In the depth of pandemic lockdown, after my roommate moved out to return closer to family, I was in my house alone for a month straight. One day I hear the tea kettle whistling on the stove.
It was the middle of summer, I hadn’t made tea in weeks. Maybe I bumped the stove control? But there shouldn’t have been any water in the kettle. And I hadn’t been in my kitchen for over an hour and it wouldn’t have taken that long for the water to boil had I put it on and just forgotten about it somehow. I keep my doors locked.
Idk, the only thing I can think of is the isolation really got to me that day, I put the kettle on and completely forgot I had done it five minutes later.
Was there any water actually in it or did you not check?
Maybe tinnitus or tv?
Wtf is dark matter. There’s something out there that makes gravity not work the way we expect on a very large scale, and “dark matter” is a theoretical substance that makes the math work out properly. But the fact that such a huge portion of the galaxy’s mass is this hypothetical, undetectable thing makes it seem very hand wavy. The last experiment to try to detect dark matter that I’m aware of concluded with “we successfully didn’t detect anything” 😞 having to deal with dark matter feels like trying to study atoms before the discovery of the neutron. I hope we figure this out in my lifetime.
Dark matter might not even exist, all we know is that gravity-based predictions break down after a certain point. Dark matter is the just the most popular proposed solution where you essentially just add extra undetectable mass until it works. The distant second is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) or some variation of it, which is where you try to tweak the theories to fit observations instead. It has the same problem as dark matter where we keep coming up with better experiments which always fail to find anything.
There’s a similar problem at the opposite end of the scale spectrum too; quantum mechanics doesn’t play nice with our current understanding of gravity leading to the search for the “theory of everything”. This is why I personally lean towards the idea that it’s our theories that are wrong and not an undetectable mass, but this isn’t my field so my opinion isn’t worth much (especially since a majority actually working in the field lean towards dark matter as far as I can tell).
So in other words, the big equation of gravity gives us a formula on one side, and the solution + x on the other, and we have to solve for x (dark matter) but we don’t know how to do it yet
I think I was listening to the unexplainable podcast and they were suggesting that gravity may work differently at smaller scale. Like the nooks and crannies may have different dimensional properties at the atomic or subatomic level. I dunno if I explained that right but it definitely got me curious. Like, we observe gravity as it effects large quantities of mass so, like temperature, it’s really just an average of all the different factors at play.
We know something is out there; galaxies are rotating far too quickly for our understanding of gravity to be correct. This is based on the observable matter.
For the galaxies to be rotating at the speeds we observe, we need approx 5 times the matter we see. So it is not like we have missed 10 - 20% of the matter that interacts with electromagnetic radiation, we would have had to have missed an extra 500%
As someone else pointed out, MOND is the next most promising candidate, but it has major issues even explaining what we see. Which is why it hasn’t received widespread acceptance.
I don’t have an answer; I have a few ideas. It maybe that something MOND adjacent is the answer; i.e. on the largest scales spacetime “relaxes” more when there is nothing pulling on it. So near galaxies and clusters spacetime is under more stress, this stress could equate to spacetime curving more on galaxy sized scales. But on the small scales we work on the extra stress will be almost invisible.
But as for us figuring out what “dark” matter is in your lifetime, unless you are already in your 80’s; I think there is a very good chance. The only thing we know for sure about dark matter, is that it interacts with gravity (spacetime). We are building some pretty epic gravitational wave detectors, bringing the detection threshold lower.
How does the Universe expand? Isn’t the Universe the container space of all that which exists, where does it expand to?
Why is there even an edge? I’m already mortal, why does my spacetime need hard limits too?? It’s just cosmic baloney man.
There is no edge. Just the farthest back in time we can see because of how long light takes to reach us. It’s constantly expanding not because it doesn’t exist but because we can see more of the light.
I suspect we don’t know as much as we think we do about the way the universe works. Once we figure out the missing info, it will unlock a lot more than just the forces at play.
Tunguska Event:
What’s the mystery with this one? It’s a very interesting event, but isn’t it generally pretty well understood?
Generally considered a meteor air burst, but there’s no crater and no evidence so it’s still very mysterious.
Why aren’t the basic laws of mathematics clean round numbers? Why are pi and e irrational? What secret is hidden down in the depths of these numbers?
It seems to me that the concept the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the radius is a finite value. It’s cool that it turns out to be an irrational number for us but I think that’s more a statement of how we handle math than some mystical thing.
There a infinitely more irrational numbers than rational numbers, so if one were to search for a special number like π or e, they are more likely to find them to be irrational than rational. It would be instance coincidence if those numbers would be something nice and even. And since almost everything in math is derived from either π or e and you can’t simply divide or multiply away irrationality (except with another irrational number) this irrationality tends to stick around. We essentialy have a π centric number system inside the decimal system, that’s why π gets its own symbol. No mathematician ever writes out π as a 3.1415…, so for all that matters the symbol π is nice and even.
