(I am experimenting with a shorter, punchier, more polemical style for some posts, like this one. Not to replace the longer, more sober posts, but as an extra. Tell me what you think in the comments.)
If you care enough about any one field that matters, and go into it long enough, you eventually encounter the edge of the world, like that guy seeing behind the spheres in that old drawing, except in this case you realize the official narratives are islands of truth bordered by oceans of self-serving nonsense designed to give the appearance of knowledge in place of “we don’t really know and aren’t sure where to begin.”
I loved this piece. I will take anything I can get from you. Why does it need to be one or the other. I know that if you raise questions as you did here, if I stick around at some point you will make a stab at offering up solutions. Just keep throwing it all at us, we can take it!
The idea of 'Dark' matter/energy has always felt very fudgy to me as well. I get why it exists as a theory - it explains the one major flaw I'm aware of - and I don't think it's intrinsically bad, because for all we know we're similarly 'dark' to whatever exists in that strata. Or maybe there's multiple layers - maybe instead of a rough 5 / 25 / 70, its 5 / 5 / 5 / 5 / 5 / 5 / etc, and we have multiple overlapping 'universes' that interact gravitationally and no other way. Which would be mind blowing to think about.
So I understand the commenters saying that this is dismissive of expertise - but I also agree that the experts are so often incurious and unwilling to challenge existing paradigms that they deserve to have their noses tweaked a bit.
Not a fan of the post. You hint at what model you might prefer but don't endorse anything explicitly. There are, as I would guess you know better than me, alternative theories to dark matter (eg MOND); I was taught about MOND at university and shown convincing reasons to believe that the dark matter theory fits what we're seeing best.
I don't know what your actual opinion on dark matter is; this post makes it seem like you reject the entire idea. Maybe you actually think it's a good idea that's being overused, I don't know. Maybe clarify this?
As the post is, you sound like you are falling too neatly into the box of 'let me tell you the secrets the Scientific Establishment doesn't want you to know' and makes me trust you less.
Rounding error, that fits well with my unreliable narrator. I will use this inappropriately.
One of my fantastical imaginings is that dark energy and dark matter are our unfulfilled dreams. Abandoned unworkable ideas, some that are poison, clogging flow, and damaging parts of the system. The dead ends of intention. The stones unturned. The universal lymph system designed to dispose of waste.
Julian, you are missing the 'paradox of perception': the world appears to be physical (composed of space-time-energy-matter)+dark energy-matter and science treats it as physical, but based on the physical hypothesis, the perceived world cannot be:
Instead of looking at the world from the 'third-party' perspective as an 'objective reality', instead look at it from the first person perspective and apply the theories of science to your own observing :)
You carefully share detail on the prompts used in your AI generated image; can you also credit the artist’s, whose work, without consent or compensation, trained the database needed to generate that image?
If you care enough about any one field that matters, and go into it long enough, you eventually encounter the edge of the world, like that guy seeing behind the spheres in that old drawing, except in this case you realize the official narratives are islands of truth bordered by oceans of self-serving nonsense designed to give the appearance of knowledge in place of “we don’t really know and aren’t sure where to begin.”
With the night sky being so dark between the few dots of yellow stars I'm glad we're still at 4.9%.
I loved this piece. I will take anything I can get from you. Why does it need to be one or the other. I know that if you raise questions as you did here, if I stick around at some point you will make a stab at offering up solutions. Just keep throwing it all at us, we can take it!
The idea of 'Dark' matter/energy has always felt very fudgy to me as well. I get why it exists as a theory - it explains the one major flaw I'm aware of - and I don't think it's intrinsically bad, because for all we know we're similarly 'dark' to whatever exists in that strata. Or maybe there's multiple layers - maybe instead of a rough 5 / 25 / 70, its 5 / 5 / 5 / 5 / 5 / 5 / etc, and we have multiple overlapping 'universes' that interact gravitationally and no other way. Which would be mind blowing to think about.
So I understand the commenters saying that this is dismissive of expertise - but I also agree that the experts are so often incurious and unwilling to challenge existing paradigms that they deserve to have their noses tweaked a bit.
A fun piece, thank you :)
Very much miss the long-form with nuances. This felt like a twitter.
Not a fan of the post. You hint at what model you might prefer but don't endorse anything explicitly. There are, as I would guess you know better than me, alternative theories to dark matter (eg MOND); I was taught about MOND at university and shown convincing reasons to believe that the dark matter theory fits what we're seeing best.
I don't know what your actual opinion on dark matter is; this post makes it seem like you reject the entire idea. Maybe you actually think it's a good idea that's being overused, I don't know. Maybe clarify this?
As the post is, you sound like you are falling too neatly into the box of 'let me tell you the secrets the Scientific Establishment doesn't want you to know' and makes me trust you less.
Rounding error, that fits well with my unreliable narrator. I will use this inappropriately.
One of my fantastical imaginings is that dark energy and dark matter are our unfulfilled dreams. Abandoned unworkable ideas, some that are poison, clogging flow, and damaging parts of the system. The dead ends of intention. The stones unturned. The universal lymph system designed to dispose of waste.
The baby in the used bath water?
Or something like that.
Julian, you are missing the 'paradox of perception': the world appears to be physical (composed of space-time-energy-matter)+dark energy-matter and science treats it as physical, but based on the physical hypothesis, the perceived world cannot be:
Instead of looking at the world from the 'third-party' perspective as an 'objective reality', instead look at it from the first person perspective and apply the theories of science to your own observing :)
https://medium.com/@michael-haines/no-debate-consciousness-is-the-ground-of-being-c29f4f7929db
You carefully share detail on the prompts used in your AI generated image; can you also credit the artist’s, whose work, without consent or compensation, trained the database needed to generate that image?