So correct me if I'm wrong, but the rotation of galaxies completely defies even Newtonian principles, right?
So we invented concepts of Dark Matter / Dark Energy as a placeholder, crossing our fingers that we're right on that?
So correct me if I'm wrong, but the rotation of galaxies completely defies even Newtonian principles, right?
So we invented concepts of Dark Matter / Dark Energy as a placeholder, crossing our fingers that we're right on that?
Imagine a china mug full of water. You can see the mug and the water being held in by the mug.
Now imagine a glass of water. The purest most transparent glass ever, with an identical refraction index as the water. You can't see the glass. You just see the water being held together by something. You don't know the glass exists.
You 'invent' the glass to explain the behaviour of the water, seeing as you know the how the mug affects the water.
One possibility is that we do not have any way to find said entities with any means at our disposal. Another possibility is that they do not exist (just a figment of imagination) and that the theories requiring them are wrong. In that case, one should be looking for other theories that might be a more capable explanation.
The question here is to determine when or whether we should stop looking for these entities and maybe move onto another model/theory.
The basic assumption of all gravity based theories and models is that the universe is electrically neutral everywhere and that magnetic and electric fields have no possible influence at stellar, interstellar, galactic and intergalactic distances. Whether this assumption is true or not is difficult to gauge since we only have visual observations (at all sorts of frequencies) and cannot actually get out there to make the required measurements.
So we have to fall back to what we think is reasonable and work from there.
This is impressively inaccurate: plasmas (charged and magnetic fluids) are basically the entirety of stellar evolution and the main part of everything up to galaxy evolution, so we have pretty good limits on the magnetic fields out in the universe.
There is also direct measurements of magnetic fields integrated along the line of sight out to cosmological distances, and of course every spectra ever taken has measured the ionization level of the luminous gas.
I have had this discussion with trained working physicists and the general reaction has been that these phenomena are completely insignificant in relation to stellar, interstellar, galactic and intergalactic motion. So where do we stand? If the orders of magnitude difference in strength between electric and magnetic fields and the strength of gravity is over 35. What kinds of effects do we expect with these kinds of differences? Especially when we are looking at plasmas and all sorts of ionisation.
I don't know, but it does lead to intriguing questions.
Could you expand on this a bit? I've seen that twice in the last week, but never heard it before. Can you give me a pointer to what you're talking about here?
There are models of gravitation that are based on classical electromagnetics, wherein, gravity is a residual by-product of the electromagnetic interaction between the components of atoms. The models appear to be of the correct order of magnitude for the size of the forces.
However, like a lot of models that have been developed in the last 100 years, there does not appear to be any traction to investigate these models as they are not the commonly ascribed-to models. So we are unable to see if these models produce better predictions for the experiments that are being done around the world.
LambdaCDM gives us both rotation curves and structure formation (in particular the angular power spectrum to something like 23 peaks), so any new theory needs to reach this baseline.
All I am saying is that the assumption of gravity being the only significant force (whatever gravity may be) has only led in the standard models, so far, to a proposal of dark matter for which all experiments designed to find it have failed. We have got to a position where there is a big discrepancy between the evidence that is being collected and what theory is predicting. There are plenty of questions being raised across the board about what the data collected actually means.
I am simply putting forward that there may be a possibility that General Relativity has reached a limit of usefulness and may need to be superseded.
There may be a model that gives an explanation of what we see without resorting to adding entities for which we have not received any confirmation by experiment. What that is, I don't know. I don't get paid to do that kind of research.
If we can't find the experimental evidence to support an idea that theory requires, maybe we need to look elsewhere, including into alternative models and theories.
Unless we are willing to look at different ideas and test them appropriately and rigorously when we come to significant roadblocks, we are then stuck in patterns that aren't helpful.
This is the study of the universe we are looking at, at both the very small and the very large and everything in between.
We make many assumptions in developing our theories and models, but if some of those are not quite the reality then our models can and do give results that seem okay, but in the detail are not.
Mathematical models are always idealised models. They do not take into consideration all that exists in reality. For many purposes, that is acceptable - it becomes a case of close enough is good enough. But, if you take that same model into a physical situation where the idealisations used are not matching reality, then that model will give your incorrect results. For example, in the main you may be able to assume that some feature of reality is of very minor significance, but if you change to a place where that feature is now significant, your mathematics breaks down. You have to change your model or even develop a complete new theory by which you do your investigations.
This kind of thing should be standard practice.
I'll leave you with a final thought. At about the time that Gell-Mann was working on his ideas about quarks, there was another man working on another model to explain what was being seen at the sub-atomic level. Now, this man was not a theoretical scientist but he also came up with an idea of a 1/3 charged particle. His purpose for working on the theory was purely for his own interest (he was dissatisfied with the theory and models around at the time). One he had finished his work, he put it aside and went on with his quite successful life. One of his innate abilities was that he had an eidetic memory and when quizzed could described anything on any page of his 6000+ pages of documents.
I received some of his papers years ago from someone who knew him and had obtained all of those papers. What I found intriguing was that part of the model he developed gave a much better and more easily calculable way of determining the binding energy of any nucleus (from H to Fe at least). He made it quite clear that the model was just that - a model and that one should not expect reality to actually match the model. In another part of the theoretical work he did, he made a slight modification to the electric field equation to include a Lorenz transformation which did away with the need for the strong nuclear force.
Since then, I have come across still another modification of the electric field equation (from a completely different location) which gives rise to a residual force (always attractive) and on the same order of magnitude as gravity.
Now, one of these modifications works on the very small and one works on the very large. Do they have any practical significance? I don't know, but unless there is interest in looking at whether they are capable of explaining what we see, we will never actually know. They may be dead-ends, but they may also open up completely new avenues for investigation.
Whether the "Electric Universe" or any other model is capable or not of explaining what we see is for research efforts.
What bemuses me is the apparent inability of highly trained scientists to think outside the box so to speak. They appear to be happy with their mathematical incantations (I know the word is provocative) as being the "truth" of reality. Science is not about "truth", it is about providing functional ways to understand and manipulate the universe around us in an organised logical way. If you want "truth", go become a philosopher or theologian.
But come on, all mathematics is a map by which we try to understand the processes going on around us. In the main they provide a way of logically looking at the universe around us, but they are approximate and fail in the very fine detail. Otherwise, we would not have this incredible incompatibility between how we describe the very small and how we describe the very large.
There is a strong unwillingness amongst many of those who propagate the current crop of widely accepted theories to give any credence that their theories and models may be fundamentally wrong.
We do not learn the lessons of the past, so we repeat the same mistakes. So what if a model does not accord with consensus? The Nobel Prise has been awarded to people for discoveries in fields where those people faced great ridicule because of what they discovered was against the consensus model and theory at the time of discovery.
If our theories and models have gaping holes, let us investigate alternatives that might not have those gaping holes.
These friends are also serious enough in their studies they they don't go around insisting dark matter gives us nothing but a load of non-detections.
The copies I have are partially edited and incomplete, which is why I would like to get access to the source material. I am just having difficulty trying to track down where this stuff is. As a consequence, I am having to search through all of my off-line archives for any relevant information. After 20 or more years, that is a lot of material to go through.
As I was saying to someone in recent days, I have between 500 and 1500 papers and books that I want to read and these are just the ones I currently have on-line. just looking for any one paper that I am interested can take quite a while to find. Let alone all the off-line papers and books that I am interested in reading.
So, when I do get access to this material, I will be trying to get it online to the general community even if it is only scans.
And have you looked into automated digitizing machines for your collection? The University of Tokyo seems to have a pretty good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ccxwNssmo :)
That is a neat little machine. Thanks for that.
Could you at least mention the name of the original author? What makes you think the notes were sent to an archive?
Dark matter also explains certain gravitational lensing phenomenon, aspects of the CMB, from mass location during galactic collisions (and more).
Other theories can possibly explain one or some of those observations, but nothing does a good job (or a simple one) of explaining them all.
Dark matter is real enough to make verifiable predictions in other places. Other theories don't.