Dark

[poliphilo]

OK- so most of the universe is made up of "dark matter"- which doesn't show up on any of our scientific instruments- and "dark energy"- which is even more elusive. As one of the sceptical participants in last night's Horizon grumbled, "this isn't physics, it's fairies at the bottom of the garden."

Exactly.

Am I being naiive, or does this mean that scientific materialism is finished? Or, to put it another way, who's to say that ghosts and fairies (and angels and demons and djinns and gods and goddesses and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster) can't exist when it's scientific orthodoxy that most of the stuff in the universe is something other than matter as we know it?

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

They're all just stories, right? I mean, from my (scant) knowledge of modern cosmology, dark matter/energy seems to be a way of saying "the world is like this, according to all our observations, but we can't really explain it so we'll give it this weird name."

It might end up being viewed by future scientists the way we view "aether." Aether says more about the scientists than science. It's like an inkblot test: what you learn from it is not that there is such a thing as the aether but that people thought there should be some medium through which light travelled. No one knew how this could be, but they did had a name for it. Until later developments refined our understanding.

Now, gravity and whatnot do certain things to certain other things, and no one knows how, so they call it dark matter and dark energy. It's a story.

And that's not that different from fairies and deities: those are just stories to explain rain and war and other big, confusing, and misunderstood things.

[qatsi.livejournal.com]

It was an interesting programme, with a popular narration style but without being dumbed down.

I found the Israeli scientist Milgrom particularly interesting. Conceptually it's more convincing to say that if you can't make empirical observations about "stuff" then it doesn't exist, and therefore the laws of physics must be wrong. That's exactly what Einstein did with the theory of relativity - the Michelson-Morley experiments demonstrated the lack of an aether and the constancy of the speed of light, though most physicists at the time presumed that meant the experiment was flawed or just not sensitive enough.

As for scientific materialism, well at least the programme didn't discuss string theory ... another thing which many physicists "believe" to be right but for which there it little, if any, compelling evidence. I wonder what Richard Dawkins has to say about that?

[queen-in-autumn.livejournal.com]

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. . .

For which I am always extremely grateful.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Oh, good, we have reached the place where we can't continue scentifically, and must now rely on conjecture.

I love it when a new sub-atomic particle is discovered and given a silly new name. It's like Something (something in a seventh dimension somewhere) is toying with us: "Let's give them a Stickyon to ponder!"