SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the einstein-dismisses-india-scientists dept.
BBC:
Some academics at the annual Indian Science Congress dismissed the findings of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.
Hindu mythology and religion-based theories have increasingly become part of the Indian Science Congress agenda.
But experts said remarks at this year's summit were especially ludicrous.
[...] The head of a southern Indian university cited an old Hindu text as proof that stem cell research was discovered in India thousands of years ago.
G Nageshwar Rao, vice chancellor of Andhra University, also said a demon king from the Hindu religious epic, Ramayana, had 24 types of aircraft and a network of landing strips in modern day Sri Lanka.
Another scientist from a university in the southern state of Tamil Nadu told conference attendees that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were both wrong and that gravitational waves should be renamed "Narendra Modi Waves" [Narendra Modi is the current Prime Minister of India].
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 09 2019, @06:56PM (4 children)
Because you're claiming Dark Matter has been discovered, while simultaneously admitting that there's not nearly enough of it to explain anything. AKA it hasn't been discovered.
The problem is "Dark Matter" isn't just code for "matter we haven't yet discovered", it's code for "matter that must exist to make the theory work". We know pretty exactly how much must exist for the theory to work, and while we have been looking hard, and have found some matter we hadn't previously accounted for, everything we've actually found combined is orders of magnitude too small to fill the "Dark Matter" hole - therefore it is NOT Dark Matter, it's just a slight increase in our estimates of the amount of normal matter in the universe. ~85% of the necessary mass of the universe is still unaccounted for.
There is still some potential for undiscovered MACHOs, but the range of sizes they could exist at without having been detected yet has become extremely narrow, and they're looking increasingly implausible as a DM candidate. Most of the other candidates have similarly shrunk their potential detection space to a tiny fraction of what it was once believed to be. And that's a big problem for plausability - for example, countless MACHOs across a wide range of sizes was plausible - but that they'd all end up being within the narrow range of sizes that we wouldn't have detected yet? How do you explain that the overwhelming majority of matter of the universe ended up clumping into undiscovered objects of roughly the same size, while all the mass we *can* see is distributed in size across many orders of magnitude?
And that's before we even start considering the necessity of Dark Energy as well.
Now, by all means we should keep looking, but after a half-century of fruitless searching we should also start seriously considering the possibility that while Relativity was a huge improvement in accuracy over Newtonian gravitation, it's still a fundamentally flawed and incomplete theory.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 10 2019, @12:21AM (3 children)
Except of course, it has been discovered contrary to your second assertion. Not nearly enough != doesn't exist.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @12:59AM (2 children)
That's not how it works. There's a huge amount of missing matter - that's Dark Matter. Increasing the estimates of the amount of normal matter so that the amount of Dark Matter needed is slightly reduced isn't "finding Dark Matter" - that would mean that the imbalance has been solved. All you've done is revise the estimates of its size.
If you handed me a million dollars for a moment, and I lost it, and then said "Hey, look, I've found your missing millions, there's $1.35 in change in the couch!", you would reasonably assume that I'm either an idiot, or a thief that thinks that you're an idiot. The million is still missing, the $1.35 is basically unrelated, and no reasonable person would think that the mystery had been even slightly solved.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:00AM (1 child)
It's reality. The only uncertainty is whether the gap can be made up.
Neutrinos and photons never will be normal matter. And MACHOs are a consequence of high mass and low surface area, which gives its usually baryonic matter (though black holes are a more exotic possibility) an unusually low visibility.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @03:21AM
> The only uncertainty is whether the gap can be made up.
Exactly. And until we have concrete evidence of the presence of something in sufficient quantities that it *can* fill the gap (or at least a large part of it) all we're doing is speculating and dithering with rounding errors, and Dark Matter remains undiscovered.