Anyone else think that Dark Matter and String Theory are bunk?

I say this as a person with a physics degree and a passion for the subject. I stay as current as possible and read voraciously. I just think we have two fads here with zero credibility but a ton of media coverage and classroom propaganda.

Love to hear what the rest of you think.

 

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Dark matter pretty well certainly exists, discrepancies in mass observed due to gravity have been measured and remeasured. string theory is an entirely different matter based on extrapolation rather than measurement. They are certainly apple and oranges, Why rope the two together?

 

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I think they are very similar. They are current cultural fads within the physics community that I am pretty sure will both be proven to be incorrect. What I don't understand is the conviction so many people have for each or both of them when neither has a leg to stand on.

The evidence for Dark Matter almost wholey rests on observations of the structure of spiral-arm galaxies. But that observation makes a huge mistake in its thinking. It requires that the DM to be arranged in a halo around the galaxy. If it were evenly distributed, you would solve nothing.

The reason why is simple... the only facet of DM that is required is that it interacts gravitationally with other, luminous matter. This solves the speed of the outermost stars in rotating galaxies. However, if DM interacts with regular matter, then it should assume the same gravitational distribution as luminous matter within the galaxy. That is... it would fall to the center, and rotate with similar proportions as luminous matter. You can't dream it up, in order to explain problems with gravitational theory, and then pretend that gravitational theory doesn't apply to it.

So the halo of DM that is needed seems like the sort of mistake that Einstein made with the aether and the expansion of the universe. Instead of using data to sculpt our theories, were are wed to old theories, and attempt to modify them to fit new data. That has never worked in the past, and I do not see it working here.


To me, String Theory is even more obviously bunk. A recent convention of physicists finally called ST out by demanding some testable claims of it, and soon. Too many of our brightest minds are being wasted fishing for this red herring. Like DM, it is a drain on our human resources.

 

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I think you will find that contrary to advocating aether Eistein overturned it as the accepted explanation when creating SR. Also the expansion of the universe also bothered Einstein so much that he retracted it despite all of his calculations pointing towards the later day more evidential conclusion. What is your point?

Rubbish! For example Einsteine successfully modified Newton to comply with data, and the vast majority of science is never proven incorrect but merely modified. I dont know what you are saying here but it seems misinformed and based on common cliche rather than fact.

 

My point was that Einstein didn't trust his theory as much as he trusted the handed-down wisdom of a static universe. I fear that too many people, yourself included, are going to trust DM and ST just because Scientific American keeps alternating their covers with these two supermodels.

I agree that Einstein modified F=ma to allow m and a to be dynamic and interdependent, and by this reasoning it was an extension of Newton's work. You seem to be taking side points out of context and using that to dismiss my larger thesis, which is the bunkness of DM and ST.

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I take it from your two responses that you feel that Einstein was correct to modify his mistake, because even he considered it the greatest blunder of his career, leaving the glory of expansion to Hubble. And I also take it that you feel that science proceeds in an ordered and linear progression towards an objective truth? That the vast majority of science is never proven incorrect? Again, I disagree. If we have to modify a theory, the previous one was incorrect. This is not meant to detract from the gains of science, far from it.

Interesting tangents, for sure. Does anyone have anything to say about Dark Matter or String Theory? Why they do or do not buy either theory?

 

Well OK I could name you 10s of instances where TRUE scientific work is merely modified with advancement. Can you name just one scientific work that was proven wrong rather than merely added to(dont give the everything revolved around the earth one, because as I believe it was never a scientific finding as much as an established powers that be understanding)?.

 

Hello all
I do not believe that the Dark matter (or Dark energy) theories are any more than wishfull thinking by those that believe in them. Dark matter does not explain the flat rotation curve or the well defined (thin) disk shapes we see in the universe.

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Ewwwww OK what other explanation is there for the measured mass shortfall in gallaxies andclusters for example? This is totally ludicrous in the face of modern physics and mesurement. WIMPS and MACHOS are something to argue about but its inane to argue dark matter doesn't exist at all in this day and age.

 

"WMAP data reveals that its contents include 4% atoms, the building blocks of stars and planets. Dark matter comprises 22% of the universe. This matter, different from atoms, does not emit or absorb light. It has only been detected indirectly by its gravity."

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm.html

 

I wouldn't be surprised to find that our formulation for universal gravitation is incorrect. We assume that it has infinite reach, which doesn't make sense at all. Much more likely is that the power of gravity falls off with distance beyond the inverse square of the distance. What I mean, is that this forumla could hold, even for distances of lightyears, but may fall off over some larger distance.

Not only would this explain the distribution of matter in galaxies with the elegance and simplicity that physicists and mathematicians adore, it could also explain why inflationary theory is not needed, and why current efforts to meld gravitational theory (of the general relativity sort) with QED are destined to fail.

The strong nuclear force has this same sort of power fall-off, as does the electromagnetic force in some circumstances.

It is my theory that the gravitational model is incorrect, and we are trying to shoehorn it into the data, rather than accepting the data and seeing what comes of it. We are making up variables to insert into our equations so they gibe with reality (hence the Einstein reference).

The thing holding us back is the overwhelming accuracy of the current model for short distances (relatively speaking), which was the same sort of hindrance that separated Newton's and Einstein's work. Only here we are talking relativity of scale, and not of speed or time or reference.


Edit: My theory might also explain why the universal expansion seems to be accelerating with time. But I have another theory regarding the overall structure of the universe that also explains this...

 

You should get the book

The Other Theory Of Physics: A Non-Field Unified Theory Of Matter And Motion by James Carter

 

I've looked at his theories before. Great imagination, but I think they fail quite a few thought-experiments. If gravitation were the effect of expanding space, we would feel acceleration in the same direction on both sides of the Earth, which we don't. The universe would also seem to be out of scale, according to his own theories, and it has a tough time accounting for the different effects on constant mass when in the presence of varying gravitational fields (weight of objects in space, for instance, or different escape velocity required to lift off the moon, vs. the Earth). I also don't see how his theory describes the varying flow of time in different gravitational fields, which we have measured with precision with atomic clocks in 747's.

My theory is nowhere near as well-stated or precisely formulated as his, but I think it is sounder in many respects. And much sounder than DM or ST, by a long shot. I should note that I have read some very similar thoughts by other physicists since I first stated these general ideas. Who knows who was the first to formulate them, I care not for claims of primogeniture or originality. It was in highschool that I first thought of gravitational lensing, and was quite proud of myself... most of the things I think up have already been expounded on by someone else... this never robs me of any satisfaction, rather it delights me to have some company.

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For what its worth, if you compare static electric field behavior on different shapes (sphere, long cylinder, flate plate, etc.) with large galactic structures held together by gravity then there appears to be a correlation between the shape of the galactic structure and the strength of gravity field that holds said structure together.

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Dark matter is not "just a fad" that the physics community has adopted on a whim. Because I'm too lazy to type this again, here is a copy of a post I made responding to a similar kind of criticism:

"Dark matter is already known to exist! We call them neutrinos. They don't have an electric charge, so they don't couple directly to the electromagnetic field (technical note: they can interact indirectly). The crazies who rave about dark matter being unphysical inevitably fail to inform you that we already know of particles that are "dark". Neutrinos are so ethereal that their existence was initially inferred from missing energy (sound familiar?) in beta decays. Only very recently have we even been able to determine that neutrinos do indeed have mass. I should also mention that there are a host of more mundane reasons why we sometimes can't see ordinary matter. Neutrinos are almost certainly not the more famous "dark matter" everyone talks about, but the point is that the idea isn't crazy. Sometimes seeing nothing at all can be very telling. Today dark matter is a successful and consistent part of our picture of the universe. Moreover, we have plenty of candidates for exotic dark matter and high hopes that the Large Hadron Collider will shed some light on the issue."

and from another post earlier:

"Dark matter is a fact! Neutrinos are a perfect example of a kind of matter that is massive yet does not interact directly with light. They were very hard to detect in the first place and their existence was actually first inferred from the observation of missing energy. Does this sound familiar? The fact that something isn't there can be as telling as the fact that something is there. Another great example is black holes; do you believe black holes exist? By your reasoning it must be silly science to talk about black holes since we can't see them directly (unless they are very small) and must instead infer their existence based on their gravitiational effects. Dark matter is very similar since its existence is inferred from observation using a very well tested theory. It is really a prediction of the theory, namely that we should some day be able to find (perhaps in a particle accelerator) just exactly what dark matter is.

The bottom line is that dark matter is not just some silly nonsense that people came up with one day and suddenly the whole world of science was blinded by it and no one could think anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you actually look at the early history of dark matter, it is full of poor communication with several different groups realizing independently the need for dark matter in very different contexts. Dark matter is only generally accepted now because there is considerable and consistent evidence for its existence. Most of the other ideas that you mention continue not to have the same level of success. I urge you to reconsider your opinion on the matter and have a little faith in your astrophysicists and astronomers."

 

String theory is an entirely different issue. There is no experimental evidence for string theory, much less a consistent formulation of the theory in non-perturbative terms. And while it didn't begin as a fad, it may indeed have become one. Let me be clear though, string theory has not really dominated our thinking in high energy physics, and it is popular for a number of very good reasons.

Do I think string theory has gotten a bit blown out of proportions these days? Maybe so. However, even now it isn't as obviously stupid as some people would have you to believe, and it also doesn't really control high energy physics, again, contrary to what some people would suggest. In truth, the LHC will help matters greatly.

 

Nice reply, thanks. I've been well aware of neutrinos being a primary suspect, but even the proponents of this theory admit that neutrinos do not have enough mass, or occur in the abundance required, to explain the faster-than-expected speed of the outer stars in spiral galaxies.

And even if they did, you would expect them to be evenly distributed within the galaxy (or at least in proportion to the abundance of stars, where they are created). This doesn't help explain why the outer-rim stars orbit the glactic center as fast as they do. And really, this observation is the reason we have the theory of DM in the first place. It is this problem that led theorists to "dream up" DM. They are trying to reconcile observation with theory.

And I am well aware of the history of DM speculation. I am an avid history buff, especially the history of science. Zwicky is one of my favorite theoreticians. I still don't see how you reconcile the presence of so much gravity-inducing material to solve problems on a galactic scale, and not expect all that extra mass to mess up localized observation. You can't seem to have it both ways, but that is what the current theory tries to do.

Again, it seems far more likely to me that the drop-off of the force of gravity isn't by the inverse square of the distance to infinity, like current equations purport it to be. Far more likely is that gravity operates like the other forces, and sees some radical changes due to scale.

 

This was JUST posted in the same section of this forum:

Of course, I only quote the bit that agrees with me (naturally). The rest is here: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=57144

 

dark matter exists.... its matter, which is dark, and doesnt emit light... and there is lots of it... but that doesnt mean it has to be mysterious and different matter.
(its normal matter,, in the dark)

and the strings,, are actually one dimensional lines of spatial tension, very simlar to electrical static field lines... but without polarity.

strings are gravity, matter is rolled up gravity, which is why it emits gravity.
matter also emits polarized strings, or lines of force... and they are of a range in qualities.. some more positive, some.. more negative.

-MT

 

The invisible and the non-existant look very much alike.

And art is what art is.

 

It sounds to me like Dark Matter has been conjured up to force the universe make sense again.