Why does it matter?

Wolfshadw

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We are creatures of curiosity. We strive to understand our environment. If something doesn't make sense (i.e. why galaxies do not fly apart), we try to understand why. Dark matter is one possible explanation to this conundrum. If it's proven to be true, then it's another aspect of the Universe that we need to study in order to understand how the Universe works and, perhaps, how we might benefit from it.

-Wolf sends
 
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FYI, post #1 says about DM "Why don't we just forget about it." My observation. The problem in astronomy, DM keeps showing up in stellar motion studies, *at least the interpretation of stars and gas motion moving over immense time spans points to DM*. A good example is the study reported now for the LMC and potential large DM halo, 'Galaxy encounter violently disturbed Milky Way, study finds', https://phys.org/news/2020-11-galaxy-encounter-violently-disturbed-milky.html, “The spiral-shaped disk of stars and planets is being pulled, twisted and deformed with extreme violence by the gravitational force of a smaller galaxy—the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Scientists believe the LMC crossed the Milky Way's boundary around 700 million years ago—recent by cosmological standards—and due to its large dark matter content it strongly upset our galaxy's fabric and motion as it fell in. "

Other searches looking for specific DM candidates like wimps, ultralight DM, axions, etc., those searches keep finding null record answers :) Example, 'Searching for axion dark matter conversion signals in the magnetic fields around neutron stars', https://phys.org/news/2020-11-axion-dark-conversion-magnetic-fields.html

There is tension between long distance surveys of stars and gas motion interpretation *using immense time spans* and local searches for DM particles that so far, report null records in the query :).
 
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Why are we always searching to find dark matter? What's going to happen when we find it if at all? Why don't we just forget about it.
I suppose you can forget about it if you do not want a complete picture of how everything works and what's going on. I'm of the opinion that we are already missing many parts of the puzzle that we don't even have any idea about. But dark matter - it's like trying to learn how to drive and asking the instructor, "why do I need to know traffic laws? Can't we just forget about them and drive?" It might be fine, if your lucky.
 
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I always thought dark matter was only in outer space because there no oxygen but I just read scientists are looking for it here on Earth. I don't think they will find any unless CERN comes up with an oxygen happy dark matter. Ha. Just my theory.
 
Why don't we just forget about it.
Maybe sometimes, I agree with you. I'm not saying that it is useless speaking about it, I'm only saying that maybe there is not the time to struggle in this field. Many times in fact we take in account something of too far from us that cannot help us or at least I think that it is so. An extreme example is the teory of the multiverse. But is thanks to this struggle that now we are at this point in the technology and we are living this wonderful period that our ancestors couldn't even image. All the discoveries in all the fields can improve us, in fact if now the Black Holes are so difficoult to reach, maybe tomorrow the Black Holes will help us to reach great speeds. The same thing has to be said for the Dark Matter, maybe today is a mistery for us and we think that struggle on it is only a waste of time, but tomorrow we will say something else about it. My speech could also be useless, but I only want to say that in this field nothig is a waste of time!
 
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So - dark matter really isn't anything tangible at all. We can see its effect, but we cannot see IT. It's like gravity, a force we can't see, and appears to correlate with the mass of an object so we assign that mystery to "an attractive force produced in proportion and relation to an object's mass". But that's really no explanation of what gravity is at all. It's kind of like not knowing what causes cars to move down the road and just saying, "ok, anything with wheels can move down the road". Yes! But what causes the movement??? With dark energy, we can't even point to the matter that's causing the gravity! It's missing. But stubbornly, instead of revisiting the theory, we just presume matter has to be there. So instead of seeing this "dark matter" as a clue to gravity, we're going to give "dark energy" the mysterious property of invisibility instead. Creating an entirely new, yet invisible form of matter no one's ever seen. o_O

And we do the same thing with the energy of the universe. Once we can't account for "the rest of it", once we can't form a theory that explains the entirety of it, we simply say - the rest of the 67% of the universe is made up of "dark energy".:confused_old:

And I can understand it - we have to name these things something. But if you can't form a theory that describes the Universe as it's observed or referred, then your theory is wrong. You can't say it's right but, oh yeah, I'm not going to account for 67% of it. Known Baryonic matter 5%. Dark matter 28%. Dark energy 67%. So we know nothing about 95% of the universe's makeup yet we wonder why we can't understand gravity.

Take it from me, yes, a layman; there is no dark energy, there is no dark matter, there aren't even any "black holes", lol - there is just missing science. But scientists don't like incomplete theories - so they fill them in with creative placeholders so that the rest of us won't notice the holes. And these are gaping holes not even a child should miss.

I'm not calling into question the science we know, nor our scientific method. Eventually, I believe science will get us there. I whole-heartedly believe in "the science". I'm just sayin... for those who think we are so advanced, I beg to differ. We are babes in the woods. That's why we can fly in Earth's atmosphere relatively easy now - it's a well-known science - relatively speaking. But to go into Earth orbit and beyond, we're still using brute force methods to get there.

To me, our spacecraft are like the old wooden ships from centuries past. Fragile and inefficient. We don't understand gravity, therefore we use brute-force to defeat it instead of using it to our advantage, like we did with aerodynamics. The fuel for the space shuttle weighed 20 times more than the shuttle itself! Imagine if we had to do that for aircraft? A 747 will hold 322,650 lbs of jet fuel, and the aircraft weight empty is 403,500 lbs. We're never going to be able to get to space with less fuel than ship until we understand gravity. And we'll never be a space-faring civilization without understanding it either. IMO, gravity is key to all of it. And dark matter and energy are the clues.

:)
 
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I'm starting to think if we haven't found it yet maybe we're not supposed to find it at all. Because of the damage it can do. thank you for responding so quickly.
 
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Why are we always searching to find dark matter? What's going to happen when we find it if at all? Why don't we just forget about it.
To understand the Universe we need to understand Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Without understanding them we cannot understand a lot of other things either. Forgetting about them means wallowing in ignorance.
 
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So we know nothing about 95% of the universe's makeup
It is the mormality, in the last two centuries we ended to discovery all the lands in our planet, it is only a process of growing up. Moreover I think that this is only a step that all the civilizazions have to do. First we don't know anything, then we know everything.
Take it from me, yes, a layman; there is no dark energy, there is no dark matter, there aren't even any "black holes"
In this part I almost completely agree with you, but I only have to clear something. The dark matter and energy aren't in extistence for me too. As you have already said, they are only the fill of the laking knoledge. The Black Holes, though, aren't the same things of the dark matter or energy, in fact the Black Holes, at least for me, existe. Black Holes were also photographed the last year and are some strange structure that get heavier with the passing of time swallowing some stars and other objects. Maybe the color can move this objects closer to the dark matter or energy, but they aren't the same thing.
 
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To understand the Universe we need to understand Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Without understanding them we cannot understand a lot of other things either. Forgetting about them means wallowing in ignorance.
We don't need to understand those. We will try to harness the matter for bombs and fuel and end up killing all of us. Not meant to be found.
 
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In this part I almost completely agree with you, but I only have to clear something. The dark matter and energy aren't in extistence for me too. As you have already said, they are only the fill of the laking knoledge. The Black Holes, though, aren't the same things of the dark matter or energy, in fact the Black Holes, at least for me, existe. Black Holes were also photographed the last year and are some strange structure that get heavier with the passing of time swallowing some stars and other objects. Maybe the color can move this objects closer to the dark matter or energy, but they aren't the same thing.
I added black holes to my list precisely because they labelled them "black" in the same thread as "dark". Sure, we can almost see them, well - more like observe their effects - once again, like dark matter and energy, we have a theory describing them, like dark matter an energy, but just like dark matter and energy, their inner workings are anyone's guess. I'll give you that they are better understood, and I can remove them from my list of "creative placeholders" if you wish. But they are a piece of the gravity puzzle we need to know more about.
 
I added black holes to my list precisely because they labelled them "black" in the same thread as "dark". Sure, we can almost see them, well - more like observe their effects - once again, like dark matter and energy, we have a theory describing them, like dark matter an energy, but just like dark matter and energy, their inner workings are anyone's guess. I'll give you that they are better understood, and I can remove them from my list of "creative placeholders" if you wish. But they are a piece of the gravity puzzle we need to know more about.
Alright, maybe you're right to inser them in your list. Black Holes aren't known enough to us and you want to understand more about them. Anyway there are many thing that I want to face today, namely the differences between Black Holes and the dark matter/energy (matter and energy in phisics are the same thing). Dark matter and energy have some effects that we cannot explain, whereas Black Holes and all of their effects are explained. Then we aren't able to understand where the dark matter work and why, a problem that with Black Holes isn't here. There would surely be other differences but I don't know anything else about them. This speech isn't a correction of you previous speech that I assume it as correct, is only a clarification for me about these elements that I think they aren' so similar to each other.
 
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Alright, maybe you're right to inser them in your list. Black Holes aren't known enough to us and you want to understand more about them. Anyway there are many thing that I want to face today, namely the differences between Black Holes and the dark matter/energy (matter and energy in phisics are the same thing). Dark matter and energy have some effects that we cannot explain, whereas Black Holes and all of their effects are explained. Then we aren't able to understand where the dark matter work and why, a problem that with Black Holes isn't here. There would surely be other differences but I don't know anything else about them. This speech isn't a correction of you previous speech that I assume it as correct, is only a clarification for me about these elements that I think they aren' so similar to each other.
Black holes are similar because we do not fully understand them, gravity is involved, and they were given names meaning "obscured" or "unknown". Otherwise, they are uniquely different phenomena, I agree. And they have given it a more apt name; they can also be known as a Gravitational singularity, a region in spacetime in which tidal gravitational forces become infinite. So again, you are correct.
 
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So - dark matter really isn't anything tangible at all. We can see its effect, but we cannot see IT. It's like gravity, a force we can't see, and appears to correlate with the mass of an object so we assign that mystery to "an attractive force produced in proportion and relation to an object's mass". But that's really no explanation of what gravity is at all. It's kind of like not knowing what causes cars to move down the road and just saying, "ok, anything with wheels can move down the road". Yes! But what causes the movement??? With dark energy, we can't even point to the matter that's causing the gravity! It's missing. But stubbornly, instead of revisiting the theory, we just presume matter has to be there. So instead of seeing this "dark matter" as a clue to gravity, we're going to give "dark energy" the mysterious property of invisibility instead. Creating an entirely new, yet invisible form of matter no one's ever seen. o_O

And we do the same thing with the energy of the universe. Once we can't account for "the rest of it", once we can't form a theory that explains the entirety of it, we simply say - the rest of the 67% of the universe is made up of "dark energy".:confused_old:

And I can understand it - we have to name these things something. But if you can't form a theory that describes the Universe as it's observed or referred, then your theory is wrong. You can't say it's right but, oh yeah, I'm not going to account for 67% of it. Known Baryonic matter 5%. Dark matter 28%. Dark energy 67%. So we know nothing about 95% of the universe's makeup yet we wonder why we can't understand gravity.

Take it from me, yes, a layman; there is no dark energy, there is no dark matter, there aren't even any "black holes", lol - there is just missing science. But scientists don't like incomplete theories - so they fill them in with creative placeholders so that the rest of us won't notice the holes. And these are gaping holes not even a child should miss.

I'm not calling into question the science we know, nor our scientific method. Eventually, I believe science will get us there. I whole-heartedly believe in "the science". I'm just sayin... for those who think we are so advanced, I beg to differ. We are babes in the woods. That's why we can fly in Earth's atmosphere relatively easy now - it's a well-known science - relatively speaking. But to go into Earth orbit and beyond, we're still using brute force methods to get there.

To me, our spacecraft are like the old wooden ships from centuries past. Fragile and inefficient. We don't understand gravity, therefore we use brute-force to defeat it instead of using it to our advantage, like we did with aerodynamics. The fuel for the space shuttle weighed 20 times more than the shuttle itself! Imagine if we had to do that for aircraft? A 747 will hold 322,650 lbs of jet fuel, and the aircraft weight empty is 403,500 lbs. We're never going to be able to get to space with less fuel than ship until we understand gravity. And we'll never be a space-faring civilization without understanding it either. IMO, gravity is key to all of it. And dark matter and energy are the clues.

:)
 
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I agree with everything you have said, including the fact that we don't fully understand gravity nor how to intelligently overcome it to get out of Earth's atmosphere and farther out into space. And it is so true that we are still in the dark ages with regard to our rockets and the rocket fuel used to power them! To my way of thinking, we haven't really advanced much in that regard.
 
we are still in the dark ages
As I have already said, we will always be in the dark ages if we compared us to the imaginary most advantaged civilitations. This is important to understand because we can always improve our technology, but in parallel our mind will make some imaginary alien civilitations more advantaged than us that make us feel inferior.
 
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As I have already said, we will always be in the dark ages if we compared us to the imaginary most advantaged civilitations. This is important to understand because we can always improve our technology, but in parallel our mind will make some imaginary alien civilitations more advantaged than us that make us feel inferior.
Yes, but you don't have to imagine another civilization. You can use ourselves as a model, and the science we are not so inferior at as a comparison. Along with computing and aerodynamics we are pretty good at flying within an atmosphere. Not "as good" as those imaginary civilizations but compared to just 100 years ago, not bad. But compare how we go to the moon 55 years ago to today, and besides the computing part, rocketry hasn't changed much at all. SpaceX is using reusables now. Nice computing advancement - same rocketry. Even the space elevator, if we ever get around to building one, will only circumvent our gravity problem.

I'm sure gravity isn't an easy riddle to crack. But I feel as if even the scientists see it as such a hard problem that it's not worth the time or money to really try and figure it out. Few experiments on gravity are being conducted. It's a shame because it is really the key to that imaginary civilization we can become and we're not focused on it.
 
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At the beginning you didn't convince me with your example of the flying. I'm convinced in fact that many thing happened only because of the condizion of the age whose we are speaking about. But then, with your final piece, you gave me an explanation very important:
But I feel as if even the scientists see it as such a hard problem that it's not worth the time or money to really try and figure it out.
In my opinion it is important to pointed out. Many times we aren't beyond our levels only because of this important problems, thank you.
 
I have developed a hypothesis to solve this problem and I can present a small part of it. If you were in space far from the Earth, how would you be affected by the Earth’s gravity if there was no matter between you and Earth? This is impossible, so no force can be transmitted through nothingness, and if Einstein had expressed gravity as a curvature in space, so space itself must be matter, meaning it must have a mass, and as said by the philosopher Parmenides, nothingness can't occupy a part of the space, so There is a substance that occupies the spaces between all objects. So the existence of dark matter is a philosophical imperative , if you have an interest in this idea, I can explain it physically.
 
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how would you be affected by the Earth’s gravity if there was no matter between you and Earth?
I have always heard that gravity has no need for contact to act, as magnetic force. These are two type of force that act wireless, if we want.
the philosopher Parmenides
I like philosophy and I assume that Parmenides was a great man, but here speaking about philosophy isn't good. Moreover this man lived in a faraway time, we cannot follow him and his thought too elder...
 
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I have developed a hypothesis to solve this problem and I can present a small part of it. If you were in space far from the Earth, how would you be affected by the Earth’s gravity if there was no matter between you and Earth? This is impossible, so no force can be transmitted through nothingness, and if Einstein had expressed gravity as a curvature in space, so space itself must be matter, meaning it must have a mass, and as said by the philosopher Parmenides, nothingness can't occupy a part of the space, so There is a substance that occupies the spaces between all objects. So the existence of dark matter is a philosophical imperative , if you have an interest in this idea, I can explain it physically.
Matter causes a distortion in space-time that effects other matter. The "nothingness" is not really nothingness if it's space-time since space-time is a 'somethingness". But I don't discount your theory out of hand. I think everything is worth investigating to a degree. This substance you speak of used to be referred to as an "ether" in the old days when a lot less was understood. And dark matter, if it was just outside our atmosphere, should have been detected by now since we have occupied that very space for decades already. Does this dark matter substance have a border or does it blend into our atmosphere as a gradient? I'll stop there and look forward to hearing more from you.
 
I have always heard that gravity has no need for contact to act, as magnetic force. These are two type of force that act wireless, if we want.

I like philosophy and I assume that Parmenides was a great man, but here speaking about philosophy isn't good. Moreover this man lived in a faraway time, we cannot follow him and his thought too elder...
Logically, a connection between two bodies cannot occur without a change in the medium between them, there is no magic in physics, and therefore there must be a medium that transmits this change, whether in gravity or magnetism, and for the great philosopher Parmenides, I do not follow him, but I cite his words, and I will continue my talk about my hypothesis in this thread
 
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Matter causes a distortion in space-time that effects other matter. The "nothingness" is not really nothingness if it's space-time since space-time is a 'somethingness". But I don't discount your theory out of hand. I think everything is worth investigating to a degree. This substance you speak of used to be referred to as an "ether" in the old days when a lot less was understood. And dark matter, if it was just outside our atmosphere, should have been detected by now since we have occupied that very space for decades already. Does this dark matter substance have a border or does it blend into our atmosphere as a gradient? I'll stop there and look forward to hearing more from you.
First, ether is necessary as a medium for transmitting electromagnetic waves, and although it is a physical necessity, most scientists deny it exists because of the Michelson and Morley experiment, but I am convinced that it is really everywhere, it is the space itself!!!
Let's explain my hypothesis from the beginning
Logically, It is not possible for a body to affect another object far from it without a change in the medium between them, This is a very important rule, and it is more important than any experiment.
. Suppose you are now in space far from the earth. It is clear that the material of the Earth does not touch you while you are far from it, so how can the Earth pull you towards it without touching?
The only solution from my point of view is that there are strings between you and the ُُEarth, and here if the Earth moves in space it will pull you with it, and this is the first case.
Now, how can the earth pull you towards it without it moving? The only possible solution is that the strings are elastic, and here, those strings may contract and here you will approach the ground
Thus, you can also move away from the ground if those strings are stretched
It is known that a body far from the earth has a greater potential energy than an object placed on the ground, and here we can conclude that these strings must lose energy in order to contract and gain energy in order to expand, so they contain energy, and here we may also solve the problem of dark energy !! .
Likewise, if you try to calculate the gravity of an object far from the surface of the earth from Newton's law of gravity, you will see that the mass of the earth is constant no matter how far away the other body is, and this means with a little imagination that the mass of the earth is not in its material, it can exist in the surrounding space, and this means Mass and matter are two different things, not one thing as we have learned
I will be satisfied with this amount now so that things do not get mixed up for you, and i Wait for your questions
 
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