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| Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate (2006) made of light-absorbing Vantablack |
In a recent New Scientist (3206) article on Dark Matter, we are presented with what passes for Sub Atomic Physics today, namely:-
Particles crossing to our world could open a portal to the dark-matter realm
We've identified particles that could secretly cross from the regular world to the shadowy realm of dark matter.
No, you are not reading a treatment for the latest far-fetched Science Fiction blockbuster, but the introduction to the musings of several leading modern physicists worldwide.
WE KNOW it is out there. It makes up the bulk of matter in the universe and sculpts its grandest features with a hidden gravitational hand.
And yet, despite a long campaign to expose it, the mysterious cosmic architect known as dark matter continues to evade detection.
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| New Scientist (3206) - this publication is really starting to read like a comic |
So.... How did they get to this point, and what is it that is determining their problems? Well, it is a very long story, which is far too voluminous to include in a short review such as this (as I have discovered to my cost).
But, it IS a major crisis, and if it isn't remedied immediately, it will join the current Economic and Political Crises in danger of somersaulting our World into oblivion! And, these increasingly desperate Crises are not as unconnected as they seem.
We forget just how recently Mankind began to construct their modern intellectual disciplines, and how certain it would be that many wrong-turnings would definitely be unavoidable, in that endeavour, and their correcting would never be easy, or even fully achievable. For, Mankind was not designed, beforehand, for any particular purpose (certainly not for understanding the universe), but actually evolved within circumstances that were wholly independent of Mankind's existence. Any actual development was not a matter of decisions made by anyone, but the Natural Selection of that organism within the conditions it encountered.
But, NOW, with all these crises happening together, especially when Money and Power are steering the ship, it means that vested interests will oppose vital solutions, if they can be found at all, for such changes will inevitably be to their total detriment.
In past intellectual crises in Science, they were still painful and difficult to resolve, but progress was usually made eventually, unless, of course, they were also bound up with political power, as with the Church in certain historical cases.
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Galileo made crucial scientific discoveries that upturned the entire discipline and upset the powerful Catholic Church.
He was charged with heresy and spent the rest of his life in prison. |
So though, as a scientist and philosopher, I will be attempting to deal with the total mess that currently confronts Science today, I may not be listened to, as other cataclysms may dominate, and the path I indicate may be made impossible to pursue in the ensuing circumstances!
Two different contributions have determined this current crisis in Cosmology.
First, there is the relative inaccessibility of the Cosmos we attempt to study: we cannot experiment upon it, as we can with many other more accessible parts of Physics.
And second, the primary tool for Cosmology - Physics, has now finally abandoned Explanation for the supposed Essentialities of Formal Mathematics.
It has, therefore, switched from Materialism back to Idealism (did God write this Math!?) - and switched from investigating concrete Reality, to studying abstract Ideality- the study of Pure Forms alone, presumably as the sole determinators of Everything in the Universe!
And, if that wasn't bad enough, the key intellectual disciplines of Mathematics, Formal Logic and Science are all wrongly-based upon the Principle of Plurality, which deals only with qualitatively-fixed components, and their quantitative variation. So that Science, for example, is supposed to be determined only by eternal Natural Laws. And, therefore, Real Development is replaced by a mere Complexity of pre-existing Laws.
And, Contradiction always and only ever spells Falsity!
But, the achievement of Plurality, for it surely was a step forward 2,500 years ago, is now becoming a major liability, and actually prohibits any real Understanding of Qualitative Emergences, such as those of Life, and then much later, that of Consciousness.
And, in the current topic of Cosmology, with its extremely slow tempo, and yet its breathtaking temporal scope, we cannot avoid the noticing of clear qualitative developments: they are everywhere. Indeed, remarkably, laid out, surrounding us out in Space, is a veritable History of the Universe, caused by the finite Speed of Light, as the further we look into the distance, the further we can look back in time.
In addition to which, occasional Cosmic cataclysms, like Supernovae, and different stages in the evolution of Stars, are also available from various times in the past (but seen now).
But, and this is important, only snapshots of instances in the past are available, so as with the fossil record and the genetic record, all the involved actual processes of change are NOT directly available, so the interpreting trajectories are always, to some extent at least, purely speculative (leading to the sorts of quotes we saw earlier).
The actual material determinators happened both somewhere else, and at a time no longer available.
The other source of data which skews our understanding is the modern, massive experiment machines like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where high speed collisions of "Elementary" Particles can be arranged-for and then observed and analysed.
Now, unsurprisingly, this latter evidence is considered to be "exactly" what may have been the case in the early moments of the Universe. So, overall, astronomical observations, plus accelerator experiments on Earth, as well as Mankind's discovery of how to cause Nuclear Fission and Fusion, were all used (along with Pure Speculation!), to construct the supposed Early History of the Universe - in particular commencing with The Big Bang.
But, totally unavoidably, too many premise-errors would necessarily scupper the possibility of those speculations being at all well-founded:
First, Plurality decreed that the Natural Laws would be the same throughout that whole period of Development, which is certainly NOT true. Second, all the components used in relating those developments are always the exact-same, or closely-related to those we know now. Third, the strictly pluralist view would also be unable to reveal, at the right key times, the creation of the wholly new, via Emergences, without which no real understanding of the trajectory involved could ever be possible. Fourth, the full richness of a true holist mix of simultaneous factors would not be even contemplated, nor are their consequent productions of Stabilities, Crises and even Total Collapses, not-to-mention the concluding crucial creative-constructive-phase producing the entirely new.
With such a constipated premise as Plurality, the true glory of the actual trajectory of Change could never ever even be approached.
Now, as a "review" of this New Scientist article, you might have expected a comprehensive account of all the current positions upon this "area of study". But, if I did that, I would only be perpetuating this pointless discourse. For, as those involved have already shot themselves firmly in the foot, and are hobbling away in a doomed-to-fail direction, I have, unavoidably, had to address two key things only.
First, the mistaken premises and methods of all current Physics, and second, the possible Nature of Dark Matter! So, having briefly dealt with the former, there remains only to establish an alternative explanation for the Nature of Dark Matter.
The answer may well lie in Substrate Theory.
I have spent some considerable time demolishing the Copenhagen idea of Wave/Particle Duality, by explaining-away all of its consequent anomalies with a simple idea. Wave/Particle duality is clever workaround for the fact that we can't detect the Substrate - merely by the re-introduction of a material Particle moving within an undetectable Universal Substrate, with the disturbances caused by that Particle, delivering the wave-like aspects via actual real Waves in the Substrate, and changing the whole set of phenomena into both initially direct and later recursive interactions between the two.
The main problem, in delivering this Substrate, was to define joint particles that would be so undetectable, yet entirely capable of delivering the full set of observed effects: and this was ultimately achieved using mutually-orbiting pairs from the full set of Leptons.
Now, without also delivering the full results of that extensive research here, we can still, at least, consider what impact that research has upon the possible Nature of Dark (which means undetectable) Matter!
For the Substrate could, itself, BE the fabled Dark Matter, or alternatively, if that doesn't work physically, the same sort of research that was applied to defining the Units of the Universal Substrate could instead be directed to other possible mutually-orbiting pairs of Elementary Particles, similarly undetectable.
Dark Matter needs investigating properly!
Finally, it must be made absolutely clear what "modern" Sub Atomic Physics has done to this once superb discipline.
In their reductionist commitment to the bottommost units of Matter as the basis for explaining everything else, Physics was committed entirely to the study of literally invisible so-called Elementary Particles, and studying them almost exclusively via Accelerators and Colliders.
And this had deleterious effects. The abandonment of Physical Explanation, and its inadequate replacement by Mathematics, which because of its pluralist, simplifying and idealist nature, could only act as a means of revealing the Nature of Ideality, and NOT of concrete Reality - or its seemingly hidden matter.
