This, ether, and dark matter. The equations don’t agree with observations so we invent a thing we have not observed to explain it. I wish it would be explained like this in popular science, went to a planetarium and they presented dark matter as absolute fact.
> The equations don’t agree with observations so we invent a thing we have not observed to explain it.
Yes, and then implications of the invention are followed up on and dark matter has passed a lot of tests and has strong explanatory power (i.e. parsimony, Occam's Razor) over a variety of phenomena, from small dark galaxies up to the matter web structure of the observable universe.
So it has very very strong evidence behind it, at this point. With an unbroken trend of accumulated evidence.
The reason for remaining questions stem from the fact that the small scale nature of dark matter is not yet characterized. Which differs from all other gravitationally active materials we know of - i.e. all the particles in the standard model.
But we don't know the fine structure of space either, and we don't count that against General Relativity. In both cases the large scale properties of each phenomena, that we can measure and model, provides clear reasons why investigating the small scale properties has been challenging.
In both cases, it is the extreme weakness of gravity at small scales, and the low, if any, alternative interactions with the standard model particles we know well.
The problem I have with dark matter is the name. If I understand it correctly, its existence cannot be predicted. We observe strange results, so we explain it by inventing some strange new concept of mass that's otherwise non interactive.
For example, the dark matter might be mass gathering of otherwise non reactionary particles like neutrons, it could be wrinkles in spacetime that have a similar effect as massive normal matter bodies have, or they could be advanced civilizations that learned how to hide their star systems from the rest of the universe.
We simply don't know. I suppose we had to name it somehow, but the name just sounds wrong. It might not be matter at all. It is also not dark, it's non-reactive.
Why did they not rather choose something like spacetime wrinkles?
We know we can't see it (dark, as in not emitting or otherwise interacting with light), and it creates and responds to gravity in the exact same way the matter particles we know do (matter).
The two word choices can be quibbled with, but they form an accurate shorthand for what we know.
If the fine structure is discovered to be wrinkles in space I expect there will be a renaming during a time of great celebration by the future Nobel Prize winners! Especially if that also shone light on space-time's ultimate structure!
Edit: I will humbly propose a name for your postulated tiny space wrinkles: Wrinky-dinks!
For the average person, dark matter should be presented as absolute fact. It's the leading explanation that best explains most of the associated phenomenon, and the average person has repeatedly shown themselves to be unable to understand what a scientist means when they call something a theory.
Emphasizing that we haven't explicitly discovered what dark matter actually consists of inevitably leads to people who don't understand the evidence dismissing it as "made up" and instead pushing explanations that have a much higher burden of proof (eg modified gravity or modified light speed, which struggle on the point that there are structures which have more or less "extra mass" than usual).
"We know the facts. We have it all figured out." Then the facts change years later.
Or "There's a great mystery here, a secret we haven't yet found. We're still looking, but here's some ideas that seem to explain 90% of what we're seeing."
The second is so much more engaging and would promote more interest and science funding.
It would also help retain public belief that science is a process for neutral seeking of the truth rather than a self-interested force with rapidly dropping credibility. Some revision is inevitable but it doesn't need to be routinely due to having been intentionally misleading.
The facts don't change. Apples fell to the ground when we thought newtonian gravity was correct, they still fall to the ground now that general relativity is the accepted explanation. Theories are explanations of factual observations. The observation of the phenomenon we're calling dark matter is as factual as apples falling to the ground. The explanation is subject to change as we learn more, but the facts won't.
> the average person has repeatedly shown themselves to be unable to understand what a scientist means when they call something a theory
The average person consumes science from news, not from scientists.
A lot of news outlets and "science communicators" have been repeatedly dumbing down scientific subjects for non-scientific purposes. Clickbait, ideology, lazyness.
The nature of dark matter should be presented to the public as it is. If we dumb it down too much, it's the same as not presenting it at all, or misrepresenting it.
I tend to agree about science communication, but on the other hand, I've also seen how frustrating it can be to constantly have to correct the same fallacious arguments over and over again because people misinterpret the ideas and have a bad case of Dunning-Kruger.
So presenting things as is doesn't really work because people still have only partial information relative to those who work in the field. Thus being the same in effect as misrepresentation.
I think I was too harsh in saying that it should be presented as absolute fact, ideally I'd rather the average person be much better educated in their understanding of the scientific process, such that they'd have enough humility to recognize that watching a documentary does not give them all the facts. But that doesn't seem realistic, so it's a difficult issue.
Dark matter and dark energy is a gap in knowledge and should not be presented like a fact, but as a temporary constant added to human models of universe to make them actually work.
It is like a boy calculating physics homework, only to be 30% off, so he will add some constant to get to result he wants. It sounds ridiculous, does it? Well dark matter/energy is that constant to get result we expect.
"For the average person, dark matter should be presented as absolute fact." This is how you end up with a crises where noone trusts experts or institutions anymore
But the thing is it's only the angular speed of star systems in some galaxies. We have also found galaxies that behave differently, as if they have no dark matter. This is very easily explained with dark matter theory - they actually don't have dark matter. Any theory that modifies gravity needs to explain why we only sometimes modify gravity.
Further, while that was the observation dark matter was originally introduced to explain, there are a lot of other observations it has since explained. For example we can see regions of space with high gravity that do not appear to have any substantial amounts of regular matter in them. Again, stuff we can't directly detect as it doesn't interact with light but still has mass is a really simple explanation.
And from a theoretical perspective, there's no reason to think dark matter is weird. There is no law that says all particles need to interact with the electromagnetic force, indeed we know of many particles that don't even though none of the ones we know are particularly good candidates for dark matter. That there is a particle we don't know about specifically because it's most important property is that it is hard for our instruments to directly detect is far more likely than that one of our most successful theories which has an extremely firm foundation and has correctly predicted numerous observed phenomena with incredible accuracy has been wrong this whole time.
What I don't like about this, is that we take the observations, apply some custom guesses as to why the spacetime is folded differently and... there you go, your formulas now match. It smells too much like the explanation of geocentric system, where they invented that planets also circle around a perceived dot on their trajectory path and that happily coincides with the Earth's rotation.
I think what we are missing is that these behaviors need to be predictable. We don't know where these anomalies in spacetime curvature will be and why they are there. And as I stated in another comment here, I think dark matter is a bad name for the unexplained spacetime curvatures (warpings?, wrinkles?).
Again, you're focusing on one small sliver of what dark matter is observed to do, and coming up with alternative explanations for that particular observation. There are a whole host of different observations of dark matter, and any reasonable competing theory needs to explain all of them. Modified gravity is the inelegant epicycle explanation, while dark matter is the simple alternative explanation in your analogy.
> I think what we are missing is that these behaviors need to be predictable. We don't know where these anomalies in spacetime curvature will be and why they are there.
But we do! We can see galaxies that have been stripped of their dark matter and we can find nearby the dark matter that was stripped. We can predict, based on our theory of dark matter where these gravitational anomalies will be, then we look there and lo and behold we see them. We aren't applying custom guesses to match our observation, the universe just happens to match exactly what we'd expect it to look like if it contained a bunch of matter that didn't interact with the electromagnetic force.
> I think dark matter is a bad name for the unexplained spacetime curvatures (warpings?, wrinkles?).
Dark matter isn't the space time curves, which aren't particularly special. All massive particles produce such warping, and we just call it gravity. Dark matter is matter (stuff that interacts with gravity) which is dark (does not interact with light). We would expect it, assuming it exists, to produce such warping of spacetime, which again is exactly what we see.
It should be presented as this is what we think, there are some gaps we filled in here, and these gaps are usually where the next big advance comes from. No need to even use the word theory, just explain in simple words and people can get it.
But your brain is disconnected from your body during dreams, to keep you from flailing around. Sometimes you even wake up before the block is lifted and can’t move. So controlling such a device would be difficult.
You're describing sleep paralysis, right? It's not so much a disconnection as it is an inhibition. Attempts to move most of your muscles are blocked, but external stimuli still get in. You know, once upon a time someone started the washer while I was presumably in REM, and I started to hear something in my dream. When I woke up, it only took me a couple minutes to realize that what I had been hearing in the dream was some greatly slowed-down version of the washer that had just been started, since I guess my dream time was travelling faster than real time. I think the only reason it didn't wake me up is because I'm used to sleeping through the sound of the washer running and may even normally filter it out. That's just the first time that someone managed to turn it on in the middle of my actual dreaming phase.
Yeah, that’s right. I had it once before I knew it was a thing and could see, hear, feel, but not move. Quite terrifying at the time, even if it resolved pretty rapidly.
I've been trying to induce it willingly for around a decade at this point. Same for lucid dreaming. Haven't really managed to do either one, not sure if I am capable of it either. Oh well.
All my odd dream/sleep experiences came as a teenager, got every one at least once, lucid dreams I had several times, also night terrors, and sleep paralysis. Nothing since then.
I believe there are two "obvious" theories on how sleepwalking may occur:
- Sleep paralysis doesn't properly activate, and someone accidentally transfers the motion of walking into real life. proprioception may pass through to the dream, they might perceive a dream environment that allows them to navigate the real one. (i.e. righting themself from bed, staying upright while walking)
- They aren't fully asleep, but they aren't awake/aware either. I've had my fair share of people telling me that I said or did things after waking up and before immediately going back to sleep, and those are things I don't remember doing at all, probably because they weren't properly recorded in memory because my brain was not fully awake. (Some of these cases could have been DID though.)
The Amish are a good example of making an antitechnology stance religious, and they get pretty good accommodation. IANAL but it seems like would be a serious discrimination suit if they were denied service due to a lack of smartphones. This is in the context of the USA, not sure how it would work in Europe.
This is a good point. Some orthodox Jewish denominations find
themselves in the same situation.
But I'd actually like to argue against that.
I wrote here [0] that we ought not conflate technology morals with
religion.
It's important to give room to traditional religious beliefs,
reasonable lifestyle choices and secular ethical stances. All are
important.
Saying this as someone who is a practising Christian humanist but was
also once an active secular humanist/rationalist-sceptic.
For most of us it would be best (in the face of all sorts of unknowns
coming down the pipe in the guise of AI etc) to establish the primacy
of secular ethical choice around technology.
I don't boycott Big-Tech because "Jesus told me to". It's because
they're dirty criminals and gangsters who I don't want to give money
to. I don't go without a smartphone because "God forbids it". It's
because I fundamentally object to being under 24/7 surveillance and
having to carry "papers" like in some vicious tinpot dictatorship.
These are just common, secular civic and personal moral choices.
I am surprised that we aren't doing more to stand up for them, and
very surprised that Sweden (and Finland and Estonia) of all places
have such a blind-spot around social rights and respect for different
opinions and lifestyles.
My issue (OP here) is that I have read and agreed to every ToS I've been given over the last few decades. I rarely upgrade macOS because of how long it take to read the new license. I use Firefox because I don't need to read the license.
In one notable case I told a client I couldn't accept their contract because it was incomplete. "What's the problem? Hundreds of other companies have accepted it." "It says that I also agree to the terms at $URL but that URL doesn't work." They told me the correct URL and I was able to sign it. (Real B2B contracts are pleasingly fair, when both companies are on even terms.)
I cannot agree with the Apple ToS because I do not want to give them the sole right to shut down my account. If a mobile phone is critical for daily life, then the government must be able to overrule Apple's whim or mistake, and do so quickly. If there were true competition, with many alternatives and the easy and guaranteed right to transfer to another provider, then I would also not have a problem.
This is nothing to do with religion, or distrust of technology, but of who has the right to control my daily life. I trust the government of Sweden far more than I do the commercial interest of Google or Apple, who have demonstrated they are not eager participants in EU laws regarding privacy and monopoly.
Deeper problem: The average Western adult does not have the capacity
to agree to most legal instruments (EULAs. contracts) used around
digital technology today.
I include myself as a computer scientist who even read a bit of law at
university and has helped draft and analyse contracts. No "reasonable
person" is expected to read them. Tacit and coerced "agreement" to
patently egregious terms is already normalised, and this makes a
complete mockery of law in our culture.
At some point, if we want to rescue "the law" we must change the way
people relate to technology legally.
Oh, I totally agree! When I started consulting in the 1990s I got a NoLo Press book which clearly and helpfully explained contract terms for computer consulting. I've since had a couple of decades of reading contracts to do consulting work. My knowledge does not go outside that domain, but it's still fun to read things like how the storage unit we rented prohibits keeping farm animals in it.
By the way, HUGE shout out to the OmniGroup, who have the absolute best commercial+proprietary license agreement I've ever read. They even allow some reverse engineering, just not to avoid the licensing system. That strongly influenced my own proprietary license to allow the same.
When I have these discussion with the government and political parties, I will be asking if the high school curriculum is being updated to include more training in reading ToS, and to ask if it's really reasonable to be personally bound to terms that no one reads.
Personally I think there needs to be the equivalent of the Uniform Commercial Code, though to harmonize, standardize, and regulate app service ToS. But that's a wild idea that I cannot pursue, only wonder about.
All I can focus on is that we should not require the permission of Apple or Google to be a citizen living a simple life in Sweden.
I agree we should respect secular ethical choices with the same protections as religious ones, but this is currently an aspirational goal in the US. For now to get acceptance and strong legal protection of ethical choices we sort of have to wrap them in a religious shroud since that is the framework the state has to deal with protecting such choices. The issue with this is that your choices might not align perfectly with the options you have and people will say it’s not a real religion if you are the only practitioner. Maybe a workaround would be to take a dead christian denomination and use that? Other religions wouldn’t get easy acceptance here.
Wondering what if anything you thought of that story of
the woman who claimed a religious objection to using
Microsoft?
(Perhaps you can read my article and follow the links to the original
story... I also wonder if this would fly in Britain and think about
talking to church ministers about it. I deeply and sincerely cannot
bring myself to enrich these crooked bastards, but I feel
uncomfortable "cloaking" that in religion even though it may inform my
ethics. hope that makes sense)
I used to sit and stare at the walls in offices daydreaming about a better way. I would stare down at the green space around the office building and imagine small single room office cabins, where everyone had light, privacy, control over the local environment. I thought if it could be made to work this would be the ideal layout for engineering/design/whatever creative work. Funny thing, over a decade later I found out I just described working from home.
there’s a joke in poor taste to be made here about laborers in…
you know what, never mind. let’s just get to the point.
for someone with this kind of money, bringing people from far enough away, geographically, culturally, and economically, would be a viable means of isolating them, and even silencing them.
Totally. The entire country would be a midsize state in the US.
Thinking about it I’m not totally sure so I looked up Norway’s size and population density, which seems to most closely match Kansas (37/mi^2 vs 35.9 for KS) and the land area of KS is a bit less than half, so it seems two kansases is a decent approximation for Norway, ignoring the coast/shape, just for a sense of scale. Of course Norway has a 1.5T fund and maybe they spend more? Figuring the per capita budget for both they are pretty close, so apart from cultural and topographical differences this seems like a pretty close fit.
Yeah, that’s what I meant by topographical differences, and my numbers for spending came from actual spending, as disbursed from the fund.
I’m just looking for a better yardstick, and I have experienced Kansas firsthand. Lots of comments about the relative sizes of countries and I was curious what some of the basic numbers looked like.
This is not a problem if you are still making a profit and not an obvious tax shelter. After all, how would the IRS know which business expenses are intended to make a profit vs investments that didn’t pan out? There is obviously room for abuse there but it is for company ownership to deal with not the government.
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