WIMPs are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, the hope of particle physicists. WIMPs have not been observed yet (in 2023). Particle physicists hope that some sort of WIMPs, as yet unknown, are what Dark Matter is made of. But maybe Dark Matter is made of WIZs, Weakly Interacting Zombies. (as SQPR holds: in SQPR, large scale quantum collapse leaves a mass-energy residue… Those weakly interacting zombies…)
Dark Matter has been a riddle for a century (a Swiss from Caltech, Zwicky suggested it first). That there is something cosmically flouting the laws of known physics is blatant, and for all to see (if one has a telescope). Two-thirds of spiral galaxies are barred, including our own giant Milky Way. The bar moves rigidly, obviously, and this is an obvious contradiction with having a lot of mass at the center [1]. Either gravity fails (as MOND has it) or there is a lot of mystery mass (Dark Matter) away from the center.
I had the pleasure over the weekend to talk with David Schlegel from LBL, one of the most cited US physicists. He studies dark energy, dark matter, and fundamental physics.
Here are some key points of our exchange which I think are the most important:
- David firmly believes in WIMPs. He believes not all the “phase space” has been studied and the particle accelerators will find WIMPs in areas not yet surveyed… “within a decade”.
- David agrees that Dark Matter (DM) can’t be explained by neutrinos, because neutrinos don’t stay in place.
- David does not believe MOND (MOdified Newton Dynamics is a potential explanation for DM “anymore”. Not in the “last ten years”. So I asked him if it was because of the Bullet Cluster and similar situations, and he said yes. Too many of these. I told him I NEVER believed in MOND, because it looked too ad hoc. David retorted that everything is ad hoc (in science)… So he got on the receiving end of an ad hoc versus logical-principled approach to science. I gave the example of Kepler (ad hoc) versus Newton… In truth, though, even Kepler was not ad hoc, in the sense that he made a deliberate “war on Mars” (which had been launched by Kepler’s mentor Tycho).
- I pointed out the philosophical difficulty of having as we have in the Big Bang model now TWO inflation mechanisms, one observational (Dark Energy, demonstrated first at Berkeley LBL cosmology and astrophysics group), the other a theoretical necessity to make the Big Bang theory work. That made him smile nervously. He said that after all they are perhaps the same (Wait! What? That’s what SQPR holds). David also said that it would all be figured out in detail within ten years: traces of cosmic inflation should be found… or then, well, inflation would be disproven.
For once I was polite and guarded, in part because I had filled my weekly quota for new enemies earlier that day. I didn’t insist on Big Bang Trouble,
that those early enormous galaxies with old red giant stars contradicted LCDM… I didn’t point out that, without cosmic inflation, the Big Bang model doesn’t work. I didn’t point out that finding a WIMP candidate is only part of the story, and not the most important part… Most crucially, one needs to explain why the Dark Matter is where it is. SQPR, which is a geometric mass-energy theory, does this effortlessly.
All this tells me that core official, ultra expert cosmology is putting all its hope in WIMPS, and keeps on being ultra-confident of the Big Bang religion.
Never mind that the most recent space telescope is apparently verifying a stunning prediction of SQPR, namely huge very old galaxies (and they should be poor in Dark Matter).
Cosmology? One more dimension in which the next decade is going to be fascinating…
Patrice Ayme
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[1] centrifugal acceleration is ~ vv/d (v being the speed of the orbiting object, d its distance to center of the rotation) gravity is ~ 1/dd. Equating both, we get: vv = 1/d, or v is the square root of the inverse of the distance. So v should diminish as one gets away from the center…. But the bar is rigid… and that means that the speed v is proportional to the distance d. So the discrepancy is d^3/2!
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[2] David Shelgel makes the largest two-dimensional and three-dimensional maps of the universe, which are important tools for cosmology and for studying dark energy, dark matter, and fundamental physics. David is the principal investigator (PI) for the BOSS project on the Sloan Telescope, which has made a three-dimensional map of 1.5 million galaxies and measures the size scale of the Universe to 1% precision (http://www.sdss.org/sdss-surveys/boss/)
David is project scientist for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (https://desi.lbl.gov). When it began operations in 2018, it constructed a three-dimensional map of tens of millions of galaxies spanning the local universe to 10 billion light years. Such devices built in collaboration with Lausanne’s EPFL use 5,000 actuators that harness Swiss high tech high precision know-how inherited from watch making.
Tags: Astronomy, Cosmology, Dark matter, WHIZs, WIMPS
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
March 29, 2023 at 9:38 pm |
I think there are several questions about dark matter, but if you are going to explain it with WIMPS I think you have to define what is meant by massive. Too heavy to be made in current colliders? That would irritate one S. Hossenfelder who is against spending enormous sums of money to build a bigger collider.
What about too light to be detected? What about they simply haven’t been detected (recall the LHC rejects 97% of its data, and maybe the particle can only be detected by deficiencies in momentum of certain types of collisions.) What about they can’t be made in a collider because certain things, like lepton number, is conserved, and no “dark number” is input so nothing dark comes out? There is too much we don’t know, and unfortunately gravity is weak and has one only effect so all we have are these galactic irregularities.
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March 30, 2023 at 4:23 pm |
Defining massive? Anything which gravitationally attracts, which is what Dark Matter does.
Sabine Hossenfelder is interesting… But completely wrong about NOT financing Big Science. Big Science was always important: classicall observatories in ancient Greece, India and finally Tycho’s (handsomely financed by top aristocrat, and then the emperor himself…) forged breakthroughs. I understand big particle physics is a gravy train where people can get PhDs for turning screws, but it pushes high tech, if nothing else. Especially if one uses existing tunnels and has to augment the magnetic fields…
Indeed, too light is the way, most probably. In SQPR, the Dark matter is so light it loses all its quantum characteristics, except for energy-momentum and the ability to cause a singularization (that’s forced by the necessity to gravitationally interact).
One thing that I found very interesting talking to Schlegel was that he was totally dismissive of groups claiming simple explanations for Dark Matter (like Italian groups specializing in wild DM claims). He was also dismissive of MOND, although he took them seriously up to ten years ago… I NEVER did take MOND seriously, and always viewed it as bad science… because the math ain’t right: the MOND which works for the Milky Way doesn’t work for large galactic clusters or Bullet Cluster, etc… That’s pretty obvious. Thse MOND guys seem clueless about basic math, and that includes Sabine H….
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