Galactic Mystery - Matter - On the Dark Side
By: Mike Strauss
Heralding a new age in the cosmos, Norwegian Kristian Birkeland
predicted that the universe likely consisted of an exotic component that
would later be called dark matter. His comments about this subject
matter appeared in a description of the Norwegian Aurora Polaris
Expedition (1902-1903). Birkeland's ideas about the Expedition were
published in the fateful year of 1913 which would see the rise of the
socialist Federal Reserve System and the Income Tax in the United States
of America, two key components of the communist manifesto. Evolutionary
processes were in motion throughout all fields of endeavor. Economics,
politics, science and the hearts and minds of men and women were in the
balance whilst relativism not truth held sway over the modern
imagination. Cosmology would suffer from the same 'evolutionary' mindset
and Birkeland wrote as much:
"We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off
electric corpuscles into space. It does not seem unreasonable therefore
to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is
found, not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in "empty" space."
In this fashion, Birkeland predicted that because of the 'evolutions'
present within the cosmos most of the matter in the universe must be
found in 'empty' space rather than that which is observable in stellar
objects. It is currently believed that only four percent of the universe
is of this ordinary visible stellar type. Further, about a quarter of
the universe is made up of the ubiquitous dark matter with the rest of
the cosmos being filled with the even more bizarre dark energy. It was
Fritz Zwicky, a swiss astrophysicist working for Caltech, who would
further the concept of dark matter through the aegis of the Virial
Theorem.
This mathematical relation is a formula which bounds the energy of a set
of particles. In another dark year in the steady evolution to slavery
since 1933 saw the removal of gold from the accounts of american
citizenry, Zwicky used the Virial Theorem in an attempt to ascertain the
validity of the dark matter hypothesis. He focussed his attention on the
Coma galactic cluster and his analysis provided prima facie confirmation
for the existence of dark matter. By evaluating the amount of movement
of those galaxies at the periphery of the cluster he was able to
approximately surmise the aggregate of all the matter therein.
He was astonished to learn that this sum total of mass is different from
a separately computed estimate. This other value was obtained by
analyzing the sum total of galaxies and the brightness of the Coma
cluster. Juxtaposing this value with the periphery computation he
observed that there was a discrepancy of at a minimum four hundredfold.
Since the galaxies were insufficiently massive to cause the computed
orbital velocities there must be some other mechanism to explain this
phenomena. This conundrum became in the scientific lexicon the missing
mass problem. Zwicky had established the need for the existence of an
invisible source of mass hitherto unknown which must provide the
necessary gravitational effect for the cluster.
Thus, it is a fact of the current state of cosmology that the greatest
set of evidence for dark matter comes from this galactic gravitational
data. Scientists have even made galactic curves describing the
rotational properties of stars versus the distance from the galactic
center. When the gravitational data is plotted it can be shown that only
a small portion of the observed speeds are explicable by classical
computations. In other words, there is a scarcity of visible mass in the
observed galaxies to attribute the sum total of gravitational effects to
visibly observable stars planets and galaxies. Thus, the simplest way to
explain this galactic mystery of insufficient mass is to hypothesize a
non-detectable type of mass known as dark matter which can be the cause
for the gravitational effects.
As more and more data is collected on these and other aspects of the
universe, formulae and cosmological postulates are generated describing
the results so obtained. Fulfilling the requirements of the
aforementioned aspects leads some scientists to propose several
different types of dark matter. The four main types of dark matter are
called 1- baryonic dark matter; 2- warm dark matter; 3- cold dark matter
and 4- hot dark matter. Dark matter ranges from the known to the
predicted, from black holes to brown dwarfs to the massive compact halo
objects (MACHOs), the neutrino, axions, WIMPS or weakly interacting
massive particles and the esoteric neutralino. However, there is an
alternative explanation for the gravitational effects which originally
created the dark matter concept.
If an incomplete understanding of gravitation is factored into the
picture, then it can be asserted that the dark matter interpretation is
incorrect because some other cause is generating these phenomena.
Several different contending theories have been developed to describe
the observed galactic data. In particular, one of the main competing
explanations is given by scalar tensor theories which try to combine the
teachings of quantum mechanics with gravity. Amplifying these ideas
leads to a variety of exotic ideas which challenge our most fundamental
notions of physics and astronomy. Other concepts go even further and
have been the subject of interest for astronomers like Dr. Riccardo
Scarpa since these allow for a cosmology without the inclusion of the
enigmatic dark matter.
Dr. Scarpa works at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago Chile
using the Very Large Telescope Array at Paranal. With all of his
experience in this field, it is interesting to note some of his most
recent comments on the superfluous dark matter:
"Dark matter is the craziest idea we've ever had in astronomy. It can
appear when you need it, it can do what you like, be distributed in any
way you like. It is the fairy tale of astronomy."
In view of these comments one should ask if another scientific idea
might be on the verge of collapsing. Indeed, astronomers are routinely
using these other theoretical principles on a daily basis in infrared
observatories around the world. Thus, it is very likely that we are
simply wrong about all of this dark matter. It is within all probability
that the only dark matter that we will ever find is that ignorant dark
matter between our ears.
Author Bio
Michael Strauss is an engineer and author of Requiem for Relativity the
Collapse of Special Relativity, a serious critique on the fallacies of
Special Relativity. To contact the author visit:
www.relativitycollapse.com
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