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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Dark Matter My Ass

OK, I'm just an armchair scientist. I don't have a degree. So I'll try to keep this simple and include links to people way smarter than me.

Just a short time ago, our model of the universe began with The Big Bang.



The universe began in a cataclysmic, unimaginably hot and dense explosion. In milliseconds we go from an infinitesimal point, a singularity, to a rapidly expanding universe. Like a balloon being filled with gas.

From it's birth 14+ billion years ago, the universe has continued to expand. The biggest question was whether the universe would continue to expand forever until the last star died and the universe went dark and cold? Or whether there was sufficient gravitational attraction to eventually halt the expansion and even pull the universe back together into The Big Crunch, where the universe would once again collapse into a singularity. Perhaps even to generate another Big Bang and give birth to a brand new universe.

Simple enough.

Without getting into the complexities, I'll just say that in recent years, shit has changed. No, scratch that. Things didn't just change. They got fucking bizarre.

Strange Punchbowl Turd #1: It appears that the universe is mostly invisible. Everything we can see and detect, every planet, every star, every galaxy, every atom that makes up every single object in the observable universe, only accounts for about 0.5% of the matter that should exist according the most bleeding edge cosmological models.

WTF?

Cosmologist and physicists have postulated the existence of Dark Matter to make up this matter deficit. This Dark Matter is supposed to make up the other 95.5% of the universe.

So, 99.5% of the universe can't be seen, detected or measured. But wait, there's more.

Strange Punchbowl Turd #2: It was thought that in an expanding universe that originated in a cataclysmic explosion, the expansion would be slowing. It was just a question of whether it would slow enough for gravity to regain control over the expansion and pull everything back together, or whether the ever slowing expansion would outpace the reach of gravity leaving every bit of matter cold, dark and alone.

But no! That isn't what's happening! The expansion isn't slowing at all. It's accelerating! Over 14 billion years after the initial push of the only source of energy we can explain, "something" is shoving everything in the universe apart from every other thing in the universe at an increasingly rapid rate. Cosmologists and physicists have dubbed this unknown force "Dark Energy".

So, let's recap. Over 90% of the universe is shit we can't see, detect or explain but seems to form the gravitational "scaffolding" or "superstructure" of the entire universe. It is all being shoved apart by some mysterious energy source that we can't detect or explain, but which must be more powerful than anything known to man and seems to defy the laws of known physics and thermodynamics.

I call both bullshit AND shenanigans on Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

Sounds to me like a lot of shucking and jiving, trying to put a familiar face on shit we know nothing about.

It sounds a lot like the theory of Luminiferous aether.

Like I said, I'm not a scientist. But I do have common sense, a sound grounding in scientific theory, and a great bullshit detector.

I'm going to go out on a limb right now and predict that "Dark Matter" isn't really matter, and "Dark Energy" isn't really energy.

My theory is that the observable effects that we attribute to Dark Matter and Dark Energy in our own universe are actually manifestations of a much larger structure made up of multiple universes and extra dimensions.

No, I haven't been smoking crack.

I'm talking about Colliding Brane Cosmology, a.k.a. ekpyrotic cosmology.

"In ekpyrotic cosmology — which was proposed in 2001 by physicists Paul Steinhardt, Justin Khoury, Neil Turok and Burt Ovrut — there is no beginning of time. Instead, our visible universe exists on one of two four-dimensional “branes” floating in a five-dimensional space. These two branes are locked in an endless oscillatory motion in which they creep together, “bounce” through each other, withdraw and then creep together again (see animation: Branes collide). At each bounce, which is like a fresh Big Bang, ripples in the branes collide and liberate energy at different places to produce the initial density perturbations."

The universe is a much larger and stranger place than we can explain today.

But I am absolutely 100% confident that the universe is completely explainable, adheres to consistent laws, and involves no supernatural hocus pocus. Which is exactly what makes it so magnificent, awe inspiring and humbling.

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