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2016 may be remembered as the year that the hypothesis of dark matter
was finally officially falsified.
Two recent scientific studies report findings
that may raise fatal objections to Dark Matter's existence.
In this episode, our guest Barry Setterfield begins our analysis
with an overview of the origins of the dark matter hypothesis
and the significance of these new scientific reports
from the Electric Universe perspective.
Both of these studies involved the role of so-called Dark Matter
in maintaining the observed rotation rates of galaxies.
It's these galaxy rotation rates which caused the whole idea of dark matter
to be introduced in the first place.
This is because the outside spiral arms of galaxies were rotating
as fast around the inner core as the insides of these spiral arms were.
Gravitationally, it was expected that the stars in the outer arms
would be rotating much more slowly, just like our planets,
outside planets, rotate more slowly around the Sun than the inside planets do.
Because galaxies don't do that,
the gravitational action of dark matter was invoked.
But both articles show that dark matter was not behaving as predicted.
One professor of astronomy independently concluded
about the September research article,
regarding the rotation rates of galaxies that, and I quote:
"Nothing in the standard cosmological model predicts this result,
and it is almost impossible to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it
without discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely."
More recently one of the authors of the November article,
Paolo Salucci, concluded that their results
"make it clear to scientists that there is another sort of physics
yet to be discovered and explored."
So these two articles suggest that the dark matter idea
might have to be questioned or perhaps a new sort of physics awaits discovery, or both.
For historical context let us explore
why scientists first proposed the existence of dark matter.
When Sir Isaac Newton mathematically encapsulated
the way that massive bodies behave under the influence of gravity,
it allowed the behavior of all objects in the solar system to be described exactly.
Ever since, astronomers have been using those equations
in order to explain the behavior of everything that we see in the whole universe,
ranging from comets to galaxy clusters.
The rate at which the individual planets circle the Sun
was neatly described by Newtown's laws
and they're shown to be reliable over many years.
By way of illustration, a planetarium uses these gravitational laws
to show what the solar system events occurred at a given time in the past
or will occur at a given time in the future.
Archaeologists rely on eclipse information based on these gravitational laws
to date historical events.
In essence, Newton's law has stated that
the further away an orbiting body is from the central object that it's orbiting,
the slower it's going to travel.
So, the planet closest to the Sun, Mercury,
has an orbital speed around the Sun of about 30 miles a second.
In contrast, our Earth, the third rock from the Sun,
travels at the speed of about 18 3/4 miles per second
while the tiny and distant Pluto only travels at three miles per second.
If the law of gravity was being followed, it was expected that
the rotational orbital speeds of stars around the nucleus of their parent galaxy
could fall off in a very similar way to the planets around the Sun.
In the late 1970's, Vera Rubin and Albert Bosma
independently discovered something unusual about the way that galaxies rotate.
They didn't behave the way that gravitational laws said they should.
Instead what was found was that, outside the region of the core of the galaxy,
the speed of stars in their orbits was approximately the same,
all the way to the galaxy's outer edge.
There's no slowing, no drop-off in the orbit speed.
Once this fact had been fully established for many galaxies,
the necessity for an explanation became obvious.
And that's in this context that the dark matter concept actually developed.
Newtonian gravity did not predict these observational results.
So, obviously something was not being taken into account.
If these flat rotation curves as they are called,
would have been explained by gravitational action alone,
then it was only possible if there was a huge amount of matter in an immense halo
around the entire visible galaxy and beyond.
This huge halo had to extend way beyond the stars
that made up the visible edge of the galaxy for the proposition to work.
And since this halo of material was not visible and didn't appear to emit any light,
it eventually became to be called "dark matter."
It was important to note that on this explanation that dark matter
had to interact with ordinary matter gravitationally,
otherwise the proposition wouldn't work.
In November of 2016, Dr. Andreas Ringwald defined dark matter in this way:
"Dark matter is an invisible form of matter which until now
has only revealed itself through its gravitational effects.
What it consists of remains a complete mystery."
Although it still remains a mystery,
various forms of dark matter have been proposed nonetheless,
such as hot dark matter like plasma, cold dark matter like cold hydrogen gas,
massive compact halo objects which have been given the acronym MACHOs, M A C H O.
Massive compact halo objects like swarms of planet or moon sized objects
wandering aimlessly throughout the galaxy.
Extensive observations have definitely ruled out
all three of those particular options.
Furthermore, by late October of 2013, studies by the Kepler Space Telescope
had also ruled out any possibility of dark matter
being made up of black holes of any size.
The possibility of it being in the form of strange or exotic matter
was proposed in November of 2014.
But that was because of the unsuccessful search for a likely candidate.
But this is currently considered quite unlikely as a candidate for dark matter.
The current favorite explanation lies with WIMPs.
WIMPs is another acronym, and they are proposed to be
weakly interacting massive particles, something like neutrinos.
In recent scientific history, much time, money,
and research effort has been expended in looking for WIMPs,
and they appear to be the only possible explanation which is left.
But WIMPs, in the form of neutrinos and a slew of other possible particles,
have all been ruled out by experiment and observation.
It was hoped that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN
is going to discover key elusive dark matter particle that could be labeled as the WIMP.
[Narrator] If WIMPs are proposed at the dark matter component,
is it true that these two studies call into question whether it would interact
gravitationally with ordinary matter as expected?
[Setterfield] Yes, they do call it into question.
Ekatarina Karukes, the lead author of the November paper, put it this way, and I quote:
"Most dark matter, according to the most credible hypotheses would be WIMPs.
It would not interact with ordinary matter except through gravitational force ...
Our observations, however, disagree with this notion."
If that is the case, then the original proposition about dark matter is false
since it was expected that it would interact with matter via gravity
and so govern the galaxy rotation rate.
The November study actually goes further;
it shows that the distribution of matter and dark matter
must be closely related if dark matter is really there.
The authors state, and I quote:
"We found a link between the structure of ordinary,
or luminous matter like stars, dust and gas, with dark matter."
In other words, these observations show that,
if dark matter really does exist,
it can only be in those locations where ordinary matter is present.
It means that there cannot be a massive halo of dark matter
extending beyond the visible limits of galaxies.
The reason, according to that study,
is that those visible limits mark where ordinary matter comes to an end.
And so any dark matter must end there as well.
In fact, in February of 2015, a specific search for dark matter halos
beyond the visible limits to galaxies gave a negative result
for the galaxies that were specifically studied for such an effect.
So, the conclusion is that dark matter can only occur in those locations
where ordinary matter is found, not on its own or elsewhere.
This negates the whole idea of dark matter halos existing at all.
The September 2016 paper came to similar conclusions
using a sample of 2693 data points in 153 galaxies.
David Merritt, the professor of physics and astronomy at Rochester Institute of Technology,
who didn't take part in either study,
but came to these conclusions from the scientific papers.
He said, and I quote:
"Galaxy rotation curves have traditionally been explained by
an ad-hoc hypothesis that galaxies are surrounded by dark matter.
The relation or law discovered by McGaugh et al.
is a serious, and possibly fatal challenge to this hypothesis,
since it shows that rotation curves are precisely determined
by the distribution of normal matter alone.
Nothing in the standard cosmological model predicts this,
and it's almost impossible to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it,
without discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely."
The September 2016 paper determined that there was a precise mathematical relationship
between the visible matter present and the acceleration that stars and galaxies undergo.
It's an almost exact relationship or law
with very little room for error in galaxies of all varieties.
The source of the accelerational force is not identified
except that it is not normal gravity.
The paper's lead author Stacy McGaugh said, and I quote:
"The natural inference is that this law stems from a universal force
such as a modification of gravity like MOND, that's M O N D, an acronym again,
the hypothesis of modified Newtonian dynamics proposed by Israeli physicist Moti Milgrom."
The MOND approach by Milgrom actually tries to explain
the rotation curves by adding a small acceleration term
to the normal Newtonian gravitational equations.
This term has little effect on small-scale, such as in our solar system,
but it becomes effective on the larger scale of galaxies.
While all the gravitational phenomena cannot be accounted for by the MOND proposal,
McGaugh's study does not discount the validity of Milgrom's approach.
In fact, it is in line with it but MOND, and here's the problem,
is a purely mathematical device that gives us the right answer to some observations.
That is the problem; it is only a mathematical device.
There is no actual physical reason for the additional term or the new law.
This in itself might caution us that we should look at other options
where other accelerating forces exist apart from gravity.
[Narrator] An alternative candidate for an accelerating force is electromagnetism.
Why has this possibility been largely ignored by mainstream cosmology?
[Setterfield] There is, in fact, a historical reason
that it's been largely ignored until recently.
If you can bear with me for a few moments
while we trace this through and see what happened.
In the earliest years of the 20th-century, a Norwegian, Kristian Birkeland,
was studying the behavior of plasmas in the lab.
Plasma, the fourth state of matter, is created in the lab
when atoms have stripped off one or more electrons, leaving protons, ions and electrons,
that is charged particles, and they wander freely around.
Moving charges like this constitute an electric current,
and these currents have a circling magnetic field.
These magnetic fields constrain the plasma to form filaments and sheaths.
So, all the interactions of plasma are electric and magnetic.
Birkeland's work in the early 1900's
was the beginning of something known as plasma physics.
However, almost immediately a mathematician and physicist Sydney Chapman,
well respected for his work, decried Birkeland's plasma physics.
His opinions were so respected that they blocked the progress of plasma physics
until Chapman's death in 1970.
Since then, new discoveries in space have confirmed
that Birkeland was right and Chapman was wrong.
As a result, plasma physics has become much more widely studied.
What has been found is that over 99% of the matter in the universe
exists in a plasma form.
So, studying how plasma filaments behave in the lab
can give us some clues as to what's going on in space.
So from this history, it can be seen that the option of electromagnetic forces
and plasma physics had barely emerged in the late 1970's and early 1980's
when this galaxy problem surfaced.
So, gravitational phenomena alone were considered as the only option.
It is in this context that Anthony Peratt of Los Alamos National Laboratories
pointed out in 1992 that the electromagnetic force
can be up to 10 to the 39 times stronger than gravity out in space.
Ten to the 39, that's one followed by 39 zeros.
His experiments and simulations showed that the answer to the dark matter
dilemma lies along this line of investigation.
In the series of articles in the IEEE journal for December of 1986,
Peratt discussed his experiments and computer simulations
with intertwining plasma filaments,
acting under the forces of electricity and magnetism.
He pointed out that, at the cross section of interaction between these filaments,
miniature spiral galaxies were formed.
These galaxies actually included all known types.
The number of interacting filaments he used
ranged from up to 12 experimentally and up to six in the simulations
but when using just two or three filaments,
galaxies of all types were formed by the electromagnetic interaction.
Peratt pointed out that these lab experiments and the results
can be linearly upscaled to cosmic proportions as a result of known plasma behavior.
Thus, the key candidate for an accelerating force in galaxies
is electricity and/or magnetism, which for historical reasons,
has been largely ignored by gravitational astronomers up until now.
For this present discussion, one important point
emerges from these experiments of Peratt.
These lab-generated miniature galaxies
where the spiral or elliptical, or whatever form they took,
all had rotation curves which are exact replicas of their cosmic counterparts.
The flat rotation curve resulted because galaxies
were not acting under gravitational forces
but were rather controlled by electromagnetic interactions,
which act in a different way, as well as being much faster and stronger than gravity.
Thus, the forces involved in plasma interactions alone
are capable of producing flat rotation curves in galaxies
without any extra mathematical terms or exotic physics
or the necessity for dark matter.
Peratt's research, therefore, deserves much more publicity among astronomers,
physicists, and cosmologists than it has received up to now.
So too does the answer to dark matter conundrum that he found
from plasma physics to be reproducible by experiments in the lab.
So, it's a complete solution to this puzzle, and what is more, it's reliable science.
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