SNOLAB: Inside the Dark Matter Lab Buried Over a Mile Underground
February 2nd, 2017Via: Vice:
SNOLAB, one of the world’s premier laboratories, searches for dark matter, supernovas, and neutrinos 6,800 feet underground.
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That lab is amazing, reminds me of Black Mesa. I’m very interested in the subject of cosmic radiation’s influence on evolution, especially when the atmosphere was forming. Both light and cosmic radiation alter DNA, though our current atmosphere blocks quite a bit of both.
Does anyone else think dark matter is the epicycles of the 21st century?
I’m no physicist, but if there is evidence of extra energy and mass out ‘there’ that’s NOT itself detectable, it may strongly suggest a sort of substrate for what’s here…(“It’s turtles all the way down!”)
As mass is energy condensed (There’s enough in your little toe to level a city), it may be that what we perceive as reality in this universe, where quantum effects seem to rule at the edge of our experience, but laws soldify in the bulk of it, is the sublimative edge where the canvas (at least from our POV) becomes the painting. Putting that in another way, as E=mc^2, and mass is condensed energy, it may be that our dimensions of physical existence and the mass and energy we perceive are newly coalesced forms of another ‘energy’, let’s call it energy^x (not to suggest that it is a product of the energy we know, but in an attempt to communicate its being energy of another dimension and magnitude). In other words, there’s a massive amount of something comparable to energy supporting the manifestation of mass and energy we perceive in our universe, like the proverbial and actual iceberg.
…And that’s without adding ‘information’ to the picture…The holographic universe! Check out paragraphs 7 & 8:
https://astronomynow.com/2016/11/08/new-theory-of-gravity-might-explain-dark-matter/
BTW, @Duras, if you like the subject of cosmic radiation>evolution, you may get a kick out of the sci-fi book ‘Radix’ by A.A. Attanasio.
Cool, I appreciate the explanation, and I will definitely check those out. I’ve read a bit on the holographic universe model, seems like it has a lot to offer.
I have a lot of respect for the work of astronomy, and your insight on this, the rest of my post is simply providing the other side of the ‘argument’:
My concern with dark matter, is that it may be an overly convoluted theory that keeps getting changed to fit observation, much like Ptolomy with epicycles.
“There is a very good chance that dark matter, in particular, may not be a very good explanation for why there appears to be non-electromagnetically interacting matter in our universe. Over the past few years that the LHC, the particle collider in Switzerland, has been running, it has systematically ruled out many of the energies at which the most popular theories predicted dark matter to be. There hasn’t really been much progress in the past few decades at all in discovering dark matter, since it was first proposed.
The theory of epicycles is usually introduced to students as a warning against theories of arbitrarily large complexity. Before epicycles, astronomers thought all planets followed simple circular orbits around the Earth. However, they ran into a problem: planets seemed to travel across the sky at different rates, and in fact sometimes underwent retrograde motion, where they appeared to travel backwards. In order to fix this problem, Ptolemy (and others) became proponents of the epicycle theory: by adding circles to the orbits, they could correct for this motion.
The usual story then says that as measurements of planets became increasingly precise, astronomers found that they needed to add more and more epicycles in order to accurately produce the motion they were observing. This is the big problem: when a model needs to be tweaked frequently (especially when the tweaking involves increasing its complexity) in order to stay ‘up to date’ with the most recent data, there’s good reason to believe there’s some deep flaw with the entire family of models. This actually is almost exactly what is happening to dark matter theories today: as large numbers of dark matter theories are being ruled out by CERN, the only candidates left are ones that, for the most part, were previously considered to be unlikely. In this sense, many of the most elegant dark matter theories, akin to the low-epicycle-number theories for planetary orbits, aren’t consistent with experimental data any more.
I won’t comment on dark energy, since I know much less about it; it seems to be a very elegant theory, and unlike dark matter, it’s new enough that as far as I know there aren’t any troubling experiments yet to worry about.”
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-chances-of-dark-matter-and-dark-energy-turning-out-to-be-the-21st-century-equivalent-of-Ptolemys-epicycles
I see this as sort of a attempt to place a “working” theory in place on an unexplained phenomenon, which is useful for the sake of study, but shows how little science really understands about how the universe works. I think a more revealing/honest term would be “Mystery Matter”
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2013/03/26
@Duras, thanks for the links 🙂
I agree ‘mystery matter’ would be more apropos, but words like ‘mystery’ get many scientists antsy. Maybe this dude Verlinde’s got a good rival explanation. I don’t have anywhere near the understanding needed to examine his theory, but it seems once you accept information as a fundamental component of the universe, things get ‘meta’ fast: the turtle is now sentient. (On which topic, dear readers, there’s ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ by David Bohm, available, as is ‘Radix’, via crytogon’s homepage Amazon link.)