Jump to content

My explanation for dark matter. It's that simple.


Recommended Posts

Have been thinking about dark matter and wrote this short essay. Feel free to comment, to agree or disagree with me - this is a truly interesting topic for debate.

 

Imagine that you place a magnet between two glass panes. You then get another magnet and use it to manipulate the magnet you placed between the panes - you move the outer magnet around on the surface of one of the glass panes

Even though the magnets don't touch eachother, they attract eachother. Their attraction is 3-dimensional but as both can only move in 2 dimensions, only the planar components of the magnetic forces can be observed.

Now imagine that the plane between the glass panes is Flatland. Several scientists suddenly observe that the magnet is seemingly attracted by a random point of the plane, but can't find the source of the force that is moving the object. They think that it's dark matter - something that can't be observed but still enacts forces upon "normal" matter.

Sounds familiar?

Add one dimension and you have the explanation for dark matter. Space (space, not spacetime) is 4-dimensional but matter can only move in 3 dimensions. Gravity is one of the few forces that breaks through the dimensional barrier, e.g. spreads through all four dimensions. Dark matter is simply matter located on another "layer" of space, e.g. displaced in the 4th dimension. We can't see or feel it but we notice its gravity. It's not "dark" by any means, just normal matter located on another layer of space or dimensional plane or brane or however you would call it.

Now let's move away from "dark" matter and take a closer look at the 4th dimension itself, which consists of 3-dimensional "layers" or "planes" of space. They are separated from eachother by physical barriers that disallow movement in the 4th dimension - our glass panes. Only few forces can act through these barriers - maybe it's only gravity, maybe others too. The thickness of the "layers" is infinitely small (maybe Planck length?), resulting in complete immobility and the impossibility of the creation of 4-dimensional particles or objects. The layers are as such physically discrete.

The neighboring "layers" are essentially what we would call parallel universes. Same physical laws but different location and distribution of matter. Things like the invisible Great Attractor are just galaxy superclusters located in neighboring spatial layers.

Note that 4 is not the maximum number of the dimensions of space - in my opinion, there is an infinite number of dimensions actually. The 4-dimensional layers, the 5-dimensional hyperlayers and n-dimensional n-layers of space form complex structures incomprehensible to our minds. I don't know whether the layers are "straight" or whether they have irregular forms. If our universe has a positive curvature, the "layers" are different layers of a hypersphere, meaning that different layers differ in sizes and that the volume of parallel universes gets smaller and smaller as you travel towards the center of the hypersphere.

I mentioned travel. Whether travel between parallel universes is possible or not depends on the structure of the barriers - if they are physical by means of consisting of matter, they might have infinite density or not, resulting in the viability of breakage or perforation and the creation of portals to parallel universes.

However, these barriers are most likely non-material just as the barrier that separates flatlanders living on two different sheets of paper from visiting eachother. These barriers don't consist of matter or space but of the absence of space - just like the absent 2-dimensional space that chains flatlanders to their paper sheets. The layers don't interact with eachother except by means of gravity; a possibility of transport has yet to be found. It is likely that no way of breaking the dimensional barriers of our universe will be found ever and that communication with our brethren living on parallel earths will only be possible by means of enacting forces upon their universe - an object that moves between two places in space is enough for a "gravity telegraph".

 

Interesting, isn't it?

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Fascinating, thanks for the writeup.

I'm not familiar with any comparable hypotheses or research into them, but there are maps that show tentative distribution of "dark matter" within our universe, correct? In that case,

1) would it be possible to come up with plausible mass distributions for 'nearby' 3D spaces such that total accelerations in the observable universe match what is seen?

2) could we try to find the "plane distance" that makes those distributions most similar to the one in the observable universe? Assumption of shared physical laws as in the OP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is a well-thought-out idea; I'm impressed. It's not too dissimilar from some other suggestions that have been made, but I like the way you've presented it. It's easy to imagine an infinite number of galaxies all lined up next to each other, "visible" only through parallel gravitational interaction.

One immediate challenge is that we have a pretty good understanding of how dark matter distributions interact, and in everything we've seen, dark matter doesn't interact with itself other than via gravitation. It doesn't clump into dark matter stars or dark matter planets or anything like that; it remains diffuse and continuous no matter how much of it there is. So that's why it is most likely not ordinary matter in a different plane.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

An implication of this, if I understand it right, is that for example: in a parallel universe there could be a massive object the size of Earth that will pass by the location where Earth is In our universe. And although in each universe only one of the objects 'exists' so to speak they will attract each other. Is this possible by your theory?

Edited by Findthepin1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ OP : that would imply there's "another" universe. Consequences aside, it's a great way to explain why there exist deep space, intergalactic dark matter that seems to defy most thinking about how mass spreads out, but what about galactic dark matter ? Random stars in the parallel ? Far-flung clusters in the parallel ? I mean, it can't be another galaxy, which will just make the whole thing very dense, but we don't see them here (or least, not yet able to)...

Also, someone should look up the math. I'm affraid gravitation won't be the same. And what about energy conservation ?

And it'd be very frightening to actually being visited by one of these objects !

Edited by YNM
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Multiple parallel Universes? DC Comics incoming! Maybe we are visited by the Flash soon ;-)

Now the serious part: Since it would be very unlikely that our "next" universe moves exactly parallel to us this should mean that the points of "4-Dimensional attractions" should change their position at a observable speed. If ithose places stay largely on a spot (the force of dark matter attraction doesn't change it's value) than it is most likely not a parallel-dimension-mass.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/10/2017 at 7:52 AM, MedwedianPresident said:

Imagine that you place a magnet between two glass panes. You then get another magnet and use it to manipulate the magnet you placed between the panes - you move the outer magnet around on the surface of one of the glass panes

Even though the magnets don't touch eachother, they attract eachother. Their attraction is 3-dimensional but as both can only move in 2 dimensions, only the planar components of the magnetic forces can be observed.

Now imagine that the plane between the glass panes is Flatland. Several scientists suddenly observe that the magnet is seemingly attracted by a random point of the plane, but can't find the source of the force that is moving the object. They think that it's dark matter - something that can't be observed but still enacts forces upon "normal" matter.

Sounds familiar?

This is how normal matter already works. Nearly all of the mass of matter (~99%)  is due to fields self-interacting. There is no practical difference between that and saying that there is "more mass across the glass". What it really comes down to is fields.

At the end of the day, if you are saying that matter interacts with something adding more mass to the universe, you are saying that there exists an interaction field and a field with which matter interacts. Where there are fields, there are particles. And that's really just a Weakly Interacting Massive Particles hypothesis.

So congratulations, you've discovered WIMPs, but it's rather nothing new. In fact, it's currently the leading explanation for dark matter, and further exploration still comes down to trying to detect associated particles.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, hms_warrior said:

Now the serious part: Since it would be very unlikely that our "next" universe moves exactly parallel to us this should mean that the points of "4-Dimensional attractions" should change their position at a observable speed. If ithose places stay largely on a spot (the force of dark matter attraction doesn't change it's value) than it is most likely not a parallel-dimension-mass.

While I've already explained why I don't think the OP's idea works, I should point out that this particular objection is easily surmountable. The mass in the parallel dimensions would be attracted to the mass in our dimension; gravitationally bound states would persist across dimensions. So you would end up with potentially innumerable dimensions, all separated from each other and yet maintaining roughly the same mass distributions.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, K^2 said:

This is how normal matter already works. Nearly all of the mass of matter (~99%)  is due to fields self-interacting. There is no practical difference between that and saying that there is "more mass across the glass". What it really comes down to is fields.

At the end of the day, if you are saying that matter interacts with something adding more mass to the universe, you are saying that there exists an interaction field and a field with which matter interacts. Where there are fields, there are particles. And that's really just a Weakly Interacting Massive Particles hypothesis.

So congratulations, you've discovered WIMPs, but it's rather nothing new. In fact, it's currently the leading explanation for dark matter, and further exploration still comes down to trying to detect associated particles.

Would such mechanism alters how gravity works, considering they sort of having an extra (or less ?) dimension to work on ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, YNM said:

Would such mechanism alters how gravity works, considering they sort of having an extra (or less ?) dimension to work on ?

There are already certain branches (threads?) of string theory which posit that gravity's low strength relative to the other forces is due to it "leaking" into other dimensions.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

There are already certain branches (threads?) of string theory which posit that gravity's low strength relative to the other forces is due to it "leaking" into other dimensions.

Heard that before. Though, I'm not very content with the fact that the whole thing remains capable of being approximated with an inverse-square distance relationship...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I see a huge hole in this hypothesis: if gravity did in fact propogate in four spatial dimensions, shouldn't it lose strength over distance by an "inverse cube law" rather than "inverse square law" as it measurably and observably does?  You can show that this is the correct progression through dimensions, by looking at the falloff of light from a linear emitter (like a really long fluorescent tube), which is inverse first power, as long as you're close enough the ends don't affect things.  That light is effectively spreading in two dimensions.  Since light does, in fact, spread in three dimensions, point (and, once you're far enough from them, all other)sources in fact lose intensity by an inverse square law -- and so does gravity.  This is strong evidence that gravity is a three-dimensional force, just like electromagnetism.

IMO, a much better candidate for a higher-dimensional force would be the strong nuclear force, which holds atomic nuclei together despite their electrostatic repulsion.  The strong force is very, very strong -- but only over a very short distance.  In fact, it seems as if it must propogate in more than even four spatial dimensions -- perhaps the eleven of Hilbert space.  If that were the case, it would fall off as the inverse 10th power of distance -- which would make it a very short-range force indeed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Briefly: we live in >3d landscape, and Newtonian gravity law is directly checked just in 100 AU range. We are like ants living on a tiny square f large crumpled tablecloth.

 

When we look at other squares, they look similqr. But tablecloth is crumpled.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

I see a huge hole in this hypothesis: if gravity did in fact propogate in four spatial dimensions, shouldn't it lose strength over distance by an "inverse cube law" rather than "inverse square law" as it measurably and observably does?

Well, for starters, that's not exactly how gravity works. Newtonian gravity happens to be a good approximation, but there is no actual equivalent to the continuous field lines like in electrodynamics. So the inverse power laws don't have to apply. And in fact, they do not. Close to Schwarzschild radius, gravity does not follow inverse square law.

Nonetheless, gravity is roughly linear at large scales, and it is fair to ask if we'd still get roughly inverse square law if we had extra dimensions. The answer is that we probably wouldn't with a complete R4 spacial dimensions, unless something really strange was going on, but if extra dimension is finite in its span, then we'd still get inverse square law, while getting all kinds of side effects. This idea shows up in string theory, supersymmetry, and holographic interpretation of quantum mechanics. So it's actually an idea that has been studied quite a bit.

Unfortunately, none of the existing >3 dimensions + time models have demonstrated any advantage over the standard model. Just the opposite. They either ended up not sufficiently robust, or made predictions that did not pan out in experiment.

At the end of the day, Standard Model, for all of its drawbacks, is sufficient to describe everything we have observed. We might have to add a field or two to describe dark matter and dark energy, but nothing indicates that we'll have to invent all new physics to account for these. Kind of like Higgs particle was added without any loss to existing models.

And as a reminder to these who aren't physicists, Standard Model consists of 3 + 1 dimensional space, where extra dimension is time, and a number of intrinsic degrees of freedom which do not have an associated dimension. After enforcing local symmetries on all of these degrees of freedom, a Lagrangian of the Standard Model can be written down, and from it equations describing absolutely all known physics can be derived.

That said, if we try to account for local symmetries in all degrees of freedom, equivalent to saying that we want to have a quantum gravity description of the universe, we can write down the equations, but we cannot solve them numerically or algebraically. Which is a bummer, and why people are still trying to come up with nicer models, like Loop Quantum Gravity, to try and give us an alternative description which has solvable equations.

The key point, however, is that we aren't currently looking for a replacement because something in SM doesn't work. Absolutely every part of SM agrees with experiments and observations. We just ran into some boundaries with the ability to make predictions from it, and some people think we can do better. Dark matter changes none of that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

... except it appears from nothing, the only reason to think it exists is its gravity, and only gravity is thought to be its only detectable manifestation. Looks somewhat unfalsifiable, even more than old good floggy stone.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

... except it appears from nothing, the only reason to think it exists is its gravity, and only gravity is thought to be its only detectable manifestation. Looks somewhat unfalsifiable, even more than old good floggy stone.

Each of the fundamental symmetries yields its own kind of charges. But the fermion fields can carry any combination of these. We have particles that only carry a weak charge, neutrinos. There is no particular reason why there can't be a fermion field that carries only a gravitational charge. That would be a prime candidate for dark matter.

And while falsifying such assertion seems difficult on the surface, it becomes more feasible as you start to look at the implications. If, as stated, this new field is fermionic, there is a good chance that it has flavors that do interact with normal matter which can be produced at an accelerator facility.

Besides that, the direct route should not be discounted. We are measuring gravitational interactions now. We ought to be able to measure changes in dark matter currents using the same techniques we've used to measure gravitational waves.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

On 6/13/2017 at 3:30 AM, K^2 said:

Each of the fundamental symmetries yields its own kind of charges. But the fermion fields can carry any combination of these. We have particles that only carry a weak charge, neutrinos. There is no particular reason why there can't be a fermion field that carries only a gravitational charge. That would be a prime candidate for dark matter.

And while falsifying such assertion seems difficult on the surface, it becomes more feasible as you start to look at the implications. If, as stated, this new field is fermionic, there is a good chance that it has flavors that do interact with normal matter which can be produced at an accelerator facility.

Besides that, the direct route should not be discounted. We are measuring gravitational interactions now. We ought to be able to measure changes in dark matter currents using the same techniques we've used to measure gravitational waves.

I thought the problem with a dark matter particle that only acts through the gravitational interaction was that it would be very difficult to generate these particles during the Big Bang, at least, using only the Standard Model.  I don't know exactly why though, I'm not a particle physicist and I don't understand pair production.  Maybe to create a particle that only interacts through the gravitational force you'd have to have stupendously powerful gravitational waves?  If so, that would make sense that no gravitational-only particles would get formed because the early universe was supposed to be incredibly dense but very uniform.  Who knows, maybe if gravity does get unified with the other forces, we'll find that it predicts gravitationally interacting-only particles can be formed above the unification energy or something like that.

Edited by -Velocity-
Link to comment
Share on other sites

This does seem interesting. I would highly recommend you read the book "The Elegant Universe", which goes into much greater detail about the number of dimensions possible and the current standing of theoretical physics, mainly focused on string theory. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 hours ago, -Velocity- said:

I thought the problem with a dark matter particle that only acts through the gravitational interaction was that it would be very difficult to generate these particles during the Big Bang, at least, using only the Standard Model.  I don't know exactly why though, I'm not a particle physicist and I don't understand pair production.  Maybe to create a particle that only interacts through the gravitational force you'd have to have stupendously powerful gravitational waves?  If so, that would make sense that no gravitational-only particles would get formed because the early universe was supposed to be incredibly dense but very uniform.  Who knows, maybe if gravity does get unified with the other forces, we'll find that it predicts gravitationally interacting-only particles can be formed above the unification energy or something like that.

Direct production is, indeed, unlikely. On the other hand, as I've pointed out earlier, fermion fields tend to have flavors with electric charge different by one. So if the weakly interactive particle responsible for dark matter happens to be a fermion, it likely has a flavor pair that has electric charge. Such a pair would have to be very heavy to have remained unobserved so far, which would mean that it would nearly instantly decay producing shower of other particles and its much lighter weakly interacting partner to conserve some relevant quantum number.

The much lighter, weakly interacting particles, while being produced en masse as both particles and anti-particles, would interact so weakly with each other that they would, for all intents and purposes, refuse to annihilate with each other. And because they are produced in just silly quantities in the early history of the universe, even if each one isn't all that massive, the total mass can easily be much greater than that of ordinary matter.

It's all speculation, of course, but the mechanism is there. And the smoking gun in this hypothesis would be the existence of that heavier partner particle. It's something we ought to be able to find, albeit, perhaps, with much more powerful particle accelerators.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How exactly do WIMPs slow down and clump together? Is the only way that they can shed kinetic energy through gravitational waves?  I suppose they could trade kinetic energy with other objects through gravitational attraction, but I don't think that there is any total change in kinetic energy + gravitational potential energy when that happens. In the very distant future of the universe, might dark matter "cool down" enough to start coalescing into objects smaller than galaxies?  

Obviously, WIMPs can interact weakly, but that's going to be an extremely low probability event... but the gravitational waves they emit will also be extremely, extremely weak, so which dominates?

Edited by -Velocity-
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not sure what the answer is or what the OP was going for:TLDR atm. But the first thing to do is not try to come up with a theory. It's to analyse the current theory for what it is. Usually that is a simple math function being treated as more than it really is. Then you need test things base on more complex premises. This is what is lacking in modern science. And I mean the physicist and people running the equipment like the colliders and other test equipment. They do not understand the scale of what they are testing(or ignore it) and massively simplify and use very fanciful/simplified ideas. They have no chance of finding out the answer with their approaches(potentially by design). You have a 99.9999% chance the premise of any modern theory is completely over simplified garbage the guys making it up simply can't or don't do the math to put in context of the next step. They then waist massive amounts of money to test nothing and get nowhere. What they need to do is get themselves to the point they can get their theories to a level of complexity to reality(wich is measured in massive magnitudes of complexity.) and then test the theory and move ahead a massive magnitude more with what they find. Current theory is all basically slow rolling theories as little as possible to fuel their egos or grants or pocket books(in the case of lectures and side money). It's not science. They are con artists. They do not know how to do real work.

Current, "science," is just slow rolling out formulas to make money and get center stage like video card makers release video cards. It's for nothing but increased profit. It has nothing to do with trying to advance understanding. It's all about them! Just like everything else today.

No intended statement about your theory though! It's just that how modern, "scientific theories" are made(from actual scientist), dark matter is a big potential and/or openly known simplification on modern sciences part. It leaves a lot of natural problems with basing anything on that type of modern "theory" like dark matter. It naturally makes it so you have to presumes to much about it when it could in itself too easily be nothing. which makes theorizing harder because the info in front of everyone from scientists is so low level and bad. Particularly certain commonly known and publicly seen, "scientists." Or any of the scientist that spend their whole lives in essence staying in the cool kids category and debasing anyone who disagrees with them and stops real scientific advances from happening. Those who are sadly slowing down open and full debate in one way or another for their own purposes.

Edited by Arugela
Link to comment
Share on other sites

34 minutes ago, Arugela said:

Not sure what the answer is or what the OP was going for:TLDR atm. But the first thing to do is not try to come up with a theory. It's to analyse the current theory for what it is. Usually that is a simple math function being treated as more than it really is. Then you need test things base on more complex premises. This is what is lacking in modern science. And I mean the physicist and people running the equipment like the colliders and other test equipment. They do not understand the scale of what they are testing(or ignore it) and massively simplify and use very fanciful/simplified ideas. They have no chance of finding out the answer with their approaches(potentially by design). You have a 99.9999% chance the premise of any modern theory is completely over simplified garbage the guys making it up simply can't or don't do the math to put in context of the next step. They then waist massive amounts of money to test nothing and get nowhere. What they need to do is get themselves to the point they can get their theories to a level of complexity to reality(wich is measured in massive magnitudes of complexity.) and then test the theory and move ahead a massive magnitude more with what they find. Current theory is all basically slow rolling theories as little as possible to fuel their egos or grants or pocket books(in the case of lectures and side money). It's not science. They are con artists. They do not know how to do real work.

Current, "science," is just slow rolling out formulas to make money and get center stage like video card makers release video cards. It's for nothing but increased profit. It has nothing to do with trying to advance understanding. It's all about them! Just like everything else today.

No intended statement about your theory though! It's just that how modern, "scientific theories" are made(from actual scientist), dark matter is a big potential and/or openly known simplification on modern sciences part. It leaves a lot of natural problems with basing anything on that type of modern "theory" like dark matter. It naturally makes it so you have to presumes to much about it when it could in itself too easily be nothing. which makes theorizing harder because the info in front of everyone from scientists is so low level and bad. Particularly certain commonly known and publicly seen, "scientists." Or any of the scientist that spend their whole lives in essence staying in the cool kids category and debasing anyone who disagrees with them and stops real scientific advances from happening. Those who are sadly slowing down open and full debate in one way or another for their own purposes.

I'm just going to start out by saying I disagree completely and wholeheartedly with everything you just said.

I'm then going to quickly apply the "don't feed the troll" mantra and move past this post.

If anyone wants to have a debate about this with @Arugela, make a new thread, let's not derail this thread.

 

Back on topic:

7 hours ago, -Velocity- said:

How exactly do WIMPs slow down and clump together? Is the only way that they can shed kinetic energy through gravitational waves?  I suppose they could trade kinetic energy with other objects through gravitational attraction, but I don't think that there is any total change in kinetic energy + gravitational potential energy when that happens. In the very distant future of the universe, might dark matter "cool down" enough to start coalescing into objects smaller than galaxies?  

Obviously, WIMPs can interact weakly, but that's going to be an extremely low probability event... but the gravitational waves they emit will also be extremely, extremely weak, so which dominates?

I believe some WIMP hypotheses have them being able to interact weakly via the electroweak interaction, which is how they can coalesce into clumps.

 

My guess would be that the other interaction still dominates over gravitational waves (especially at short range), purely because even a weak electroweak interaction is many orders for magnitude stronger than a gravitational one.

Edited by Steel
Link to comment
Share on other sites

i remember reading about a theory awhile back, but i cant quite remember the source. essentially it states that we exist in the subluminal part of the universe. this is accompanied by a superluminal part where nothing can go slower than light. there is also a luminal part that is the divider between the two, everything in that "plane" goes exactly c. proximity to this plane, velocity wise, is what causes relativistic effects. dark matter is essentially the material in the superluminal part of the universe. gravity is shared between both parts. the ftl nature of the superluminal "material" pretty much means it can never form atomic structures or be anything more than a soup of really fast particles. it will however be attracted to and orbit mass in our part of the universe. it sounded interesting, but i dont even know what its called.

Edited by Nuke
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Superluminal doesn't exist. If you refer to the universe outside our hubble sphere, it is gone and won't come back. Impossible to interact with or reach. Say good bye :-)

There is nothing superlimunal or extrauniversal about dark matter. It is right here, it explains extra gravity, it grows over time but it doesn't interact otherwise. That makes it difficult to observe. For now.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...