Darkness as an entity

Curly Judge

I know before I start that I'm on a hiding to nothing on this one!
What the hell....I've had a good life.....

For some time now scientists have been looking for the missing dark matter which they believe accounts for 90% of the total mass of the universe.

Lets go back a little to the Mitchelson/Morley experiments of the 1880's when they spent a great deal of effort looking for the famous Aether then supposed to occcupy every nook and cranny of the universe .

They failed to find it and from that it was deduced that it did not exist.

A short time later Einstein's theories made the idea of the Aether redundant and so it was abandonded.

What if the said, all pervading Aether was .... wait for it ....darkness.

" But darkness is mearly the absence of light", I hear you say .

What if darkness has an entity? What if it has a tiny mass and a minute electric charge and just lies around the universe waiting for a photon of light to come along to banish its gloom.

Would it not be the ultimate ironey if all the astronomers who ever looked for this famous missing matter were found to have been blinded by starlight and failed to see what was all around them - the encircling, ubiquitous darkness.

pug_

I'm answering this from my uneducated armchair hobbyist perspective, but it sounds to me like you're defining darkness as visible light? As in visible to the human eye?

If so then there is a whole lot more on the spectrum out there than what we can see, and the Cosmic microwave background radiation which was the original light from the big bang (as I understand it) is everywhere just with a much longer wavelength than the human eye can detect.

So you could say the human idea of darkness is not really how things are as our eyes are limited by evolution to only see what we need to survive.

Curly Judge

pug_ wrote: »

I'm answering this from my uneducated armchair hobbyist perspective, but it sounds to me like you're defining darkness as visible light? As in visible to the human eye?

If so then there is a whole lot more on the spectrum out there than what we can see, and the Cosmic microwave background radiation which was the original light from the big bang (as I understand it) is everywhere just with a much longer wavelength than the human eye can detect.

So you could say the human idea of darkness is not really how things are as our eyes are limited by evolution to only see what we need to survive.

You make a number of good points!
Does radiation, [particularly Cosmic microwave background radiation] have mass?

krd

Well. It's more complicated than that - I haven't studied the entire canon.

But I can blow your darkness theory out of the water.

Nowhere in the universe is dark. The human eye can see the visible spectrum - the colours of the rainbow. We don't see the other light. Like you can't see ultra violet light - or infra-red. If there's no visible light, we don't see anything - we see darkness.

Everywhere in the universe is constantly bathed in light (most of it invisible to the human eye). If you are in your bedroom, and you switch off the light, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the air, and even you, will be emitting infra-red light. If you're eyes could see infra red the room would be bright as day.

I don't know where the missing gravity is - I'd need someone to work out the equations in front of me for that.

No one has ever seen, or detected, this dark matter (which is why its' called dark).....The reason could be simply, because it is not there. And they're barking up the wrong tree.

The dark matter could be some feature of gravity, or even empty space, that is just not readily apparent.

I had a pet theory, it could be the gravity from virtual particles - like in the Casimir effect. But I mentioned it to an astrophysicist, and he said there wouldn't be enough gravity produced by the particles. If he goes and writes a paper and wins a prize, I'll be pissed.

Still, I'd be curious to know, what happens to the gravity from virtual particles.

pug_

Curly Judge wrote: »

Does radiation, [particularly Cosmic microwave background radiation] have mass?

As I understand it photons are considered to be massless particles so no they don't contain mass.

seamus

As krd says, it's called "dark" matter because we currently have no way of detecting it, not just necessarily because we can't see it with our eyes.

Dark matter appears to be a catch-all term to describe a "something" which is required to balance out equations which don't seem to add up.

For a simple example, if I observe a planet orbiting a star and take notes, I can make a good plot of the orbit, I have good figures for the velocities involved. By a few other measurements and educated guesses I can reasonably infer the mass of the star to within a very small confidence.

I can then take the orbital data, the mass of the star and other bits and pieces, plug them into a big calculation and get a number back which gives me the mass of the planet. But there's a problem. The number I get implies that the planet is five or six times larger than it actually is or that the planet is largely composed of a very heavy element.
If I take this value for the mass of the planet and plug it into other calculations for a sanity test, those calculations go shooting way off and give me back figures which completely disagree with solid measurements I've already taken.

So the conclusion here is that either the formula is wrong (it isn't), or that there's something else in addition to the planet, acting on the star. If I calculate the mass of the planet by other means and stick that into my formula, I discover that there's a big "something" else in there, which on paper looks and acts like matter, but is currently undetectable.

As I say, that's a simple example. To the best of my knowledge, this actually occurs on a galactic scale and either doesn't occur or is so slight at a solar scale that it doesn't pop up in those calculations.

As krd says, it could well be a feature of gravity or some other force that is otherwise undetectable except on phenomenal scales, as opposed to being actual matter.