(no subject)

[quesarah]

New Evidence Directly Supporting the Existence of Dark Matter

Dudes, that's seriously exciting. Of course, some of us suspect the particle theory is only partially correct; nevertheless this is important data.

Comments

[galacticmilk.livejournal.com]

Pffft... MOND all the way.

[biogeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

Eh. Jury's still out on MOND.

[galacticmilk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know, I was just being snarky for the sake of snarkiness. That, and you brought up a science subject I actually know a little something about!

I'm a bit skeptical of dark matter because it sounds suspiciously like a fudge factor for something scientists can't explain. They couldn't figure out why the rotations of galaxies aren't matching up with expected predictions, so they posit the existence an invisible substance that must be behind the problem. And this substance doesn't give off any radiation, doesn't reflect any light, it's just there and we have to take the scientists word that this stuff exists. Why shouldn't I be a bit skeptical?

What little I know about MOND I've read about in Discover magazine a few years ago, and they had a more recent article about TeVeS that provides more support for MOND. Time will tell!

[biogeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit skeptical of dark matter because it sounds suspiciously like a fudge factor for something scientists can't explain.

But that's how all theories start, basically. Some observed phenomenon doesn't fit existing models/formulae, so posit something to explain it. It doesn't matter if it's completely out there, as long as you can devise an experiment to gather data to support or refute it. This is why this data is exciting, because finally there's some tangible observation that scientists can use to evaluate the dark matter hypothesis.

On the other hand, re-writing the Poisson distribution to match observed phenomena seems equally sketchy to me, but that's what theoretical scientists do. Just because the math is pretty doesn't mean it's sound.

On a good day, the theory and the experimental agree and you have a nice solid theory of how something works. But it's going to be a long time before we have that for the galaxy rotation problem.