Thursday Throughput: Dark Matter Edition

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

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13 Responses

  1. veronica d says:

    [ThTh5] — It’s almost as if nature is fucking with us.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to veronica d says:

      It makes sense though. You want electrons to move effortlessly, you need a conductor that is very stable. Things that are very cold, or under a lot of pressure, tend to be well stabilized.Report

  2. Oscar Gordon says:

    ThTh7: We do need a replacement for Arecibo…Report

  3. Kolohe says:

    I know this is (probably?) not at all correct, but so much of the discussion of dark matter & dark energy sounds like ‘the anther’ is making a comebackReport

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kolohe says:

      anther == aether?Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Kolohe says:

      Aether, or maybe just Ptolemaic Epicycles.

      The thing people have forgotten (or, really, never learned) was that epicycles worked, for a given value of “work”. They allowed you to predict when and where the different planets would come into view, and were accurate to within the limits of the measurement technology available. It’s not like there was some religious decree that The Earth Is The Center Of The Universe and everyone just went with that, there was actual math based on that assumption that actually worked. And Galileo’s theory about heliocentrism actually had less math backing it up, and the math actually worked less well than epicycles (because Galileo thought orbits would always be perfect circles). It’s entirely appropriate to suggest that Galileo’s version of heliocentrism was the MOND of his day — some crank annoyed at complicated math putting forth a silly proposal to rewrite everything we knew of physics to explain some apparently inconsistent phenomena.Report

  4. Michael Cain says:

    ThTh2: These are immune to the evaporation problem that ruined so many old science fiction stories about tiny black holes?Report

  5. Brandon Berg says:

    Private sector: Develops a vaccine over the weekend.

    Government, a year later: Throwing away expired doses while trying to avoid vaccinating too many people of the wrong race.Report