Some of us careIt gets ignored by the mainstream (LOL I made a punz) cos it's really, really hard to fit in the standard paradigm, but it's there, so far as we can tell. What it means no-one knows, but it appears to be there.
How significant it is is a different argument.
We still also care about cuspy cores of galaxies. Standard models of dark matter say the galactic cores should be super, super dense. They're not. You can solve some of that problem, but I'd say the problem hasn't actually gone away. It just gets ignored.
The standard paradigm has been staggeringly succesful, and it's amazingly simple, too, which is why people don't want to drop it. But there's a few things, like the dark flow (horrible name) that don't quite fit, and they shouldn't be ignored. I'd personally put dark energy into things that don't work because unless you like an intrinsic energy of spacetime (which few people really do) there's no convincing models of it.
See also: dark matter. If you don't like supersymmetry there aren't any convincing models for dark matter, either. Odd that it only arises when we push our theory of gravity orders and orders of magnitude beyond what we can test, innit? Gravity can be tested out to Pluto's orbit. The Pioneer anomaly's *might* (probably don't, but might) point that it's failing even at the edge of the solar system. The solar system is, at an optimistic estimate, about a tenth of a parsec across. The galaxy is around 100,000 times bigger than that -- who the fuck are we to think that actually our theory can be extrapolated across that kind of jump? Then the universe is staggeringly larger than that, and we're *still* using the same theory of gravity.
Nah, something fishy's going on here.
(How significant it is is a different argument.
We still also care about cuspy cores of galaxies. Standard models of dark matter say the galactic cores should be super, super dense. They're not. You can solve some of that problem, but I'd say the problem hasn't actually gone away. It just gets ignored.
The standard paradigm has been staggeringly succesful, and it's amazingly simple, too, which is why people don't want to drop it. But there's a few things, like the dark flow (horrible name) that don't quite fit, and they shouldn't be ignored. I'd personally put dark energy into things that don't work because unless you like an intrinsic energy of spacetime (which few people really do) there's no convincing models of it.
See also: dark matter. If you don't like supersymmetry there aren't any convincing models for dark matter, either. Odd that it only arises when we push our theory of gravity orders and orders of magnitude beyond what we can test, innit? Gravity can be tested out to Pluto's orbit. The Pioneer anomaly's *might* (probably don't, but might) point that it's failing even at the edge of the solar system. The solar system is, at an optimistic estimate, about a tenth of a parsec across. The galaxy is around 100,000 times bigger than that -- who the fuck are we to think that actually our theory can be extrapolated across that kind of jump? Then the universe is staggeringly larger than that, and we're *still* using the same theory of gravity.
Nah, something fishy's going on here.
boris the spider,
Fri 11 Jun 2010, 12:44,
archived)
Oh I like this stuff. Remind me to pick your brain about it in hideous and upsetting detail soon.I wonder how many years it'll be before the CMS @ CERN throws up some curveballs.
(
Ttssattsr,
Fri 11 Jun 2010, 12:51,
archived)
Go for it, anytimeThe reason I'm still doing this job is that when you sit back a bit and look at what you're doing you realise just how fascinating it is and how damned lucky you are you're getting paid to do it. Then it becomes an obsession you want to talk to everyone about.
Which doesn't bother me :)
(Which doesn't bother me :)
boris the spider,
Fri 11 Jun 2010, 13:02,
archived)