lucaspa
Legend
You haven’t seen it, you haven’t touch it, you haven’t experiment with it in a lab, you haven’t detected it in any form or fashion. What you observe are effects (rotation curves and redshift) but you have not establish an empirical link between those effects and your dark, metaphysical brands of matter and energy.
By detecting its effects, you have detected "it" in a form or fashion. This is the same as detecting atoms by changes changes in pressures of a gas as you change the volume and temperature.
"Dark matter" is the name given to the matter necessary to account for the motion of galaxies. "Dark energy" is the name given to the energy necessary to account for the accelerated expansion of the universe. They are not more specific than that.
Now, if you get to more specific hypotheses about either -- such as exotic neutrinos -- then you may complain about the lack of "empirical link". But not as it stands.
You cannot just claim that something did it without showing what did it or how it did it. This is nothing more than goddidit with new names.
1. "goddidit" always comes, however, with a claim about how God did it. That claim is always that God manufactured the item in its present form.
2. Dark matter is claimed to exert its effect by gravity. So that one has a "how".
3. Science often makes claims without showing a "what" or a "how". For instance, in 1962 Marshall Urist published a paper showing that implantation of demineralized bone matrix into the skeletal muscle of rabbits caused the formation of new bone at the site. No claim about "how". That still has some mysterious details. No claim about "what" other than the DBM. But that is no more informative than "dark matter" or "dark energy", is it? Was it a component of the DBM, the shape of the DBM? Something else.
Sorry, Doveman, science has always worked the way you now try to claim it can't.
But if you cannot empirically verify how he did it then it’s not science, it is faith.
First, the idea of "verification" went away with Positivism.
Second, we don't have to have a mechanism right now. Of course, in dark matter we do have a mechanism.
Goddidit was doing quite well for centuries until scientists came along and changed it to dark-matter/energydidit even though the results are the same.
There is a hidden mechanism there, isn't there? If there is not a hidden mechanism, then dark matter and dark energy are STILL "goddidit". The assumption you have is that anything in science means that God could not have done it. How do you make that assumption?
How do you even know it is gravity? You are just building one assumption upon another.
Because the motion can be explained by the presence of a mass working by standard gravity.
The fact that you cannot detect enough mass to produce the amounts of gravity needed should cause you to question your assumptions.
Why? Are there other reasons we don't detect the mass besides that it is not there? How do we detect mass at that distance? Well, 3 ways:
1. Motion of nearby objects. That's how we detect planets around distant stars.
2. Light emitted by the object. That is stars. Notice we can't detect those planets by light. Those planets are also "dark matter".
3. Occluding light emitted by objects behind the mass. This is how we detect the dust and gas in the Horsehead Nebula.
So, if the mass doesn't shine by its own light and doesn't block light emitted by other objects, then we can't detect it directly. All we have is the effect on nearby objects by gravity. Now, Michael in his thread has posted a recent article that more light from stars is blocked by dust and gas than previously thought. This may be part of the dark matter.
And we may indeed have some of the dark matter in a bank: dust.
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