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Another Problem With Big Bang?

I'd also like to ask BeAChooser how he thinks a controversial theory like MOND ever got into the astonomy literature, and how it continues to get time and space there, since it also directly contradicts the Dark Matter theory.
 
Yllanes said:
He means detecting the specific particles that comprise dark matter. We see their gravitational effect, so they must be there, but we don't know what kind of particles they are (they can't be ordinary baryonic matter). They could be supersymmetric particles, for example.

There are many candidates: axions, WIMPs (including neutralinos), etc. They are much more than names, we know what properties they would have. All of these are not part of the standard model, so we need new experiments to see whether they exist.
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I see. DM is one of the funner things to contemplate when I contemplate the Universe. It's a puzzle. How do you detect something that doesn't react with light yet has some kind of mass which exerts gravitational force. I love to contemplate puzzles.
 
To bring this back around to the matter of dark matter, has anyone mentioned this story from a few days ago yet?

New Mystery of Invisible Matter Generated by Cosmic Collision
Cosmic train wreck' baffles astronomers


There's also the following story from a few days ago, it's not related to dark matter but I thought it interesting to mention anyway:

Dead star holds evidence of Earth-like planet



Huzzah! Post #1,000! That was a quick 1,000 compared to my previous posting totals on other message boards...
 
skeptigirl said:
I see. DM is one of the funner things to contemplate when I contemplate the Universe. It's a puzzle. How do you detect something that doesn't react with light yet has some kind of mass which exerts gravitational force. I love to contemplate puzzles.
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One example of (attempt at) direct detection is the DAMA experiment at the Gran Sasso (an underground laboratory buried under a mountain in Italy).

They use scintillators capable of detecting the recoil of electrons and nuclei after a collision with another particle. This particle may be DM, background radiactivity, cosmic rays, etc. To eliminate all kinds of noise and leave a possible signal due to DM they measure for very long periods of time. The orbit of the Earth around the Sun causes a modulation in the DM flux (and not on the background).

The experimenters at DAMA reported a signal, but it has not been reproduced anywhere else, so we still don't have any direct detection of DM. An enhanced version of the same experiment is now running, I think the first data should come out in 2008 or something like that.

Corsair 115, the story you mention is precisely the one BeAChooser commented in his OP. It was him that first mentioned plasma cosmology.
 
Further to my thread on Cosmological Philosophizing, why do some posters, who are clearly grossly unqualified to do research into practical plasma physics (and would have to admit so, faced with an actual plasma chamber), feel that they are able to seriously critique cosmological models? Is it because at some level cosmology intrudes on religion (and that amateur philosophy can have serious theological impact)?

I'm not critical of peoples' rights to hold opinions, but where opinion conflicts with learned convention, ought not a person to do more listening and less talking? Convention may be incorrect, but it will not be overthrown by internet babbling...

:boggled:
 
You can participate as long as you really try to communicate, we can all think good thought but it helps to listen to the other side. If you just state that what you assert is true then you are not a critical thinker. You can critique things if you try to understand the 'conventional' as long as you maintain critical thought. May people, including the best and brightest are will to not be critical about their thinking a lot of the time.

You must strive to understand the conventional model to critique it, that is probably the most striking part of scepticism, you should try to understand the data, there are often critical errors in interpretation of the data.

However it points out that if you can't discuss the data then you really can't critique it. Then it is just assertions and beliefs and they are very prone to errors of perception.
 
Yllanes said:
Corsair 115, the story you mention is precisely the one BeAChooser commented in his OP. It was him that first mentioned plasma cosmology.
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It is? Well, that's what I get for not paying closer attention. :o
 
This doesn't seem to have been clarified so I'll put this as clearly as I can. The big bang has absolutely nothing to do with dark matter, the standard model, MOND, plasma physics, dark energy or any other theory about what makes up the universe. The big bang is based on one single point - everything in the universe is moving away from everything else, therefore at some point it must have all been in the same place. That's it.

It doesn't matter where the structure of the universe comes from, it doesn't matter what matter is made out of or what forces affect it, all of these theories just address what happens once the big bang has happened. BeAChooser clearly doesn't understand this, and therefore his understanding of any cosmology is suspect.

Dark matter might be undetectable particles that interact only with gravity. It might be regular matter that we just can't see because it isn't doing anything. It might be something else entirely. It might be gravity working differently and not matter at all. It might be other forces, known or unknown. There are valid theories about all these possibilities, and more. None of this has anything to do with the big bang. No matter which one of these theories turns out to be correct, if any of them, everything is still moving away from everything else, and the only explanation we have for this is a big bang. Of course, there are also plenty of different theories about exactly what that was and how it worked, but that's not really the point.
 
Indeed planets and dwarf stars are still on the list of explanations that can't be ruled out. So are neutrinos which I would think fall in to the category of "regular matter" if that phrase means "particles we already know about".
 
Of course, as Cuddles says, at this point there are many possibilities and DM may not even exist, though this is very unlikely. One of them is MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics).

That said, if we stick to the standard theory it is true that DM cannot be ordinary matter, if by ordinary we mean baryonic (protons and neutrons are baryons, but neutrinos aren't). All the matter we are familiar with on Earth is made of baryons (and electrons). Of course there is baryonic invisible matter (dwarf stars, MACHOs) but the study of Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the Cosmic Microwave Background tells us that it can only be a small fraction of the total amount of DM.

Most DM is non baryonic. Neutrinos are the simplest candidate, but it doesn't seem likely that they can be responible for all the DM we see. Other candidates are more exotic and include supersymmetric particles, WIMPs, etc.
 
Yllanes said:
Of course there is baryonic invisible matter (dwarf stars, MACHOs) but the study of Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the Cosmic Microwave Background tells us that it can only be a small fraction of the total amount of DM.
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Isn't there still a lot of room for our accounting of cold neutral hydrogen to be wrong?
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Isn't there still a lot of room for our accounting of cold neutral hydrogen to be wrong?
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Much more hydrogen would mean a very dense early universe. This in turn would imply a very efficient burning of H to give He. The problem is that right now there remains too much deuterium, which means that the original fusion could not have been too efficient. We also don't know any mechanism of deuterium production that could account for this discrepancy. The conclusion is that there can't be that much H.

This is of course more complicated and there are more possibilities, but in my last post I was presenting the most likely scenario with our current data, without discussing alternatives. However, at this point, our understanding of DM is incomplete enough to leave room for many alternative explanations.
 
My own personal opinion is that MoND (as far as dark matter goes) is pretty much dead in the water. It was never really good at accounting for cluster dynamics anyway, and when you write a relativistically-correct version (not a trivial thing), it fails to reproduce the CMB power spectrum. Modifying GR is still open for explaining dark energy, however.

Far and away, the best candidate for dark matter is a cold, weakly-interacting non-standard-model particle. Neutrinos don't work since they are too "hot" -- if they were the dark matter they would have washed out formations like galaxies (and us). Now, up for debate is WHICH cold, weakly-interacting non-standard-model particle it is.
 
I'm with you, especially after the latest observations. I think there is very little room for MOND right now. Of course, I'm not a cosmologist, so this is an outsider's opinion.
 
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Hi, I'm back. I would have been back sooner but I got tied up in some other threads here at JREF. I'm going to put those on hold for a while and focus on this one. Hope everyone is still aboard. :)

I'd like to start off by commenting on something TV's Frank posted earlier.

TV's Frank said:
"The 'Deep Impact' mission by NASA produced information that astounded the project cometologists, yet these key findings were predicted by the Thunderbolts group to which author/lecturer Donald Scott belongs."

Hahahahahahahahahaha.
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Just curious. Have you, Frank, (or anyone else on this thread) read the new book by Donald Scott titled "Electric Sky"? Deep Impact and many other topics are discussed in the book. I'm curious what you have to say about the specific evidence he presents concerning flaws in Big Bang and specific evidence suggesting the plasma cosmologists are right.

And just for the record, he's not just an author/lecturer ... he's a electrical engineer who taught the subject at a major university for over 39 years. He says he got interested in cosmology when he heard astronomers and astrophysicists making claims about electrical and magnetic phenomena that are simply false. And I think proves it in the book. :D
 
wollery said:
Does plasma physics explain all galaxy rotation curves? If not then it fails as a theory in that regard.
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Well apparently it does for everything they've looked at so far. You are certainly welcome to present an instance where it fails. The nice thing about plasma cosmology is that it is falsifiable. The big bang explanation is not. Think about that. :)
 
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