SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:59AM (1 child)
Given the crappy writeup in The Conversation, forgive most here of pooh-poohing it as a bunch of mental masturbation.
I looked at the paper. Basically they look at spirals, identify something that can be expressed as A + iB (just like E&M!), and go out of their way to construct physical meaning around them. Basically, look at a system with a spiral, muck around with it until you find some properties that you can fill out their Table 1 with. It struck me more along the lines of the ancient practice of building constructs around such things as the Platonic solids, or conic sections, or some other attempt to assume the perfection of a system, and see how you can build up a description of the universe around it, except with a hell of a lot of 1990's-era information theory buzzwords and name droppings. This looked to me a lot like those writings showing the ubiquity of the Golden Ratio EVERYWHERE, and all the physical reasons for it.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:49PM
Also consider this statement from TFA, in reference to an image of a highly structured dual spiral galaxy:
“The stars in the galaxy are simply choreographed by an entropic force to line up into a pair of such spirals to maximise entropy.
I know entropy can be a slippery concept, but these guys are saying that all that structure somehow represents maximum entropy? Can anyone explain that?