FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 4 hours ago
Listen, power to women, and Vera Rubin’s work was amazing and she deserves every praise.
But nobody has ever proven the existence of Dark Matter. What’s proven is that our current mathematical models do not accurately represent the universe due to the way things move and effects of gravity, under our current understanding, requiring a large amount of mass that we have not observed.
Does that make sense? It could be that our models or understandings are just wrong, or it could be that there is some magical unobservable matter, but we don’t know. We haven’t proven anything.
The reason I think this is important is because we keep throwing money at bigger and bigger dark matter detection chambers, and we keep operating on the possibly incorrect assumption of dark matter while we create new theories.
Okay, Sabine, whatever you say.
How would you go about proving the existence of regular matter?
A theory from a famous book I just read (not gonna say the title, not to spoil): dark matter is the matter that has collapsed into a smaller spatial dimension (2 or 1)
ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
This is actually the bit that Vera Rubin discovered. The summary of her discovery in the quote is the issue :)