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The 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler was the first to muse about the structure of snowflakes. Why are they so symmetrical? How does one side know how long the opposite side has grown? Kepler thought it was all down to what we would now call a "morphogenic field" – that things want to have the form they have. Science has since discounted this idea. But the question of why snowflakes and similar structures are so symmetrical is nevertheless not entirely understood.
Modern science shows just how fundamental the question is: look at all the spiral galaxies out there. They can be half a million light years across, but they still preserve their symmetry. How? In our new study, published in Scientific Reports, we present an explanation.
We have shown that information and "entropy" – a measure of the disorder of a system – are linked together ("info-entropy") in a way exactly analogous to electric and magnetic fields ("electromagnetism"). Electric currents produce magnetic fields, while changing magnetic fields produce electric currents. Information and entropy influence each other in the same way.
[...] This means that we don't actually need dark matter after all. According to our model, the galactic entropy gives rise to such a large quantity of additional energy that it modifies the observed dynamics of the galaxy – making stars at the edge move faster than expected. This is exactly what dark matter was meant to explain. The energy isn't directly observable as mass, but its presence is certainly supported by the astronomical observations – explaining why dark matter searches have so far found nothing.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday August 10 2019, @09:07PM
What I find suspicious is the appeal to antiquated authority, in this case, Kepler. Sure, Kepler was a great scientist. But scientists from 4 centuries ago got an awful lot wrong. And they just plain did not have the knowledge and discoveries we do today. No periodic table of the elements, no notion of biological evolution, or plate tectonics, e=mc^2, Set Theory, Incompleteness, and of course, Information Theory. Benjamin Franklin had not yet discovered electricity, and accurate time keeping was not possible with small, portable devices. Even pendulum clocks weren't available until the 1650s. No Calculus either. Kepler died before Newton was born.
Heck, there were still plenty of profoundly wrong ideas circulating in the 19th century. Like, how about the idea of calorie, a sort of "energy fluid" that contains and transmits heat? Why would Jules Verne think that an air balloon could take a person all the way to the moon? Some really thought that the Earth's atmosphere might extend that far. No one knew about radioactivity, and when it was discovered, it took some time for people to understand the dangers.