Comment by Sysreq2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sysreq2 | Hacker News Reader

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Aristotle believed that all objects desire to be in their natural state. Throw a rock and it aims to return to the earth. Burn some twigs and the fire eventually stops. And the natural state of any object is at rest.

Every piece of evidence for hundreds of years proved this point. Every scientist knew it to be true. And yet I ask you today, does an object in motion desire to rest OR does it stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force?

It wasn’t until later that people had the tools to say, hey, wait a minute, this isn’t right. There is more here than we understand.

Which of these scenarios seems more likely: 85% of the matter and 95% of the universe is made up of stuff that we can’t detect, doesn’t interact with anything and doesn’t follow the rules of everything else OR there is something going on that we don’t yet understand?

Yeah that's what all the astrophysicists thought too. I didn't know where you're getting the idea that DM doesn't follow the same rules as everything else, though.

My last understanding was that it fell outside the standard model and would require some kind of new elementary particle to explain. It doesn’t interact with light or electromagnetism. The only real basis we have for it is gravitational abnormalities.

I guess I have to ask: why do you presume there exists an undetectable force that makes your equations work and not that the equations don’t account for everything?

Seems silly. You would never believe 85% of software bugs were caused by unseen, undetectable stochastic physics errors that only manifested as a system crash. The fact that doing the same thing over and over again produces the same result certainly doesn’t cement that theory in my mind.

Oh, by "the rules everything else follows" you didn't mean the basics of quantum mechanics and energy conservation and such, you meant the exact current model of physics that literally everyone with the slightest clue admits is wrong or incomplete.

FWIW, the standard model already has plenty of particles that don't interact with EM, so you can't act like that's prima facie unreasonable. The story of the discovery of neutrinos is particularly relevant.

Anyway, feel free to read around in this thread for the multiple other lines of evidence that lead to dark matter. Or read the Wikipedia article on it. The information is out there, if you want to know. Or you can keep making up strained analogies involving the number 85%. No one can stop you.

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