
The mythic associations of “dark matter” - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/dark-matter-is-in-our-dna
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martinpw
> While some point to galaxy cluster work by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, dark
> matter was truly “discovered” in the 1970s by Vera Rubin, who was studying
> the rotation of spiral galaxies. Rubin found that galaxies were spinning too
> fast for the matter we could see in them, yet they weren’t flying apart.

And Zwicky found that galaxies were moving too fast for the matter we see in
clusters yet the clusters weren't flying apart. This seems exactly analagous
to Rubin's discovery so it is not clear why the author considers it not the
true "discovery".

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Avshalom
>dark matter was truly “discovered” in the 1970s by Vera Rubin

as a nit: dark matter was actually discovered in the 50's with the first
direct detection of neutrinos, which is why-in the 70's- "maybe there's just a
bunch of matter not interacting with photons" wasn't laughed out of the room.

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fooker
Neutrinos are no longer considered to be 'dark matter'. Before the 1980s it
was, though.

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Avshalom
Neutrinos aren't the dark matter responsible for the bullet cluster, rotation
curves etc... But dark matter as a term is just a catch all for particles that
don't interact with photons, hence hot (neutrinos) and cold (what we need for
galaxies)

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rflrob
The headline writer here has evidently decided to take an article about one of
physicists’ pet peeves and include a biologist pet peeve—saying something is
“in our DNA” to mean it’s an apparently inherent part of our cultural legacy,
without making any reference to actual biology.

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godelmachine
Is this something that should be flagged?

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rflrob
I don’t think so. It is in the headline on Nautilus, and while I think there’s
room for yet another article where a scientist carps about how the lay press
misuses scientific terms, this whole article is about why “Dark Matter” as a
term is evocative, and “in our DNA” has also come to mean something beyond “is
encoded in the sequence of our chromosomes“.

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fourthark
Was hoping for an article about how dark matter affects genetics.

