Can someone please provide an idiots guide to wtf dark matter is and why it’s so important that countries are spending millions trying to find/justify its existence. Is it just simply to prove a theory and to expand mans knowledge of the universe or is there some life changing point to all this?

guiness poo, innit.

yeah what’s the point of doing anything? What’s the point of physics, chemistry, biology, music, art, literature, exploration, sex,…. existence, for that matter?

So physicists whose mathematical model of the universe is miles off can kid themselves it’s right.

If it’s anything like dark chocolate, I don’t see the point either.

Disclaimer – I am NOT a physicist. Dark matter may not be related to dark chocolate.

exploration sex…. 😛

It’s the source of all depression and negative thoughts. If you know your enemy, you can kill it! The universe would be a lighter place to exist.

exploration sex

Do you have rings around Uranus?

Do you have rings around Uranus?

Thought it was called “Urectum” now?

****ing magnets, how do they work?

In all seriousness, the universe is primarily empty space. The atoms we are all made of are empty space, and yet everything has a far greater mass than the sum of it’s parts. Hence, the search for dark matter is the search for the missing mass of the universe, including us and everything around us.

That’s how I understand it. I could be wrong.

Thought it was called “Urectum” now?

Either way, I’m worried about those rings.

So physicists whose mathematical model of the universe is miles off can kid themselves it’s right.

Physicists don’t make numbers up to suit the models there trying to work. That’s an outrageous suggestion!

It did make me wonder when that scientist at CERN went on about 1 Nobel Prize for this, 1 Nobel Prize for that and 1 Nobel Prize for the other..

Does make you wonder if he’s pushing the frontier of science or just a glory hunter spending X Bahillions on experiments that are just theory anyway.

I do wonder.

No, really I do.

You could save £9Bn of that grant we send over there and resurface our roads, which I think is more worthy of a Nobel Prize.

So physicists whose mathematical model of the universe is miles off can kid themselves it’s right.

If you listen to most scientists, they can’t wait for some evidence to come along that blows all accepted theory out of the water. That is the point of science.

You could save £9Bn of that grant we send over there and resurface our roads, which I think is more worthy of a Nobel Prize.

And yet the world would be a slightly less interesting place IMO.

Hence, the search for dark matter is the search for the missing mass of the universe

So searching for something in nothing, sounds like the brainiacs of the world are take the pi55 to me. They must be sitting in their big underground colliding machines playing huge games of paintball and go carting

So searching for something in nothing,

That’s the point: It isn’t “nothing”.

It isn’t doing much else either.

It isn’t doing much else either.

How do you know?

Or is it?

A Q&A with Richard Panek, Author of The Four Percent Universe

Q: What is the “four percent universe”?

Panek: It’s the universe we’ve always known, the one that consists of everything we see: you, me, Earth, Sun, planets, stars, galaxies.

Q: What’s the other 96 percent?

Panek: The stuff we can’t see in any form whatsoever. At a loss for words, astronomers have given these missing ingredients the names “dark matter” and “dark energy.”

Q: What are dark matter and dark energy?

Panek: If you find out, book yourself a flight to Stockholm.

Q: So nobody knows? We’re not talking about “dark” as in black holes?

Panek: No. This is “dark” as in unknown for now and possibly forever.

Q: Well, then, what do astronomers mean by “dark matter”?

Panek: A mysterious substance that comprises about 23 percent of the universe.

Q: And dark energy?

Panek: Something even more mysterious that comprises about 73 percent of the universe.

Q: Okay, 73 and 23 add up to 96 percent, which does leave a four percent universe. But if we don’t know what dark matter and dark energy are, how do we even know they’re there?

Panek: In the 1970s, astronomers observed that the motions of galaxies, including our own Milky Way, seem to be violating the universal law of gravitation. They’re spinning way too fast to survive more than a single rotation, yet we know that our galaxy has gone through dozens of rotations in its billions of years of life. Galaxies are living fast but not dying young—a fact that makes sense only if we say that there’s more matter out there, gravitationally holding galaxies and even clusters of galaxies together, than we can see. Astronomers call this substance dark matter.

Q: And the mysterious dark energy?

Panek: In the 1990s, two independent teams of astronomers set out to discover the fate of the universe. They knew the universe was born in a big bang and has been expanding ever since. Now they wanted to know how much the mutual gravitation among all this matter—dark or otherwise—was affecting the expansion of the universe. Enough to slow it down so that the universe would eventually grind to a halt, then collapse on itself? Or just enough that the expansion would grind to a halt and stay there? In 1998 the two teams came to the same conclusion: the expansion of the universe isn’t slowing down at all. In fact, it’s speeding up. And whatever force is counteracting gravity is what they call dark energy.

Q: Do astronomers have any clue as to what dark matter and dark energy might be?

Panek: Yes and no. As for dark matter, they think it might be one of two subatomic particles, but physicists have been looking for these particles for thirty years and still haven’t found them. As for dark energy, they don’t even have an idea of what it might be. They’re still trying to figure out how it behaves. Does it change over space and time or not? If they can answer that question, then they can start to worry about what dark energy is.

Q: If astronomers themselves don’t know what dark matter and dark energy are, why should people believe that they exist?

Panek: Scientists like to quote a saying of Carl Sagan’s: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Many astronomers in the 1970s strongly resisted the idea of dark matter until the evidence became overwhelming. And even the two teams of astronomers that discovered the evidence for dark energy in 1998 resisted the idea until they could no longer come up with another explanation.

Q: Sounds like science is a pretty straightforward process of discovery and follow-up.

Panek: Straightforward, maybe. Pretty, no. As I show in The Four Percent Universe, the discoveries involved a lot of behind-the-scenes rivalries that sometimes turned ugly—rivalries that continue to this day. But in a way, these rivalries have been good for the science. When scientists who would like nothing more than to prove one another wrong wind up agreeing on a weird result, their peers can’t help but take the result seriously. Astronomers hate to say it—they’re as superstitious as anyone else, and they think they’ll jinx their chances—but there are Nobel Prizes at stake here.

Q: So this is real. Astronomers actually believe that 96 percent of the universe is “missing”?

Panek: Yes. They call it the ultimate Copernican revolution. Not only are we not at the center of the universe, we’re not even made of the same stuff as the vast majority of the universe.

Q: What now?

Panek: Nobody knows! And for astronomers, that’s the exciting part. Again and again, at conference after conference and in interview after interview, I’ve heard astronomers say that they can’t believe how fortunate they are to be scientists at this point in history. Four hundred years ago, Galileo turned a telescope to the night sky and discovered that there’s more out there than the five planets and couple of thousand stars that meet the eye. Now astronomers are saying that there’s more out there, period—whether it meets the eye or not. Lots more: the vast majority of the universe, in fact.

Q: If this revolution is such a big deal, why haven’t we heard about it?

Panek: Because it’s just beginning. Only in the past ten years have scientists reached a consensus that what we’ve always thought was the universe is really only four percent of it. Now they feel that figuring out the missing 96 percent is the most important problem in science.

Q: Will finding answers make our lives better? What’s the payoff?

Panek: On an immediate, day-to-day, price-of-milk level, nothing. But Galileo’s observations starting in 1609 completely changed the physics and philosophy of the next four hundred years in ways nobody could have anticipated. As I argue in The Four Percent Universe, this new revolution is going to have the same kind of effect on civilization. The fun is just beginning.

His book wasn’t a bad read

A typical physicist

It doesn’t matter. 🙂

All science assumes that it is correct until proven otherwise, one of the reasons I hate Dawkins and his ‘absolutes’.

It doesn’t matter.

All science assumes that it is correct until proven otherwise, one of the reasons I hate Dawkins and his ‘absolutes’

Well done you’ve got that almost 100% wrong which takes abit of skill even in this place

If we sat on our arses and didn’t explore, discover, experiment and muck about (scientific term there) people would die young of curable disease, life would be dull as we wouldn’t have worked out where the rest of the world was, we wouldn’t be in space so communications would be pants etc. We discover things without knowing the end result. These may take us to the stars and a horrible fate like in Alien/Prometheus or just make it easier to get from A to B and make it possible for a machine to make a good cup of tea.

All science assumes that it is correct until proven otherwise, one of the reasons I hate Dawkins and his ‘absolutes’.

And yet science is constantly looking to prove itself wrong. A proper scientist doesn’t talk in “absolutes”.

I hate Dawkins too, by the way.

All science assumes that it is correct until proven otherwise

A lot motivation is science is about getting recognised for making some big discovery (even if it means ignoring the evidence that disproves their theory). There is a lot of bad science out there, as well as a lot of bad scientists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy

A lot motivation is science is about getting recognised for making some big discovery (even if it means ignoring the evidence that disproves their theory).

Peer reviews don’t allow scientists to make discoveries if there is evidence suggesting otherwise. Remember the experiment that claimed to have broken the speed of light?

If it hasn’t passed a peer review then it is merely a theory, rather than a discovery.

Most of our universe is missing! They have no idea why galaxies aren’t ripped apart by their own spin and the obvious answer is there’s more matter there than meets the eye. Dark Matter! Or maybe Dark Magic holds them together.

Who knows what other fantastic properties it has!? Does research have value to society if it produces no technologies?

There is a lot of bad science out there, as well as a lot of bad scientists.

Peer reviews don’t allow scientists to make discoveries if there is evidence suggesting otherwise. Remember the experiment that claimed to have broken the speed of light?

If it hasn’t passed a peer review then it is merely a theory, rather than a discovery.

There are more lazy journalist’s out there than bad scientists willing to listen to any nut job with a theory especially if it’s a controversial one or to pick up on one point from a 100 page report and take it completely out of context. When it all blows up it’s either too late or easy to blame the scientist.

If it was just a matter of peer reviews being a check on bad science, then how did the MMR link to Autism paper ever see the light of day?

edit…it made it in to the Lancet, by the way, not just the News of the World.

If it hasn’t passed a peer review then it is merely a theory, rather than a discovery.

The word you are looking for is hypothesis 🙂

Once a hypothesis has stood up to scrutiny and peer review it can become a theory.

Evolution is a theory, as is gravity, but very well tested ones

Whilst I whole heartedly agree that exploration is beneficial to human kind, the cost/benefit of the search for dark matter seems hard to justify. Human space exploration has pretty much been canned for financial reasons. Most historical exploration has had an ultimate goal, but the search for dark matter has the scientists perplexed as to what usefulness it serves.

If it was just a matter of peer reviews being a check on bad science, then how did the MMR link to Autism paper ever see the light of day?

the lead author of the article, Andrew Wakefield, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest,[2][3] had manipulated evidence,[4] and had broken other ethical codes.

Peer review can be manipulated but publishing in a journal is the opportunity for others to then look at what you have done and review themselves. It’s not the final thing but papers love headlines…

The word you are looking for is hypothesis

Once a hypothesis has stood up to scrutiny and peer review it can become a theory.

Evolution is a theory, as is gravity, but very well tested ones

I was talking about a more advanced stage. A discovery still has to undergo a peer review, otherwise it remains theory, which may have progressed from being merely a hypothesis.

If it was just a matter of peer reviews being a check on bad science, then how did the MMR link to Autism paper ever see the light of day?

Becuase Wakefield faked his results.

Peer review isn’t perfect it relies to a fair degree on evidence being presented in good faith so the results and methodologies can be scrutinised. Out and out fabrications can actually be difficult to spot. But this isn’t science its basically fraud. Wakefield was struck off as a result.

The media picked up the story and ran with it for their own reasons

Peer review isn’t perfect it relies to a fair degree on evidence being presented in good faith so the results and methodologies can be scrutinised.

I do agree with you here, but I don’t really understand why it wasn’t scrutinised a bit more before it was published, given the impact/controversy that the paper was inevitably going to have(as for the media, why wouldn’t they pick up on a potential side effect of a new MMR jab? – what else would you expect?).

Wakefield was struck off as a result.

He got off easy IMO.

(as for the media, why wouldn’t they pick up on a potential side effect of a new MMR jab? – what else would you expect?).

Maybe report all the studies – the overwhelming majority of which – showed no link between MMR and autism, instead of just the scary one. The scary study had a sample size of twelve by the way.

It wasn’t a new vaccine either it was introduced in the early nineties and is used in 90 countries. Only one of these countries had a significant scare and only one of these countries has a large Daily Mail readership too.

You might find this interesting:

Its entertaining and accessible but has a reasonable level of science behind it. I’m not sure he completely answers your question but he goes someway towards it.

{quote]Can someone please provide an idiots guide to wtf dark matter is and why it’s so important that countries are spending millions trying to find/justify its existence. Is it just simply to prove a theory and to expand mans knowledge of the universe or is there some life changing point to all this?[/quote] people would probably have said that about understanding sub atomic particles and atomic structure – things which have directly and indirectly given us computers, helped us design medicines, nuclear power (which whether you agree with it or not is a massive achievement considering our knowledge 100 yrs ago), lasers, even stainless steel etc…

I dare say some people said ‘ooh they’ve discovered a spirally molecule, big deal’ when watson and crick worked out the structure of DNA. Whenever we discover one thing it just leads to more questions…