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[-] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 251 points 1 week ago

The thing with dark matter is it's just a placeholder term for "we don't know what the hell it is", and aren't most hypotheses pulled out of the ass before experimentation to prove them?

Plus, Dr. Kaku is a string theorist so wacky is pretty much par for the course in that field. Granted, I consider him more of a TV personality these days and grew up watching him as a speaker on [insert any number of Discovery Channel shows here].

Maybe I'm just biased and enjoy the wacky theories because I'm more interested in seeing them proven right or wrong and thinking about the implications if they happen to prove correct.

[-] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm not smart enough to prove my hypothesis, nor am I smart enough to understand any proof that I am wrong, but I'm not entirely 100% convinced that dark matter exists as an attractive phenomenon inside galaxies the way it is often described.

The way I see it, it might as well be a repulsive force between galaxies. This way it could also help explain Dark Energy.

[-] i_love_FFT@jlai.lu 50 points 1 week ago

While there may be a part of it being "different gravity", dark matter cannot 100% be explained by modified gravity of any kind.

Why do we know this? Well there are observable galaxies that survived collisions and have been stripped of their dark matter, and the reverse is also true (galaxy-sized dark matter blobs without baryonic matter in it).

I can refer you to this wonderful PBS Spacetime video about it: https://youtu.be/5t0jaE--l0Y

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[-] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 19 points 1 week ago

I'm not entirely 100% dark matter exists in galaxies the way often described. ... The way I see it, it might as well be a repulsive force between galaxies opposed to the current understanding of it being am attractive force. Plus, if it were a phenomenon that pushed things apart, it could also explain Dark Energy.

And to me, that's a perfectly valid theory. Like other proposed explanations for dark matter or dark energy or "whatever the hell it is we can detect the effect of but can't identify", it's difficult to test.

That's why I enjoy science. It's like a big puzzle, and sometimes you get halfway done and realize you put it together wrong and have to start over.

[-] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I would like to emphasize the first part of my previous comment. As I am a hillbilly occasionally cosplaying as a smart and educated person, I am incapable of exploring my statement further than just making the claim. And for that I must insist on referring to it as an hypothesis, unless someone shows me some math that it could actually work. And I hope anyone showing me said math brings the necessary crayons and puppets to explain it in a manner that I can understand.

[-] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I am a hillbilly occasionally cosplaying as a smart and educated person

Same. Which explains why I (twice, lol) incorrectly used the terms "theory" and "hypothesis" interchangeably when those are totally different things in sciences.

[-] ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 week ago

Unfortunately of course such hypotheses are extraordinarily difficult to actually test. However intuitively I do kind of like where you're coming from. I've always been fascinated by how everything that we conceptually are aware of has a sorta polar opposite that we kind of define it by.

[-] LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 12 points 1 week ago

We know that's not the case because we can see different galaxies with different levels of dark matter.

Dark matter doesn't interact with anything else except by gravity, we don't know why, but we can detect that behavior by seeing the way it clumps together.

We can also see that galaxies that collide with each other have different levels of dark matter than galaxies that haven't recently done so. The dark matter appears to just pass through each other and continue on while the regular matter hits each other and stays generally together in one group.

It's pretty interesting when you work through the details of what we do and don't know.

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[-] Zink@programming.dev 10 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I like to think of it this way:

Dark matter is not a theory or even a hypothesis. It is a collection of observations.

Having "matter" in the name is kind of a presumptive thing, like "our observations act like there's too much gravity, and matter creates gravity, and we can't see any extra shit, so..."

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[-] 58008@lemmy.world 83 points 1 week ago

I thought this guy was a legit scientist, but I read his recent book Quantum Supremacy and it was all shit like "with quantum computing, in the future you will be able to solve athlete's foot". Literally everything you can think of is going to be quantummaxxed by cubits, according to him. Need your car serviced but the garage isn't open on Sundays? Quantum computing. Need your mother-in-law to dial down the snarky comments about your new house? QUANTUM COMPUTING. Frequently walk into a room, forget why you went in there, leave, then immediately remember why you went in the second you cross the threshold? MOTHERFUCKING QUANTUM COMPUTING!

I'm sure he is a legit scientist, of course, but as a science communicator and terminal book-hawker, he's no better than Joe Rogan.

[-] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 45 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

he's 80. he's just old and losing it and trying to stay relevant.

he is legit and was dope in the 90s/2000s, he has just started losing his mind due to being old.

sort of like trump and tariffs. those were suppose to solve my athlete's foot too.

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[-] CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

A young woman from Washington state university has already proven classical computers can solve just as well as quantum if you give them equal advantages. Everything saying quantum computing is faster is operating on the unspoken principle of having the entire data grid already preloaded and comparing it to classical computers who do not have the entire data grid preloaded but when you give them both the magic preload pill quantum computers aren’t any better than classical

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/uw-grad-student-researching-quantum-computing-proved-classical-computers-better-thought/

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[-] Fizz@lemmy.nz 46 points 1 week ago

Interesting but i suggest it might be normal matter that had a bad childhood experience and turned evil. We can save it tho

[-] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 41 points 1 week ago

parallel dimension

Aren't dimensions by definition orthogonal?

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[-] addie@feddit.uk 30 points 1 week ago

Scientific method and all that. Any conjecture is okay.

Now, what's the hypothesis that you can make out of it? We've plenty of observations that don't match theory, which we believe to be on account of dark matter - galaxy rotation speeds, what happens in the core of a type 2 supernova, and so on. Does this hypothesis explain those problems better than what we have?

If it does, keep it. If it doesn't, discard it. Repeat, until we've solved all the mysteries of the universe by banging our heads against them.

This strikes me as the kind of conjecture that has no predictive power, and therefore must be discarded, but I'm no PhD-level theoretical physicist.

[-] Kefla@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

As a theoretical physicist (my degree is theoretical don't ask to see it) I think dark matter is trillions of little spacebugs scurrying all around the place

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[-] Carrolade@lemmy.world 28 points 1 week ago

I see nothing wrong with suggesting that, so long as it is made clear he is discussing one of many theoretical possibilities.

Is he a kook? He does kinda look like one, but so do a lot of legit scientists, so that's not a good measure.

[-] CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world 33 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Not a kook. Legit scientist. He has a PhD in theoretical physics, not a theoretical PhD in physics. While he spends a lot of time as a science communicator, he has his bona fides.

Yes, it's all just theories and intuition like all nascent science.

[-] Brummbaer@pawb.social 17 points 1 week ago

A PhD is not a "get out of Jail" card for kookery.

He is definitely part of the "woo" people in his field.

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[-] Korval@lemmy.today 9 points 1 week ago

You can be both credentialed and a kook, can't you? I remember him from his regular guest appearances on Art Bell's radio show.

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[-] wewbull@feddit.uk 27 points 1 week ago
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[-] OrganicMustard@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago

What he's probably saying is not that far out.

Dark matter was proposed initially because at galaxy scales the gravity force doesn't seem to match the one created by the visible matter in that galaxy, while others tried to propose modified laws of gravity at that scale. He is probably defending the later via compactified dimensions, so at some scales gravity stops transmitting at one over the distance squared, as those extra dimensions start to make an effect somehow.

[-] OrganicMustard@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago

In case someone thinks I'm saying something crazy imagine a universe that is an infinite straw. When you zoom a lot in the surface you see two flat dimensions, so gravity would propagate at one over the distance. When you zoom out you stop seeing the dimension that loops over itself and only see one, so gravity gets constant at that scale.

You could get the same with a lot more complex manifolds, that look like 3+1 dimensions at some scales.

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[-] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, this guy is so full of shit.

Edit: Whoever doesn't like it, go watch his discussion with Roger Penrose, etc. He's so obviously out of his depth when he's not talking about speculative pop science bullshit.

[-] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 week ago

Angela Collier's video about this: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?t=2213 (Kaku part starts at 36:50).

A TLDW on the rest of the video: "Gell-Mann Amnesia" is a term Michael Crichton coined. It refers to how people read articles in a newspaper about a topic they are experts in, realize it's all horribly written trash, then turn the page and happily read the next article about an unfamiliar topic forgetting they just learned the newspaper is trash.

Collier expands on the idea to include the Gell-Mann Complement and Gell-Mann Recollection. The Recollection is what Kaku does, where he doesn't know anything about a topic but presents a simple explanation on it anyway just because he's an expert in something different. This frequently gets him into completely bonkers territory, like Deepak Chopra level bonkers.

[-] DrBob@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's not like Penrose doesn't get out of his depth pretty rapidly. I read The Emporer's New Mind and my first reaction was has the guy never heard of a heuristic? Brains aren't perfect Turing machines but sloppy approximaters that make "eh, good enough" decisions.

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[-] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 week ago

This guy is mostly famous from poor quality history channel scifi bullshit "documentaries".

[-] very_well_lost@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

He's literally just the Ancient Aliens guy but with a PhD

[-] Zerush@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 week ago

As long as we do not know what Dark Matter or Dark Energy is, any hypothesis is valid. Scientific method is to err above towards the truth.

[-] LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 17 points 1 week ago

A hypothesis is only valid if it has any basis in reality AND a way to falsify it.

You can't just say "it's cause god got bored" that's not valid.

You can say "it's another dimension leaking, here's something we can check and if we observe this, then it's not true."

Just throwing out random ideas isn't a hypothesis, it's fiction.

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[-] gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 16 points 1 week ago
[-] HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub 15 points 1 week ago

To be fair, this is the level of physics where if they discover things right out of fantasy book (teleportation, mind reading, transmutation etc) I wouldn't be even surprised.

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[-] Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 week ago

What if dark matter is a time artifact of gravitational waves over time/space as particles with mass travel through time/space? (I am not a physicist and I don't understand jack shit.)

[-] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

don't talk about my mom like that.

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[-] texture@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

the moment i see this guy appear on screen i know ive fucked up

[-] whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)
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[-] huf@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
552 points (95.0% liked)

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