Growing evidence that the universe is connected by giant structures (2019)
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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.
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.
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
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.
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”.
For some reason, physics seems to be 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.
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?
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 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.
I don't know why, but physics seems to be a much more popular target for these type of people than any other field.
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.
Strangely, I'd love to read more on this if anyone can point me in the right direction
https://twitter.com/universal_sci/status/1217314288085479426
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.
The exception would be the fanatically oriented, as acting in opposition to logic is part of the basic premise.
Can't quite make myself claim it's better than Orthogonal.
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.
[1] https://medium.com/s/story/are-you-suffering-from-existentia...
- 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 :)
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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_Supercluster
If i could write i would write a novel about the great flow. That was awesome and terrifying to read.
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 :)
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
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.
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.
(I deserve downvotes for this!)
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).
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.
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'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
More picture and explanations on this short SE thread: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/198138/is-most-o...
I'll let you ponder how much resemblance this bears to other kinds of structures...
You've heard of the simulation hypothesis, I suppose. As untestable as it is... wouldn't it be fun if this comment were literally true?
I guess that it could all be dark matter, which we can't directly see. And there could also be all sorts of complexity in dark matter.
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.
[1]: Finally found a good source. (thanks Filligree for pointing out the screensaver mishap) https://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/
[2]: https://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/...
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.
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.
(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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCciQ8wFcVoIIMi-lfu8-cjQ
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYNbYGl89UUowy8oXkipC-Q
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]
And thanks for the YouTube links :)
0) https://phys.org/news/2020-01-sighting-hot-gas-sloshing-gala...
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...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g
[2]: I think this vid does a good job at explaining why: https://youtu.be/2_4l5_G3dnM
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 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.
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.
edit: I went ahead and wrote a thought piece on this; https://medium.com/@suphievrakzade/abstraction-layers-for-th...
"information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful"
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.
You can imagine two gas sheets sliding along eachother. All of the vortices formed between them will spin in the same plane.
You can imagine similar trends for interacting spheres and other geometries.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.seeker.com/cosmic-rebirth-encoded-in-background-...
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).
Calling it a web of filaments doesn't paint a clear picture as to the movement itself.
Assuming it's synchronized, I think of child objects moving in sync with some kind of parent structure. That sounds ridiculous though.
The movements described in the article are mainly alignment and direction of axial rotation.
It would be pretty amazing if all this turned out to be true ^
What does this even mean? Would they rotate clockwise when looking from Australia?
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.
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.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blinker%20Sy...
LOL. Popsci is hilarious. And physics is in a desperate crisis. We need less science and more philosophy.
These nerds don't even understand refraction. Space isn't empty.
If space isn't empty you will never be able to account for the path photons actually travel.
Gas causes refraction, how could you be sure the photos that hit the lens in your telescope actually traveled in a straight line.
I know this will get down voted to hell. IDC.
Dark energy on the other hand is a whole other story.
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 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.
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...
Relevant: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/435853/does-ligh...
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.
[1] - https://gdesilvestri.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/was-the-atmosp...
We actually have a pretty good idea of what's going on inside a proton.
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.
Why do you say we don't know much about subatomic physics? In your view, how would things be different if we did know "much"?
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.
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.