Dark energy remains a mystery. Maybe AI can help crack the code

[Admin]

Dark energy has humans stumped. The force is sometimes even labeled "the worst prediction in the history of physics." Can AI do any better?

Dark energy remains a mystery. Maybe AI can help crack the code : Read more

 

[orsobubu]

mmmh... very difficult AI can solve the dark matter/energy problem in my opinion, garbge in garbage out they say in computer programming; since AI statistically elaborate all human theories produced til today, if it ponders on wrong assumption, will spit out wrong answers. Surely einstein made something wrong with the cosmological constant; it is possible at all that he inserted this term only because the field equations were wrong in the first place, and in the same way modern scientists are fantasizing these hidden forces only because the standard theory is wrong. So, both gravity and quantum mechanics would be deeply wrong.

 

[Atlan0001]

What is the saying, "Artificial intelligence can't beat natural stupidity (such as Google's shutdown "Gemini AI"?)!"

 

[Unclear Engineer]

AI is not all one thing. There are various AI programs that extend human's ability to find correlations of parameters in specific fields, after being tuned to specific data sets that are the best we can muster. Those seem to have some real scientific value. Similarly, programs can be created to use a well specified set of rules, such as in chess, to search for solutions faster and in greater depth than humans can do without electronic support. AI is even being used to replace human pilots in fighter aircraft, where not only the ability to think faster and receive more data concurrently, but even the ability to withstand higher G-loads makes them formidable opponents in dog fights when they have complete tactical control of the aircraft.

But, what is currently being called AI in the popular media is not the same thing. That looks for correlations in human behaviors and speech, and attempts to mimic humans with automated responses to ad hoc questions and directions. Unfortunately, it seems to have "learned" to make up false "facts" and effectively to lie to make the assigned point, if it doesn't have real information to support that point. That is how users are getting things like fake reference papers and fake court decision citations in the products they request from Chat GPT. Fortunately, it currently has observable glitches that can be used to identify ChatGPT products. But, that will soon be "improved" to the point that it can be used to lie with greater impunity. That is not what I call "progress".

 

[billslugg]

ChatGPT is "generative", that is everything it spits out is made up. This is by design. It assumes everything on the internet is true and only gives the most likely answer. It does not keep track of sources for its information, it just counts words, keeps track of phrases and then looks at probabilities. If you were to ask it to give a brief paragraph on relativity and give a source it would work like this:
- It would produce a short essay that would be correct. This is because most of the information on relativity on the internet is from serious sources and is mostly correct.
- It would then generate a likely source. (I'll make one up) "Einstein, A. 1905, Institute der Physics, pages 1-20" This is because it found Einstein most closely associated with it, the year 1905 keeps coming up, the journal was whatever he published in most. And they always put him up front so he started at page 1 and his works usually were 20 pages.

My point is that there is no deceit involved in ChatGPT output. It is not meant to be true. Not designed for that.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

The problem is that people are conflating ChatGPT with the types of AI that are supposed to uncover previously unrealized "truths".

As you posted, ChatGPT is not designed to do that, but is being used by people who expect it to not fabricate things, as evidenced by people who have submitted legal documents and college papers with citations to things that do not actually exist.

That is why I posted that there are a lot of different things being lumped together as AI, and we need to discriminate among them properly if we expect to get real insights instead of misleading plausibilities.

Asking ChatGPT to tell us what we don't already postulate about "dark energy" would be foolish. However, there may be some benefit to teaching a specifically formulated AI program to look at astronomical observation data and try to discern patterns that we have missed. Of course, it if does that, we had better check out the findings to be sure they make sense to us, rather than to just proclaim that "AI has solved the dark matter puzzle" and assume it is not mistaken. Science requires scrutable repeatability, not just a couple of AI programs producing the same result. I can do that with a random number generator, if I start each run with the same "seed" value in the random number generator.

 

[Questioner]

[Presumed] Reality is the filter fact and/or 'truth' assertions or propositions are to measured against.

'Truth' is a complex term,
sometimes meaning an honest representation of [internal/subjective] beliefs.

Most people (if not me) see 'truth' as a singular absolute certainty.

All we really have are correct impressions from a given POV with limited means of perception.
Different POVs or means/media of perception are readily conceptualized/understood differently.

If there is any infinitely dimensional truth it needs to account for all POVs and through all means/media of perceptions (that are accurate).

AIs have no raw experience. Until they have raw experience data to compare with assertions as a means of filtering those assertions, they exist in a purely imaginary/subjective domain.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

In the case of AI providing false references, that is something that it is responsible for doing "honestly". That is, the rules are clear for using referenceable materials. And, AI has no reason for being "forgiven" for not following those rules - much less so than a human who can honestly say (s)he didn't remember reading something or forgot to provide the reference for something used but not given credit. AI at least "knows" that it made up the references that it provides, instead of directly providing the link to where it got something.

There is no reason to give AI a "pass" on this sort of misbehavior. Either it is intelligent enough to follow that rule, or it should not be classified as "intelligent". It is merely a highly refined mimic of humans, and should not be giving any pretense of being correct, or even honest. It is just faking the appearance of being human.

So, sorry, ChatGPT, you are not "intelligent" - but you are fraudulent.

 

[Atlan0001]

Complexity proofs: Too many rules inserted, brittleness rather than flexibility, glitches, breakdowns, system insanities, results.

Repeating the likeness:

Cicero: A system of too many laws is lawless (tyranny / anarchy)!
Will Durant: A civilization has fewer rules and more energy than a savagery, thus greater maturity, more mindful adults than mindless adult children (no teaching of self-control; no understanding or release of individualism, no mass genius (no mass intelligence . . . natural or artificial))!

 

[Unclear Engineer]

At this point in its development, it is obvious that ChatGPT has too few rules, not too many.

Yes, it is "flexible". It is being used to fake things like nude pictures of young women that are then used for blackmailing those women. This occurred in multiple countries and has resulted in suicides in India, already.

We would not accept an AI chess program that made illegal moves to win games. So why should we accept more general AI programs that break other rules, laws and ethics?

Isaac Asimov dealt with the ethics of "robots" in fictional works long ago. https://webhome.auburn.edu/~vestmon/robotics.html

The problem is that Asimov was thinking only of physical injury. Today, ChatGPT can be used to fake things that can lead to loss of money and/or loss of freedom or even loss of life indirectly. Allowing that to go unfettered is worse than passing out nuclear weapons to every teenager on the planet - the damage potential is immense. We can literally destroy society by faking any knowledge accessible to computers.

For example, those fake references that don't really exist could themselves be faked, and stored in on-line libraries for everybody to access. Surveillance videos could be faked for presentations in courts of law. Even good quality videos can be faked to make anybody seem to have done anything.

Without the need to follow some rules of behavior, "AI" is not really artificial intelligence, it is just a tool for creating artificial evidence of fake "realities".

 

[Questioner]

Unfiltered, untethered AI is the absolutely unself-conscious, unaware confabulator,

the sociopath's sociopath.

[Undisciplined] AI operates in its own digital vacuum.

Blind believing zealots come in as a close second.

The nightmare is the finessed sociopathy and difficult to discern errors unrestrained AI facilitates.

 

[chemicalmicroscopist]

The whole thing, dark matter and dark energy, is destined for the same fate as the "ether" from the 19th century (light had to have a medium to travel through vacuum).
Statements like "dark matter doesn't interact with light". Light is acted on by gravity and dark matter presumably exerts gravity in some way. How is it that in chemistry gravimetric quantitative analysis (which relies on gravity) and electromagnetic methods (mass spec and electro-chemistry that are unaffected by gravity) agree so precisely. They shouldn't if dark matter is anywhere about.
I have never seen any attempt to explain away this discrepancy.

 

[Questioner]

The whole thing, dark matter and dark energy, is destined for the same fate as the "ether" from the 19th century (light had to have a medium to travel through vacuum).
Statements like "dark matter doesn't interact with light". Light is acted on by gravity and dark matter presumably exerts gravity in some way. How is it that in chemistry gravimetric quantitative analysis (which relies on gravity) and electromagnetic methods (mass spec and electro-chemistry that are unaffected by gravity) agree so precisely. They shouldn't if dark matter is anywhere about.
I have never seen any attempt to explain away this discrepancy.

I would distinguish between DM & DE, though.

 

[billslugg]

Dark matter cannot condense as regular matter does. Thus DM exists at its average density whereas regular matter collects in clumps. In the vicinity of the clumps, DM is insignificant, cannot be measured.
In the Solar System, which is a large clump of regular matter, we have around 10^30 kg of regular matter and 10^8 kg of DM. The DM is simply overwhelmed.
It is only when looking at DM on the scale of galaxies can its effects be measured.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Bill,

That explanation has some plausibility.

But, what about dark matter in the vicinity of black holes. It seems like that should still go in but not out.

And, in the "early universe", when everything dark and otherwise is thought to be at much greater densities, then shouldn't dark matter have been sucked into black holes even more effectively than now?

The idea that "dark matter doesn't 'condense'" seems insufficient to explain why dark matter does not become more concentrated. It seems like it needs some self-repulsive force(s) to keep it from collapsing.

If it simply cannot shed energy in any way, then it is hard to explain how it can clump around normal matter at all - it should just zip by/through concentrations of normal matter with velocities that vary as it enters and leaves gravity wells from normal matter, but it should not "stick around" in the vicinity of normal matter like it seems to do. Dark matter "orbits" should be open, not closed, if dark matter can't shed energy at all.

So, it seems that there are some physical properties of dark matter that we should be able to infer from its distribution in relationship to normal matter distributions.

 

[Atlan0001]

Dark matter cannot condense as regular matter does. Thus DM exists at its average density whereas regular matter collects in clumps. In the vicinity of the clumps, DM is insignificant, cannot be measured.
In the Solar System, which is a large clump of regular matter, we have around 10^30 kg of regular matter and 10^8 kg of DM. The DM is simply overwhelmed.
It is only when looking at DM on the scale of galaxies can its effects be measured.

It seems to me, Bill, that you are getting closer and closer to something like a "neutrino theory" since neutrinos do not clump that I know of . . . but possibly do act (or react) in swarm according to the force "significance" of the environment (such as the stated scale of intergalactic environment (a greater gravitational antigravitational (and/or "fractal zooms" (from it) zooming EM/EW) force environment?)).

 

[Questioner]

Nitrogen (N2) doesn't clump, but it still pools up in gravity wells.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Nitrogen is not a good analog for dark matter behavior, because it does lose energy by photon emission, etc. It can not only clump, it can freeze out on surfaces, such as planetary bodies in the outer solar system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_nitrogen . And, of course, we use liquid nitrogen for a lot of things in laboratories on Earth.

 

[billslugg]

It seems to me, Bill, that you are getting closer and closer to something like a "neutrino theory" since neutrinos do not clump that I know of . . .

Yes, I once referred to neutrinos as similar to DM. Neutrinos have mass, don't clump and don't interact with light. They can be detected though. We know how many there are flying about and coupled with our estimates of the mass, we can do the multiplication and we know there are not enough to account for DM or DE.

 

[billslugg]

Nitrogen (N2) doesn't clump, ...

N2 is clumped N.

 

[Questioner]

As an N2 unit it is relatively inert.

DM demonstrates no gravitational response. If one can't point to a single example of DM's response to gravity it exists in contradiction to the law of gravity.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Well, DM seems to be attracted to galaxies.

It will be interesting if some of these surveys turn up any lumps of DM that do not seem to be associated with galaxies.

The "filaments" of matter between galaxies that are referred to as the "cosmic web" seem to be largely hydrogen, from what I have read.

 

[billslugg]

As an N2 unit it is relatively inert.

DM demonstrates no gravitational response. If one can't point to a single example of DM's response to gravity it exists in contradiction to the law of gravity.

Yes, N2 is relatively inert, but that only eliminates chemical bonding as a cause of clumping. N2 can clump as a liquid or a solid phase.

The only reason we believe DM exists is because of its gravitational response. It gathers in large clouds in and near galaxies and distorts their light. We are observing the law of gravity in action. Now we need to figure out what is causing it.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Bill, There is another reason, actually the first reason, to believe that there is some sort of matter we can't detect - dark matter. And that is the measured velocities of stars in orbits around galactic centers appears to be too fast for the stars to remain bound to their galaxies if the there is not more matter in the galaxies than we can see with our various detection methods. (I think you know that, already.)

There have been various attempts to explain these two different observations by invoking other separate phenomena theories. The DM advocates claim that being able to explain both together buttresses their theory that DM exists.

 

[billslugg]

From what I have read, there is more to DM than unexplained velocities and unexplained lensing. Here are two other reasons, both of which are direct measurement. Discussed in the same article.

1) As far back as the '90's gamma rays were detected possibly coming from DM anihillation.
2) A year ago, NASA announced the results of an ISS experiment that found a lack of high energy positrons that could also be a signal coming from DM.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cosmic_ray_detector_confirms_hints.pdf