Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe, brought to you by The
Thunderbolts Project at Thunderbolts.info In a recent Space News episode,
we reported on two 2016 scientific studies that each serve potentially fatal blows
to the hypothesis of dark matter. The first of these studies, reported in
September of last year, found that the acceleration and the rotation curves of
both spiral and irregular galaxies could be explained by visible mass alone with
no Dark Matter necessary. Professor of physics and astronomy David Meritt says
of the findings: "Galaxy rotation curves have traditionally been explained via an
ad-hoc hypothesis that galaxies are surrounded by dark matter. The relation
discovered by McGaugh at al. is a serious, and possibly fatal, challenge to this
hypothesis, since it shows that rotation curves are precisely determined by the
distribution of the normal matter alone. Nothing in the standard cosmological
model predicts this, and it is almost impossible to imagine how that model
could be modified to explain it, without discarding the Dark Matter hypothesis
completely." Another study reported in December presented a statistical
analysis of mini spiral galaxies, and found a so-called "unexpected
interaction" between dark matter and ordinary matter. A co-author of the study
states: "Most dark matter, according to the most credible hypotheses, would be
non-baryonic or WIMP. It would not interact with ordinary matter except
through gravitational force. Our observations, however, disagree with this
notion." In this episode, physicist Eugene Bagashov analyzes additional recent
studies that raise even further doubt of the Dark Matter hypothesis and he
explores the growing scientific case for dark matter alternatives. Following the
recent Space News episode featuring astronomer Barry Setterfield,
I'd like to briefly review some of the other recent studies regarding the
dark mater hypothesis. First of all, there have been news from several experiments that
theoretically could detect processes involving dark matter particles. For
example, the team of researchers working with Fermi Space Telescope indicates that
there are no signs of dark matter particle annihilation nor decay. These
processes should take place if dark matter particles could interact not only
gravitationally but also perhaps through weak nuclear force. The gamma-ray flux,
measured by the Fermi telescope from low Earth orbit, over the course of several
years, so far have not shown the evidence for any significant Dark Matter presence.
Experiments on and below the surface of the Earth have also failed to detect any
specific Dark Matter processes. There have been news from PANDA X experiment in
China. They've used 300 kilograms of liquid xenon to detect the collisions of its
atoms with the supposedly present dark matter particles and over the course of at
least 66 days, haven't detected any single event. At the same time the article
published by the team of experimenters, claims that this laboratory at present is
the most sensitive to dark matter on earth. Another similar experiment called
LUX is also using liquid xenon and it also have recently reported the complete
absence of events of Dark Matter candidate detection. 20 months of
observations, from October 2014 to May 2016, had yielded zero observed events.
Third experiment, using the same technique, is Xenon 100. 477 days of
data taking have not resulted in a detection of a single dark matter
particle interaction. The Large Hadron Collider, which once was a big hope for
finding lots of what is called new physics, has also not produced any new
findings in the recent years. What it does now is basically refining the
previous measurements with more and more statistics and putting more and more
strict constraints on the theoretical physicists' proliferative imagination;
speaking of which I would like to remember a story from the end of 2015
when there was a message from experimenters at LHC stating a
possible detection of a two-photon peak at the energy of around 750 Giga electron
volts. This was quickly followed by literally hundreds of papers submitted
by theoretical physicists, each stating his own hypothesis on what this peak might
stand for. Some of the versions included possible Dark Matter connection, but
perhaps the most embarrassing was the fact that this peak just disappeared a
few months later after accumulating more data. It turned out to be just a
statistical artifact. But the social phenomenon of these theoretical physicists
to rush has itself turned into the object of public and scientific
attention, including some jokes and sarcastic publications. In the previous
episode of Space News on dark matter, Barry Setterfield has already made the
point that there is a more or less suitable mathematical alternative to the
Dark Matter hypothesis, the Modified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND for short. In
the recent years other theories have also appeared. Some
of them are quite eclectic, trying to tie various physical concepts with
gravitation. I think the most interesting of them is the so-called entropic or
emergent gravity. It seems that a few people were developing it even earlier but
the most popular version of it nowadays is the one proposed by Erik Verlinde.
In his paper, published in 2010, he states that the amount of information
associated with matter and its location could be measured in terms of entropy.
Changes in this entropy, when matter is displaced, lead to an entropic force
which, as he shows later, takes the form of gravity. So its origin lies in the
tendency of the system to maximize its entropy and is thus thermodynamic in
nature and isn't actually a result of any fundamental force of nature. I'll remind
that, today, four forces are considered to be fundamental and that is electromagnetism,
gravitation, weak and strong nuclear forces. In case of Verlinde's theory,
the fundamental interaction that leads to emergence of gravity would most likely
be electromagnetic. He also gives examples of other emergent forces such
as osmosis and similar entropic forces in colloidal systems where the
fundamental interaction is clearly electromagnetic since all the mechanical
forces, such as pressure or elasticity, are electromagnetic in nature. Now I'll
try to explain, in simple terms, how I interpret the basic idea of Verlinde's
theory. Let us consider, as an example, the system
of two point masses, A and B. We always might draw a sphere centered on one of those,
for example A, with the radius equal to the distance from A to B. In this case,
the mass B would lie on the sphere. Such a system might be treated in
informational sense. That is, for example, the position of the body B with respect
to A, might encode some information. Let's say we'd divide the whole sphere in
100 sectors of the same area and each sector would correspond to some number.
Then the current position of the body B on the sphere would point at one of
those numbers, thus giving us the according information. Let us now
consider another case when the body B is slightly closer to the body A. Now we
might repeat the same drawing procedure but soon we would find that the number
of sectors, that we might divide the sphere in, is actually less. If we try to
keep the same area of sectors it is obvious that we couldn't fit the same
amount on the smaller sphere. So the amount of information that we might
encode in this the smaller system became less. Thermodynamically, this means that
the entropy has increased and the system now might provide less ordering. So the
system with masses situated closer together is thermodynamically more
stable and it is in this direction that the evolution of the
closed system would go. And there is an effective entropic force that arises to
guide this evolution. It is possible to formally derive the according equations
and Verlinde does that in his paper. In my opinion, the idea is quite
interesting and, at the very least, deserves a careful and thorough
analysis. However, there are some problems and perhaps the weakest part of this
theory is its reliance, at least in mathematical terms, on the so-called
holographic principle and AdS/CFT correspondence. Both of those are pretty
specific theoretical conjectures and are highly speculative in nature. Anyway, what
interests us here in the given context is that, based on his own approach,
Verlinde seemed to have succeeded in acquiring equations that are practically
identical to Milgrom's MOND equations for large-scale gravitating systems such
as galaxies. And more than that, in December of 2016, there appeared a
publication that claimed incredibly accurate confirmation of Verlinde's
predictions for the case of gravitational lensing. Of course, the very
phenomenon of gravitational lensing is somewhat doubtful though Verlinde's theory
could actually shed more light on its nature. If gravitation is not even a
fundamental force but some emergent effect, maybe this would also concern the
propagation of electromagnetic waves. That way or another, the theory is there and
the publications that seem to suggest its practical value are starting to
appear. So now, not only we don't register any dark matter particles but we also
have at least three alternatives to Dark Matter hypothesis itself. First one comes
from plasma dynamics, the second one is MOND and the third one is Verlinde's
emergent gravity. In my opinion, it is a very good situation for science as such
and one should try to encourage the existing controversy since it is the
controversy that is the real life of science.
This actually brings hope for the academia as a whole with its dogmas of
settled science and possibly could even serve as a sort of a pivotal point for
the scientific revolutions in other areas in the coming years. With the
current political situation in both the European Union and the United States, as
well as the imminent stock market and banking system crisis, it is entirely
possible that they would spark major scientific debates in the areas that only
recently were considered to be totally settled. But as the scientific
institutions would try to adapt to the new reality and shifted financial flows,
the situation would become different. In my opinion this provides a certain
opportunity for many alternative schools of thought, including the Electric
Universe paradigm.
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