In the blog of this week, I decided to change a little bit the topic, and to focus on one of the darkest and more secret substances in our universe. Obviously, this post is not about the darkest secrets of Dumbledore or Grindelwald, or anything related to them (apologies… but I had to make that joke; I saw the movie a few weeks ago). It is all about physics and … dark matter (and thus not on wizardry).
Dark matter is one of the greatest motivation for the existence of a theory beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, and it is therefore searched for… well… mostly everywhere. To mention some examples (for crispy details, please see here), cosmic rays are deeply probed with satellites; direct detection experiments patiently wait to monitor some dark matter particle playing some snooker with an atomic nuclei; and particle colliders are trying to directly produce dark matter particles in high-energy collisions.
In the present post, I focus on the latter option, and in particular on the best ways to model dark matter production at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (the LHC). As usual, those pushed for time or not ready to get a full shot of physics can grab the essence of this blog by finishing to read the present section, before jumping directly to the post’s summary. For the others, please grab a pizza (it was Bitcoin Pizza Day recently) and let’s move on with (hopefully) exciting dark news!
So, what does ‘modelling dark matter production at the LHC’ mean? This is not about the ways dark matter is searched for at the LHC, but more about how dark matter signals should be modelled. This is important to make sure we come up with the best possible strategy to look for dark matter in LHC data, and to compare data with theory for conclusive statements.
In practice, we don’t know what dark matter is. Particle physicists therefore came up with hundreds of theories, models and interesting setups. However, in terms of LHC signals, it is better to run away (hundreds of models to consider is just too scary), and consider minimal models instead. In a minimal model, we minimally modify the Standard Model to get a theoretical framework that could accommodate a dark matter particle which can be produced at the LHC (and nothing else).
Minimality has a huge advantage over anything else: it is minimal (I am sure you didn’t guess that)! This means that with a very limited number of free parameters, we can describe LHC dark matter signals and design very good strategies to find them. In a second step, we can relate minimal models to full theories. The interesting point is that one single minimal model has a connection with many complete models (one stone, many birds).
[Credits: Original image by ESA/NASA (CC BY 4.0)]
However, it has been recently pointed out by several groups of researchers that those models may be in fact over-simplified… A big disadvantage of minimal models is therefore… that they are minimal! They are too far from real models of dark matter, and some useful handles on signals could be missed because of that. Minimality is thus both good and bad at the same time…
This blog discusses one of my recent research works in which collaborators and I focused on this minimal/non-minimality issue. In our scientific article, we have shown that in spite of all the complications arising from following a non-minimal path, there is a systematic strategy that could be considered. The key point is to pick a modelling lying not too far from minimality, but exhibiting next-to-minimal features. This strategy then leads to search options non present in minimal models, and that can be exploited in dark matter searches.
In the rest of this blog, I first summarise in a few lines what dark matter is, why physicists believe it is interesting and how we search for it at particle colliders. Next I move on with the modelling of dark matter signal, minimally and non-minimally, and I finally discuss some of the results that I found together with my collaborators.
Why dark matter at all?
As said above, dark matter is everywhere. But as a matter of fact this is not a fresh news from yesterday. The core idea is actually almost 100 years old. In the 1930s, a Swiss physicist named Zwicky studied how stars rotated inside galaxies. He verified whether this was in agreement with Newton’s gravity and everything that was visible in the sky.
The answer was quite surprising, and the so-called galaxy rotation curves demonstrated that stars were rotating too fast. Their motion could however be explained by theory after assuming the presence of some invisible matter. This invisible matter was thus only noticeable through its gravitational effects, and allowed to restore agreement between theory and data for the motion of stars in galaxies. Dark matter was born. A couple of decades later, this possibility was more deeply confirmed by Rubin.
The universe has thus dark secrets! And these secrets are gravitationally interacting! This consisted only of the first of many (indirect) signs pointing to the possible existence of dark matter.
[Credits: Pablo Carlos Budassi (CC BY-SA 3.0)]
Let’s now move on with a second convincing sign that dark matter could be there.
From the 1960s to today, we got a better and better understanding of something called the cosmic microwave background. In standard cosmology, atoms formed 380,000 after the Big Bang. This means that at this exact moment, the universe went from a soup of electrically-charged particles to a soup of neutral atoms.
This has a very important consequence for electromagnetic radiation. As the latter interacts with anything electrically charged, it could suddenly travel the universe across long distances (no more charged beasts to trip it up). This radiation (called the cosmic microwave background) is thus mostly still there today.
The important point is that it carries an imprint of how the universe was in 380,000 A.B. (after Big Bang). Precision cosmology tells us that this imprint is crystal dark: we need dark matter.
Te story is however not finished. There are additional signs that dark matter exists (although indirect, they are quite convincing). For instance (I quote a last one and then I move on), we can try to explain the formation of the large structures in the universe (galaxies, clusters and super-clusters of galaxies). The conclusions of any simulation that we may want to run are very dark, once again. Without dark matter, gravity is not powerful enough to get where we are today.
Therefore, the universe as it is today would not result from the big bang without dark matter. Crazy, isn’t it? We thus know that dark matter could exist through numerous indirect evidence. However, we have no idea about what dark matter is (for that reason, no-dark-matter alternatives are still considered). Whereas I like pink unicorns, hundreds of other ideas are possible. And this is where it becomes tricky. How to account for all those possibilities in searches for dark matter?
Whereas there are several ways to look for dark matter, I focus in the following on dark matter at the LHC.
[Credits: CERN]
Dark matter at particle colliders
In the following, we assume that there exists a dark matter particle, and that this particle interacts with the Standard Model of particle physics. In this case, dark matter can be produced in high-energy collisions. Otherwise, life at particle colliders won’t be very dark, and will thus be less interesting.
We know since the time of Einstein that mass and energy are two incarnations of the same thing (more precisely, mass is just one form of energy among others). Therefore, we can produce massive particles (like dark matter particles) in a highly energetic collision.
In such a collision, we accelerate particles to incredibly high speeds, so that their resulting kinetic energy can be converted into mass energy. This simple mechanism opens the door to producing new particles never observed so far. Whereas energy is always conserved in any physical process (that’s an incontrovertible golden rule), energy can always be converted from one form to another. In other words, we can produce massive dark matter particles at colliders through the conversion of kinetic energy into mass.
But what is the signature of a dark matter signal? This is illustrated both in the figure below and in the figure above.
[Credits: CERN]
The detection of dark matter relies on energy and momentum conservation. The same golden rule as that mentioned above pleads again guilty. Additionally, we need to account for the fact that dark matter is super-weakly interacting. This means that once produced, dark matter stealthily escapes any particle detector without leaving any track in it. It is thus not trivial to ’see it’. In other words, the detection of dark matter is equivalent to seeing something invisible.
Whereas this does not sound easy, energy conservation saves us. Let’s explain this on the example of the above figure.
Before the collision, the sum of all energies and momenta are all located along the collision axis (i.e. along the beams). In the initial state of the collision, there is nothing except for the beams that are aiming at each other. In particular, there is nothing in the transverse plane (i.e. there is no particle moving transversely to the beams).
We however observe phenomena in the plane transverse to the beams after the collision. The main reason is that we don’t want to have the colliding beams in the way. Therefore, the sum of the energies and of the momenta in the transverse plane must be zero after the collision, exactly like before the collision. Energy and momentum are conserved, after all!
In the above figure, the transverse energy deposits are shown in red and blue, and we see particle tracks as green lines. Doing the calculation, we notice that something is missing for energy and momentum conservation to work. It is represented by the red arrow in the lower part of the figure. This arrow is hence associated with some particles leaving the detector invisibly, and thus possibly dark matter (or some neutrinos of the Standard Model).
This brings us to the definition of a dark matter signal at particle colliders: we need some large amount of missing transverse energy and a bunch of visible particles. The visible stuff is needed for the detector to trigger and record the picture of the collision. I now move on with the next question: how to model those signals?
[Credits: CERN]
Minimal and next-to-minimal-minimal dark matter
As we don’t know what dark matter is, there are gazillions of models to consider. Moreover, each model comes with many free parameters that can vary freely. This leads us to a real problem: resources. We don’t have enough resources to take care of simulating all those models and test them against data individually. For that reason, physicists designed simplified (or minimal) models that should reproduce the collider phenomena associated with many dark matter models at once.
Simplified models are built in a very simple way.
- We start from the Standard Model and keep it as such.
- We include a dark matter particle and make it stable thanks to some symmetry (otherwise, if dark matter is unstable then there won’t be dark matter anymore in our universe).
- We connect the dark matter particle to the Standard Model via a mediator relating them.
That’s all. This minimal construction leads to a theoretical framework containing two new particles and their limited set of interactions (i.e. the connection between dark matter, the mediator and the Standard Model).
The most considered specific case is when the Standard Model particle to which dark matter is connected is a quark. In this case, the model predicts a mono-jet signal of dark matter. This means that dark matter is mostly produced in association with a jet of strongly-interacting particles (see here for more information on what those jets are).
The next step is then to reinterpret the experimental results in the framework of any of the numerous complete models of dark matter.
However, simplified models suffer from one big problem: they may not be sensitive to all signals of dark matter that could be encompassed in a complete model. In addition, they also feature a bunch of theoretical inconsistencies due to the fact that they are incomplete by definition.
[Credits: NASA/ESA (CC BY 2.0)]
With my collaborators, we have tried to see what could be done to solve that problem. We investigated an example. We choose a model in which dark matter connects to the Standard Model via a scalar particle, i.e. a particle without spin like the Higgs boson. In a second step, we tried to clear a bit of the inconsistencies of the chosen simplified model. I won’t enter into details, but feel free to ask in the comment section of this blog.
The conclusion is that this led us to a next-to-minimal model in which several mediators were present, with a small set of interactions with the Standard Model. Such a modification has been found to be sufficient to better mimic the entire dark side of complete models. For what concerns the LHC, it turned out that on top of the mono-jet signal that was already predicted in the minimal case, two extra collider signals arose, like in complete models in which it is very rare that there is only a single dark matter signal.
In the figure below, I show an example in which all these new handles on dark matter speak with each other.
[Credits: arXiv:2110.15391]
In this illustration of the phenomenology relevant for next-to-minimal models, we vary the mass of the lightest of the mediators (that’s the X-axis) and fix the mass of all other particles (for the sake of the example). The coupling of this lightest mediator to the Standard Model is shown on the Y-axis.
First of all, we can find below the flashy green curve all scenarios in which we don’t have too much dark matter in the universe (so that they are allowed). In addition, the dark green region is that in which we don’t have too much dark matter contributions to cosmic rays, relative to observations. Those dark green points are thus those we should test as much as possible as very motivated by cosmology.
Second, the red, blue and dark contours are the points excluded by the LHC. The grey region is excluded by standard mono-jet searches (like in the minimal model). In red, we have constraints coming from the production of dark matter with a Higgs boson (i.e. a mono-Higgs probe). Finally the blue region is excluded by constraints coming from the production of dark matter with a pair of top quarks.
We can observe a complementarity between the various sets of constraints: they target different parts of the figure. Moreover, some of the interesting scenarios (the dark green points) are already reachable at the LHC with current data (using mono-Higgs probes). This means that with future data, those next-to-minimal models will become more and more covered, which will yield more hints on what dark matter could be and could not be.
Summary: complementary non-minimal dark matter signals at the LHC
This new blog is about dark matter and how to model associated signals at particle colliders like the LHC at CERN.
Dark matter is very motivated by various cosmological observations, and it is thus actively searched for. One exemple concerns dark matter searches at the LHC. Usually, the latter are interpreted in the framework of minimal simplified models that are constructed to represent many full models of dark matter at once. This follows the ‘one stone many birds’ picture.
However, while very powerful, minimal models have been found to be problematic in the sense that they do not capture all possible handles on dark matter (from the perspective of the variety of handles that arise from a complete model). In addition, simplified models are often inconsistent theoretically.
This is the problem which I investigated recently with a few collaborators. We demonstrated that curing the theoretical issues inherent to a given set of simplified models for dark matter naturally leads to a next-to-minimal model that offers a better framework to connect with many complete models for dark matter.
We have shown that in such a next-minimal framework, several LHC signals collaborate with each other and help us to probe dark matter better, which provide thus better handles in the light of a future detection. This provides hence a new pathway for studying dark matter at colliders.
I believe it is time to stop writing for today. I am available for comments, questions and remarks, as usual. Please do not hesitate to ask anything about this blog, or about particle physics and cosmology in general.
If you are in addition interested in a citizen science project on Hive, feel free to check out this blog and the #citizenscience tag. I will release the answer to the last assignments by the end of the week.
The first two "proofs" you mentioned as a reason to assume the concept of dark matter are not really proofs. They are just a nice way to explain otherwise flawed equations. What if gravity is just different than we believe, but without the presence of otherwise never observed additional matter? Also I am aware that dark matter "explains" why the cosmos expands not linear, but increases it´s expansion rate. Again no proof in my opinion.
Other than that an exceptionally great article!
I agree. They consist of indirect evidence, like any evidence for dark matter that we have today. We still miss the direct proof (that is what we search so hard since many years). What I like with dark matter is that a single concept can explain many different problems. There is no other alternative that does this similarly well. However, until we find out, alternatives must be considered too, even if they do not look as good.
This option is not ruled out. In terms of significance, it does not work as well as dark matter (but I insist, it is not excluded too). At the end, it is just my interests that lie on dark matter. You can find other physicists with other interests working on modified gravity theories.
I guess you meant here dark energy (which I didn't discuss at all). We know even less on this one than for dark matter, and proofs are missing. So yes, you are correct. We have no clue what it is.
Yeah id never trust any of todays "science" untill they do what we on hive do and have witnesses and block producers and snart contracts and maybe use something like lab pro + ledger nano company partnership.... french should love that... telos sciebce hive science .... ALL EXPERIMENTS PUBLIC AND PROVABLE ON CHAIN ALL DATA POSTED DIRECTLY FROM LAB EQUIPMENT ON CHAIN
IMAGINE a sort of un weapons inspector system for science where RANDOM @dan hierarchial science governenence inspectors from ecen russia north korea china have to come inspect your lab and theyll be suprr rigorous ... and also scientists from opposing rebel groups... people/nations who hate each other sho be forced to check each others science. Really proving it on chain.... all experiments should be on a blockchain
This would solve all the problems with vaccine and climate science and etc etc and 6g starlink decentralized observatories to disprove flat earth lol Theyre soooooo scared to even try this because it will just cost too much money and altho we may prove earth is still round lol we may prove most vaccines are dangerous now (not that they alqays were) and that clinate science is a scam. Or it will prove its allll real yeah sure. Then prove it with a blockchain
Cern data should be checked by other particle accelerators. They should have built like 2 or 3 of them in multiplr countries and they can all verify each others work
But noooooo we cant ever use blockchain dpos for science .... only for social media and banking but not science or healthcare lol
I should be able to profit off my scans snd xrays and health data and share it on a dpos network that gamifies cyber nurses to find problems around the world like a human evangelion cyber homonculi on chain. Fix me followers! Fix me so that i may rule over you better with a body checked daily by thousands of people around the world and a home MRI /ULTRASOUND/CAT scan med bed in my bathroom ....
And blockchain integrated open ai scanning starlink connected decentralized hive telescopes on my roof mining astro data
Actually, many are actually public already, open access (more than 90% of all our publications), open source, etc.. But this is easy to say for particle physics and high-energy physics where no big money is in the game (unlike in pharma, to quote a single example).
However, at some point we need to trust peer review. We need an expert to correctly assess state of the art studies, i.e. someone who studied a given field for years and even decades. If their reports are online, it is even better (and it is the case in at least one journal I know).
From now, I will only answer what I can (because this is related to what I know precisely).
This would be a dream. However, we don't have funding to do that. This is the only reason why we only have only one running collider for now. To alleviate that problem, we have several independent collaborations taking data independently, through different detectors located at different parts of the accelerator. That's the only way we found to double check everything we do (a double check is always in order!). Moreover, all past results (thus independent) are also accounted for in any analysis. We need coherent results.
Blockchains cannot be used for everything. Depending on the goal, there are better solutions. For instance, If you aim to develop codes to analyse data, an option like github/gitlab is better. For my citizen science project, storing the results of simulation results on chain won't be an option (I can show you what they look like. I hope this could convince you we don't want to store thousands of files like that on chain (moreover, many format are not text-based, and thus impossible to push).
Blockchains are useful, but not for everything.
no, blockchain CAN be used for everything. youll see
and thats what we will use science hive for, thats what im saying
I agree that we will disagree on this :)
Blockchains are great, but depending on the problem we try to solve, they may not be the most appropriate tool. For instance, software development is better managed through a Git-like option (by the way, Hive is developed on GitLab).
yes and you dont see github gitlab software will be all hive based in teh future? WHy wouldnt it be? every action a user makes HAS to be on chain for security purposes ... its almost a crime that its not already
Github already had telos / eos logon wiuth https://tipit.io we proved it, i was using github as a wallet :D google image "tipit github ackza" LOL
In fact, I don't see really the "security" purpose here. Any action done is stored in the history. What would be the gain of a blockchain here?
PS: I have checked what tipit is. It has nothing to do with code development. I therefore do not see the connection.
no, we do, its called eosio and telos. you store them on amazon or whatever or local servers, and amazon can be replaced by telos Dstor.cloud its better than hive but based on dpos eosio which is based on steem so its related to hive
youll see
not everything is limited by hive
blockchains in future cheaper and easier than tyhe dinosaur storage ur talkin about
and yeah you need not just the data on chain but i said THE LAB EQUIPMENT should be custom made by ledger and lab pro :D
I do not know what telos or eosio are (I have no time to check out now). But please check what is the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. I do not think any other option would work to replace this.
I don't understand the above sentence. Do you mind clarifying?
imagine if all the lab equipment that collects data has hardware blockchain ledger chips so you cant tampor with it is what i mean
like UN weapons inspectors style
so science cant be faked
eos is the thing teh steem / hive creator @dan larimer made for smart contracts and telos is an eosio chain liek a sister fork sorta, but not a fork
telos very science friendly we could get science funded using telos grants and proposals instead of the federal government one day
ooooh whata revolutionary idea i know lol
As I said, blockchains are useful, but they cannot solve any problem. I still keep to my words. I do not see what is the advantage of a chain compared with other methods.
For many scientific experimental devices (this is the relevant part when data taking is at stake), dedicated (centralised) infrastructures are often more suitable. For instance, for the LHC, see here. If you take Virgo/Ligo (gravitational waves), data is released 1.5 years after being taken so that anyone can use it and check it (see here).
Those are two examples I have in mind. For anything else that is not particle-physics-related, I of course cannot tell.
PS: I updated my blog accordingly (just had to run away from work for family reasons, and didn't had the time to do it straight away).
Dark matter and entire universe are things that are very interesting to me since I was a kid. I find various information and studies quite pleasurable to read. I hope one day all the mechanisms behind these still unknown theories will be revealed and I sincerely hope to be alive that day!
I hope too, and that this day will be during my lifetime :)
Occam's razor is always a pro but, as Einstein said, 'make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler'.
Too simple is indeed not always good, indeed. We may risk loosing a bunch of useful and important content in the process (reducing climate change to a single curve describing an average temperature is a good example of what we should not have done).
I really liked your ability for intrepretation and awareness of communication, understanding beyond what the first guess might be.
Not much else to say. =) nice to meet you via Twitter... your name captivated my curiosity immediately!
Teaching for how long in France?
Thanks for passing by. I am indeed new to Twitter since a few weeks, and I try to build connections there, these being shared between Hive and scientists.
I got a job in France in 2008. This is thus now almost 15 years... That does not make me younger :p
Ahaha =) I am imagining that you have to deal with HPC (High Performance Computing) on a regular basis? If so, any big machines you play with lately? (I am assuming of course that LHC needs to crunch things outside of BOINC too).
Apologies for the slow answer. I am attending a conference that followed a four-day week-end (I was thus quite offline). However, I always reply :)
We indeed deal with HPC every day. In my case, I can deal with a small cluster (of about 1000 cores). There are advantages in being a theorist. However, for my experimental colleagues, they use the so-called Worldwide LHC Computing Grid that is way more powerful.
On the other hand, there are specific problems handled on specific machines. For instance, lattice QCD calculations (see here) lie at the forefront for what concerns HPC.
I know that they are a few BOINC projects related to LHC physics, but I must confess I never really dug into them. Therefore, I am totally helpless here. Sorry.
No worries, and thanks for the reply. Feels nice to find people that are involved with HPC for a change =)
In my case, it's an everyday thing. 😎 all around we have now surpassed 30k cores in aggregated core count between all the clusters on the same facility. A big mess to control =)
I don't recall if we have science related to the same area as LHC stuff... I know we had some astronomy observations projects users, running stuff, but I can't recall what exactly.
I thought the Computing Grid was the one supported by BOINC. But looking now at it, I can see it's a collaboration of institutions. Didn't recall about that, Nice... would be super cool to see LHC stuff reaching New Zealand for collaborations of computing resources if that is a place to happen... I need to talk with some people apparently. Let me know if you have any leads on something that would be interested in this part of the world. Work or non-work related.
What are you doing exactly (don't feel obliged to answer if you want to stay anonymous)? Are you managing a kind of HPC facility in New Zealand? (I now know you are based in New Zealand. ;) )
A facility with 30k core could be quite useful for heavy theoretical computations such as those related to the LHC studies I am involved in. In fact, the cluster I use is probably similar in order of magnitude (in terms of total amount of cores, although I am not allowed to use it entirely).
In fact I have checked and found this. It seems several institutions from New Zealand are part of the CMS collaboration. You can also check out this page. You can even found lists of names
If you are interested in the kind of calculations we do, maybe having a look at the #citizenscience tag could be a great starting point. I run a small citizen science project here on chain, and we will soon enter a heavy computation phase.
If something I am not anymore is that. =) I am just an engineer.
Let's put it, that I can be found =) But yeah, it's not news that I am in NZ. Not even that I know about HPC now how to read many languages or know about blockchain.
But I am Portuguese and I can read French! Also not classified =)
NDA's only for the future that will torment us all and its still inside our planet =)
I will quark things up when possible ... I will check. Thank you!
I have been meaning to read this post and comment, but life just be throwing me for a loop. Brilliant! I love this stuff. My 10 year old daughter wants to pick your brain 🤣 She said to me as we were talking about Space one day, "Mom, I think Space, you know the dark part, it's in the shape of a ball. It's not infinite. Outside of the darkness is a white light that goes on forever. To infinity and beyond!" I love this kid. She is a leader. Maybe she will be a physicist someday 🤓 Check out my recent post. https://peakd.com/hive-124452/@melyxaluna/ladies-of-hive-community-contest-84-birth-order-second-born-segunda-nacida
Thanks for passing by. Unfortunately, I will keep my brain and you will have to negotiate something else with your daughter... :) I would be very glad to see her becoming a physicist one day! We have room for many! ;)
Cheers!
Wow, this is some pretty incredible stuff that flew way over my head!
Ooh :/
I tried to simplify the story as much as possible. Please do not hesitate to come back to me if you want to try to understand and have questions.
Great Post!
!1UP
Thank you for the support week after week! :)
That is very interesting. You make a big investigation
Thanks for passing by!
Thanks for your contribution to the STEMsocial community. Feel free to join us on discord to get to know the rest of us!
Please consider delegating to the @stemsocial account (85% of the curation rewards are returned).
You may also include @stemsocial as a beneficiary of the rewards of this post to get a stronger support.
Wooow that graphic looks like kurgestaat very very nice. A generic science hive could really be fun for schools and we need hive in every school for homework and @telosnetwork proposals as the students final projects /essays as proposals .. u can also use hive proposals for asking for science funding
Has anyone done that yet? An experiment funded by hive proposals? Cuz thats what you all need . Imagine when people are like "holy fuck a blockchain funding decentralized science labs all with updoots"
I am not aware of anyone asking the DHF for funding research grants or positions. However, for this to happen we need to convince people that this could work and bring a lot of positivity for the chain. As a possible first step in that direction (although I definitely didn't think about any connection to the DHF and resource option) may be what I am doing on the #citizenscience tag. I don't remember whether you had checked this already.
Cheers!
PS: The logo has been made by @glass.wolf, who left us for quite a while now.
yeah imagine if we just used telos and hive proposal funds to replace the federal NIS funds!
hive x telos in UCLA ;)
Awesome, is very interest
Thanks for passing by!
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the person sharing the post on Twitter as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com.
Sorry for being frank, but the whole concept of dark matter/energy is a complete dead end in my humble opinion. Have you researched about the Plasma/Electric Universe? Their idea is that all of these concepts were created ad hoc to explain what gravity alone can't explain as it is essentially the only force that cosmologists use. It's definitely worth to step back for a bit and rethink the mainstream paradigm as this is so much more elegant (also occams razor!).
You can be frank. There is no problem with this. Everyone has the right to have their preference or opinion. Note however that science is not a matter of preference or opinion. it is a matter of facts: data, predictions, and conclusions.
There is one important point here: data has not excluded the dark matter hypothesis (and the standard model of cosmology in general), whereas it has excluded the electric universe one. There are many flaws in the electric universe setup (please check online, you can find many articles on the topic).
It is not a matter of being mainstream or not mainstream. The idea was interesting, but nature has chosen not to be like this.
The concept of dark matter has been created in an ad hoc way 100 years ago. However, today, there are many independent pieces of evidence that seem to point in the same direction. So this option seems today to be the right one.
In general, as long as a theory/model/idea has not been excluded by data, we must be pragmatic and consider it. That's how science works and progress is made. The rest (i.e. "do I prefer this or that option") is a matter of subjective taste.
What is important at the end of the day is that research is done for all (viable) options, to be sure not to miss anything. Modified gravity, for instance, is still very alive, even if data seems to favour the dark matter hypothesis. Note that on the other hand, data does not exclude modified gravity too. This is the reason why research is made on the two options.
thanks for the reply. You couldn't have known that I have a scientific background so it felt a bit strange that you were reminding/lecturing me about how science works. But of course it is always important, especially as scientists to bring this to our attention again.
We can't really expand too much about our arguments here in too great of a detail I guess as this would require several pages, so my only point I want to make it clear that statements such as
are simply false. It sets up a strawman which is not worth arguing if the person arguing against e.g. the EU theory is not even familiar with the basic concepts as well as their many experimentally tested ideas. I am not necessarily a proponent of this theory, I just see it as a viable alternative to a model that itself has been falsified by observational evidence.
While the standard model has had its moments, we must acknowledge that all models are simply placeholders for the next paradigmatic revolution (Thomas Kuhn's work here is compelling)
I agree with the fact that we are eagerly waiting for the next revolution. There are issues with the current standard paradigms, and those issues point to the fact that we only see the tip of the iceberg. For what lies under sea level, many things are possible. I just hope to see a few of them (even one of them) within my lifetime.
As a side note, I have never really dug into the EU setup by myself, mainly because my interests lie elsewhere (a single person cannot focus on everything). From what I have found after a quick search, there seem to be quite a bunch of problems with the EU. In particular it is not quantitative, cannot be used for predictions and thus cannot be falsified (it is thus not a theory strictly speaking). I have tried to find some information on how the EU is mathematically formulated, but I didn't manage, even on their website. That confirmed my initial findings and I didn't look further. This is also why I wrote what I wrote (which is probably not the best choice of words, I agree).
I understand where you are coming from (at least I think ;) It's a busy place out there! I am quite interested in this idea of paradigms and how we function inside of it and are often now willing to look beyond (e.g., the Copernican or Darwin revolutions which changed how we looked at the world). Now that science has become the main framework in which we see "truth" I think it's important to look at the "fringes" as well as this is where often the ideas for the next shift have come from (this is a major draw back to how institutional science currently works in my opinion, e.g. it is often too dismissive of new ideas). This is why I am so interested in the EU and have dedicated many years of looking into it. It is quite comprehensive, but it also has some short comings of course!
One paper you can see some math is with Donald E. Scotts paper about birkeland currents.
http://www.ptep-online.com/2015/PP-41-13.PDF
If you don't have a lot of time, just have a look at this one
Thanks! I have quickly checked out the paper (not much time left for anything today), and the equations look fine. Section 10 seems rather qualitative and I need to dig further to see the links with the EU setup. I mean, how to go from this paper to quantitative predictions in the EU. This is still very unclear to me. Let's see whether I will find the time later this week to investigate further.
Cheers!
You'll find more here:
https://www.electricuniverse.info/electric-universe-resources/
https://www.electricuniverse.info/peer-reviewed-papers/
On a general note: quantitative papers are lacking, but that is also because they don't have a lot of resources/researchers. Also, a big part of the EU is qualitative (historic mythology, Biology of life etc.) as it tries to develop a much more comprehensive picture/understanding of the universe. Much work is about laying down the building blocks so to speak on which more can be built/researched.
🤦
Lol someone hates you
Ur not science naterial boy
Hypothesis: hive needs a new better content moderation system with emojis and colors and visually show the votes on every post ... maybe peakd will do it ... but we also need a way to like have the "reason for flag" like "reason for mite" diaplay and that reason is ALSO upvoted and downvotes as a seperate ghost post
Conclusion: tough shit
Hi @lemouth,
My delayed response to another great blog.
I think if I were offered the opportunity to take physics now (an opportunity I passed on in high school) I would accept...but they'd have to leave the math out :))
You know what you are looking for, in advance. You limit the field of possibilities to increase the chance that you will encounter the particle you seek. Does it ever worry you that in defining your search you might be in a way undermining the legitimacy of the outcome? I guess not, because if you find the dark matter particle you will be able to present absolute proof about this very special 'missing link'.
Great, relatable writing style. Thank you, and have a great week. Until next time....be well.
Hello and apologies for the delayed reply to a delayed comment :)
As mentioned elsewhere, I spent a four-day offline week-end (we have a bunch of short vacation slots in May-June in France), followed by a conference to which I currently participate. This means very little on-chain time during the last few days.
Anyway, here I am again!
In fact, this is not 100% correct. The main point is that we don't know exactly what we are looking for. And this is where it starts to get complicated: we need to try to cover all possibilities we could think about.
As this task is impossible, we need to make sure the results of the searches will be re-usable in the future, just in case we may need to use the legacy of the past experiments to test models that could be proposed much later. I am working on this item for about 10 years now. Progress has been made, but we are still very far from full re-usability...
Cheers!
Congratulations @lemouth! Your post has been a top performer on the Hive blockchain and you have been rewarded with the following badges:
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPYou have received a 1UP from @luizeba!
@stem-curator, @vyb-curator, @pob-curator, @neoxag-curator, @pal-curatorAnd they will bring !PIZZA 🍕
Learn more about our delegation service to earn daily rewards. Join the family on Discord.
Congratulations @lemouth! You received a personal badge!
Wait until the end of Power Up Day to find out the size of your Power-Bee.
May the Hive Power be with you!
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:
Congratulations @lemouth! You received a personal badge!
Participate in the next Power Up Day and try to power-up more HIVE to get a bigger Power-Bee.
May the Hive Power be with you!
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
Check out the last post from @hivebuzz: