"God's duct tape" Topic

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And now, thanks to that image, I feel like the Universe is looking at me. And it's creepy.

The Eyes of Horus!

CHAOS!

Iohovah's Witness!

Dark Matter is not Duct Tape.

Dan

Dark Matter is not Duct Tape.

It's a workable analogy.

The Dark Matter consists of the missing 30% of mass that we can't see, but explains how galaxies spin for instance. It's also the mass that produces the necessary gravitational pull to fully explain our observations.

New research, using weak gravitational lensing, has shown that Dark Matter does not exist in a uniform pattern in the universe. It exists as long clumpy filaments.

So it is a long stretched out mass of matter that holds the visible matter together. Hence the analogy that you don't care for.

Here's the paper. Knock yourself out with the equations.

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186,282 mps Tape?

Why do you think these dark matter filaments are moving at light speed? Here is some more reading about what is going on………just blocks away from where I work incidentally.

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Perhaps "honeycomb" or "spider web" would be a more apt analogy?

"That also means galaxies tend to settle along these threads, forming interconnected superclusters that stretch out in maps not just of space, but of time itself."

Here's a better analogy: A freeway system. What is more "interconnected" than a freeway system?

It's not exactly a method of transport. Nothing is travelling down these filaments. Galaxies tend to form along these threads because the threads are made of unseen particles that have mass. It is the mutual gravitational attraction of mass that causes these galaxies to form.

What is more "interconnected" than a freeway system?

A spider web? Stuff clings to the filaments.

But a spider web implies a predator. That is the only purpose of a spider's web. But travel between galaxies is benign (although it could be used, as roads are, to transport armed aggression). If you like spider web better, shouldn't you assert some kind of cosmic predator using these "webs"?

No, its just an analogy. The shape is more akin to a spider web than a highway network to my eyes. YMMV

It's not the shape. It's the connection implying purpose.

It's the connection implying purpose.

Lol. I knew you were going to lead up to something like this. The connections are simply due to gravity, are they not? I'm not sure what purpose you could divine from that.

It's like you knocking a pencil off your desk and it falls to the floor. Was there a purpose to the pencil falling? Or is it simply how objects with mass behave with respect to each other?

If galaxies are connected by gravity, then "dropping" seems like a good way to get from here to there. That would mean that intragalactic travel could be done on the same "connectors", because they exist within each galaxy as well. Now, how to "harness" the gravity, so that I can "drop" from here, to there………..

This whole concept/revelation/discovery makes me feel as if we are on the cusp of something big. A breakthrough is coming………

I think you may be correct, especially with the newer generation telescopes being launched. I'm especially thinking of the James Webb telescope, which should launch in the Fall of '18.

The theoretical component of Dark Matter is not new however. It goes back to Lord Kelvin (the father of thermodynamics). The serious mathematical work was started just under 100 years ago.

The pencil drops to the Earth (and not the other way around) due to the wildly different disparity in their respective masses. Galaxies of similar mass that are thousands of lightyears apart will not have the same effect on each other. I doubt any "dropping" will occur. But who knows?

Maybe "dropping" between disparate galaxies is akin to a one way street? To get to a galaxy, you have to take "one way streets" galaxy to galaxy. Some remote galaxies may be like dead ends, with no way back; except some slow way at sublight speed, taking thousands upon thousands of years in many cases. Or, there are no dead ends, just long, convoluted ways around.

I'm wondering if this "dark matter" which cannot be seen is a gravitational force beyond the speed of light. That could imply very rapid travel between galaxies indeed; and even very rapid, perhaps almost instantaneous intragalactic travel. The secret to utilizing the dark matter "highways" is in how "joining" yourself to one of the "highways" is accomplished. Perhaps it is as simple as putting yourself into the gravitational flow. Like going up to the altitude of the jet stream in our atmosphere allows a sudden boost in one direction. Although that is a bad analogy otherwise.

Maybe our solar system is, like all others, surrounded by a dark matter "web", which is connected to all nearby systems, since each system within a galaxy is, like galaxies themselves, arranged along "webs" of dark matter that bind the galaxy together. It is rather like cities springing up along stretches of highway, and within those metropolises (galaxies), you have the many towns and villages (systems) that make up the whole of each metropolis. If this is true, then travel from the boundary of our solar system to the next one that has more gravitational pull than the system of Sol does, would be virtually automatic. Maybe it doesn't take any definite sort of technology at all. Just position yourself to "fall" into the stream, and whoosh! off you go, "falling" to the more powerful solar system ahead……….

I'm wondering if this "dark matter" which cannot be seen is a gravitational force beyond the speed of light.

Or, more likely, matter that does not emit radiation, and therefore can't be seen.

Just a bunch of slow, clingy stuff? That would be disappointing. It would appear to have no purpose whatsoever. Much better if it formed the cosmic equivalent of a "jet stream".

If the entire universe is strung together on this "web" of dark matter, there should be some right here in our own solar system.

Hypothesizing that something, cosmic distances away and not emitting radiation, therefore unseen, is fine as long as the same "stuff" is right here at home, where it can be detected and IDed…………..

Hypothesizing that something, cosmic distances away and not emitting radiation, therefore unseen, is fine as long as the same "stuff" is right here at home, where it can be detected and IDed…

If it doesn't emit radiation then it is very difficult to detect and ID.

Lets look at neutrinos. Apparently, there 65 Billion of the little fellows passing through every square centimeter of your body every second. They are chargeless, have no measurable mass and pass through everything.To detect them, you need a pot of heavy water and bury it kilometers below the surface of the ground. This is what was done in Canada at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.

sno.phy.queensu.ca

See the problem? Can't just stick a telescope up to the sky and look for them.

Dark matter, on the other hand is also invisible,and chargeless but has mass. So they must contain Higg's Bosons. We detect them only indirectly when the mass and gravity distort normal visible matter. It's hard enough to find without "seeing" it up close in our own solar system.

Oh fine. Neutrinos now. I can almost believe that telescopes can detect light shift, thus proving the influence of this invisible "dark matter". But, I have no clue how anyone first detected atomic particles, how such things can be observed, or how names can be assigned to even more pieces-parts of things never "seen" in the first place, on such a small scale. So! When faced with such esoterica, I may, as now, attempt to read textual bloviating, until my mind freezes. Then I pull away, and all I can say from that point is, "If you can't use a broadsword on it, it doesn't exist."

But, I have no clue how anyone first detected atomic particles, how such things can be observed

Here are a series of short videos by Tyler DeWitt. Start with Rutherford and his gold foil and work your way to other topics. A kid can understand this.

youtu.be/dNp-vP17asI

All this happened over 100 years ago.

I know that. But I don't understand it.

Do you understand fractals? I mean really understand? The smartest man in the room, my late friend Rocky Russo, did not get fractals. He couldn't do the math. He likened his inability to comprehend fractal maths to Asimov's admission that he reached a point with quantum mechanics and could go no further.

I'll look over your link, later.

"A child could do it! A child could do it!"

Heh, yeah, right……………

"A child could do it! A child could do it!"

To be fair, that's not what I said. The experiments by Rutherford and Milliken and others were brilliant. They and the discoveries that come from them are wonderfully simple and understandable, even to a bright child. You'll see that when you watch them.

As for topics that I accept but have a hard time grasping, well there are hundreds. My brain was evolved to find food, conduct myself safely, find a mate and ensure my offspring survive. I have that in common with every living thing, just the details on how we go about doing that differ with us. What is the evolutionary use of fully understanding quantum entanglement, or dark energy? Basically, things that are very, very small, or very, very fast or very, very big are somewhat incomprehensible to us as they exist far from the environment we evolved in.

Another example is Time. We all know what it is, are ravaged by its effects and experience it all the time. But we don't know what it really is. The fact that is entangled with, and inseparable from space is a bit weird. We have evolved to experience time and space as separate objects, something the physicists tell us is wrong. Also, it is difficult to come to grips with the fact that there was no "before" prior to the Big Bang. I understand that time-space was created at the beginning of the Big Bang, but it is hard to fully get this. That is because we all evolved in an environment where effect always follows cause.

There are hundreds of others.

Oh ya, I remember doing Mandlebrot sets, but can't remember anything about them now. Honestly, fractels aren't that interesting to me beyond an aesthetic appreciation of the pretty patterns. If I want to be mesmerised by interesting sights, I prefer M. C. Escher artwork.

I get "outside of spacetime", as a concept. I can "see" it. It's totally in the mind, as it were. What is "mind"? EITFP, which is inarguable. And with that, we are probably done, aaagain. :)

EITFP is certainly inarguable for, me as I have no idea what you are talking about. Are you making up your own acronyms?

Yes, of course. Existence In The First Place.

Inarguable…………

Well if you mean Descartes' famous line, then yes.