative ease of content creation, rather than the relative interest in the subject matter.
Astrology can be useful to a scientist. Not as a source of truth, but as a convenient tool for introspection.
If your sign says you're hotheaded, for instance, it doesn't actually tell you anything about yourself. But you can take it as a thought starter that helps you reflect on your temper or lack thereof, and how that relates to the people around you.
Anti astrology people are so prevalent in tech and also so silly to me. They all are so obsessed with reason and science that they can't understand that astrology is fun and a platform for introspection. It's not some societal ill ruining everything.
I get it though - I felt the same way when I was like 15 ;)
Maybe you should learn to not need reason and science to justify everything.
I don't think the position of celestial bodies at my birth affects my personality. But I still get a daily Co-star push notification and sometimes it makes me reflect on something I wouldn't have otherwise.
I see it in the same light as Myers–Briggs types. They only have the meaning people find in them. People seem to enjoy it, and all the proposed harms are as hard to prove as the predictive power.
We know many things in nature are fractals: coastlines, tree branches, blood vessels...
What if the Universe is one big fractal, repeating itself at different scales: electrons go around a nucleus, planets around a star, stars/galaxies around blackholes, and so on and so on, building larger and larger structures.
Electrons don't rotate around the nucleus in the same way that planets go around stars, that's a simplification for high school text books. Supermassive black holes don't keep galaxies together either, galaxies rotate around themselves and even that isn't enough, hence dark matter.
Central forces don't guarantee that the universe is made of fractals. Nothing, for instance, orbits an electron within an atom (excluding spin-orbit coupling and other such quantum nonsense).
> “Such studies are statistical and a step forward would require a large amount of polarization data, not easy to gather with current instrumentation.”
As I understand it dark matter is predicted by one set of observations and confirmed by many others within calculated error bounds. It's not some kind of overfit model trying to explain a single observation. So to discount it you'd need to explain why it just so happens that many observations converge to the same results as that which you would expect from the predicted dark matter distribution. I don't think mere refraction can explain lots of different observations.
Dark energy on the other hand is a whole other story.
First thing to understand is the only evidence we have for the universe expanding is redshift.
Do I believe refraction is at all related to Dark mass/energy? Not all all. Refraction has nothing to do with that. Refraction has to do with redshift being miscalculated.
Compression waves are the culprit and the field that propagates those waves for dark garbage. baryonic acoustic waves give direct evidence as the perp.
I think you missed the actual point of my comment? Refraction was kind of irrelevant to it, I was trying to say something about the consistency of different observations and the strength of the evidence behind them. You could replace "refraction" with "squirrels" and it wouldn't really change what I was trying to explain.
Well you misunderstood that I was referring to refraction as being the reason for dark matter predictions. I was trying to imply that it can explain why the universe is expanding. Instead of the theory of dark matter.
I already gave you my reasoning for dark matter calculation, baryonic waves. Which you so happened to ignore?
That is incorrect. It's directly relevant. Redshift is measured and there is a willful disregard for the refraction that is inherent and a statistically overwhelming effect, given the distances and known matter in space. Redshift exists after a megaparsec in any direction, so it's not surprising that it's the farthest thing we see given we're seeing some amount of mass in the far distance from any given angle.
Don't see why refraction needs to explain lots of observations?
While dark matter may fit multiple different observations better, it may also be the multiple different observations are due to multiple phenomena. So really don't see any reason we need a magic bullet that fits all observations...
Frankly, I think refraction and reflection make a good candidate for explaining redshift of the universe, and should be easily testable...
I agree a fundamental thing is missing. Just like how during dinosaur times atmospheric pressure was so much higher that if a humans traveled back in time they would die almost instantly. [1]
I'm not knowledgeable enough to guess the fundamental issue in this case. But IMO if quasars can be linked across billions of light years then it's just as plausible that our observation that those quasars are far apart is an illusion, as it is that there are superstructures spanning the entire universe to link them.
I have an unusual idea related to this. You might call it the interconnectedness of all things. (h/t DG) The more you look into quantum systems the more things seem to look like you are looking at the observable universe that we see in the sky. What if they were the same thing and space has somehow folded back upon itself? Of course it's not really a falsifiable conjecture. For example, we have absolutely no idea what's going on inside a proton and we'll probably never know.
Sure, can you explain it to me and cite your evidence? Because that's the wikipedia article about protons, not an answer. The truth is this is a controversial area of physics heavy on theories and light on experimental data. The simple fact of the matter is we lack the measurement technology to understand the inner workings of a proton. Theories are just that.
grizzles: I don't understand what's going on in a proton.
Physicist: actually, we know about it very well.
grizzles: I don't understand what you're saying, and don't care to find out, so I'm just going to disagree with you and say you have no experimental evidence.
Physicist: we actually have terabytes of evidence describing the different quarks and gluons within protons and neutrons.
grizzles: I don't care, and I'd rather live in Anaximander's land of indefinites and superstition.
Are you a physicist? If so, why not post a link to your profile? Why the need for your made up dialogue instead of a substantive rebuttal containing information about your allegedly detailed knowledge of the inner workings of a proton?
BTW, you've misrepresented my position in 2/3 of your little sonnet. I said "light evidence, not no evidence" and I do care. The only substantive rebuttal I've received is from computerex and I responded to that.
Furthermore particle accelerators have been smashing protons for a long time to probe what's happening inside. The standard model of particle physics is validated by evidence and experiments. I don't think it is fair to say that we don't know what is happening inside a proton. There are many questions in physics still left unanswered but I don't think anyone would classify this as such.
How many constants are required by the standard model to make the math work? Doesn't that admit something is unsolved? I think it's probably accurate to say we don't know much about subatomic physics and because of the scale/measurability problem might not ever. The same is true of the expansiveness of the universe.
"Hurr durr, your physics isn't pretty enough and has too many coefficients to fit my childlike model of the universe. Clearly an approximation" - mimixco, 2020
We'd live in the Diamond Age. The molecular nanotechnology vision of the world would be true. Eg. we could create any material with the characteristics we wanted. Uncertainty wouldn't matter because there would be no compound uncertainty / decoherence. If some sub-process step in mnt fabrication failed because of inherent uncertainty, it could simply be repeated until it worked. We'd also understand how to build the tools to do this.
If we had such a "very good" understanding they wouldn't be spending billions to build the Electron-Ion collider at Brookhaven. Here's a good article about it, that's much more balanced than the QCD slanted wikipedia article:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/scientists-endorse-b...
I especially like this bit about qcd:
> The mess is so complex that even basic properties of the proton remain unexplained. For example, its three quarks account for less than 5% of its mass, the rest arising somehow from energy of the virtual quarks and gluons.
Based on your comments above, though, I don't think watching this would change your opinion about anything. People have been more than polite in trying to help you fix your misunderstandings, but you refuse to absorb any new information or change your views when presented with new data.
1. A good understanding of something's basic/fundamental properties doesn't mean that there isn't other more meaningful research to be done and knowledge to be gained.
2. Particle physics in general is considered a mess. There are still many open problems in particle physics and a shiny new accelerator never hurts ;)
Sure there is still a lot more to learn about the inner structure of protons/neutrons but that doesn't mean that we don't have a decent understanding of the overall picture. There still isn't one unified theory that explains all the natural forces, but that doesn't mean that we don't understand gravity/electromagnetism/strong/weak forces in their own right.
I'm still kinda fond of the Flatland theory myself. Us poor 4 dimensional beings can't figure out how to build tools that can take 5 dimensional measurements, so we see weird behavior we can't explain.