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July 3, 2021 at 6:31 pm
It would be really cool, I will tell you that. It would also be a heads up that we might find other quantum effects on the largest scales like maybe quantum gravitational effects such that we won’t need a huge accelerator to probe quantum gravity, we could use the Big Bang itself as our “accelerator” and watch quantum gravity at work there, either in the CMB or in the gravitational waves coming from the Big Bang.
July 3, 2021 at 6:09 pmMy question is “how is the temperature of the dark matter measured?”. Just its average kinetic energy? Also, how does it lose temperature? Does it radiate anything or does it gets “colder” just as kinetic energy becomes gravitational potential energy?
July 3, 2021 at 5:51 pmI was thinking of the same thing regarding the temperature of the CMB at 2.7 K. How would the dark matter attain the necessary 0.1mK in order to become a superfluid (unless it can be a superfluid at higher temperatures, like liquid Helium can be a superfluid at 3K)?
EDIT: I think, now thinking about it again, it could actually work despite the 2.7K of the CMB, if the dark matter doesn’t interact at all electromagnetically (after all, that’s why we call it “dark matter”), therefore it’s not feeling “the heat” from the photons in the universe. Then, only the gravitational effect is felt and Khouri’s model works.
July 3, 2021 at 5:10 pmIt’s worth pursuing, although I don’t know what General Relativity says in this matter. Why not use GR instead of Newtonian gravity? It would be interesting if MOND could be modified further in order to account for clusters of galaxies and the cosmic web as well, besides galaxies themselves – what modifications would be needed to fit that data? If that’s possible, then based on that we could see how General Relativity would fit with that story, how would it need to be modified and either discover a different property of gravity (and get rid of dark matter) or infer additional information about dark matter.
July 3, 2021 at 3:11 pmI’m starting to doubt the “particle” dark matter myself, too, although maybe it is an LSP (Lightest Supersymmetric Particle). What if it’s something like primordial black holes? Or maybe gravity behaves differently on larger scales (although this doesn’t explain the bullet cluster). Or maybe there’s a higher-dimensional “stuff” of some kind that we only see through its gravitational effects. I don’t know.
June 25, 2021 at 6:21 pmI would say that there is a theory of everything and it probably has a simple form and can in principle be known by a human mind. Of course, there are other ontological problems (such as the hard problem of consciousness or explaining what “energy is” or what “electric charge is”) that are not possible to answer even in principle.
June 25, 2021 at 5:26 pmOr maybe we need to use a different paradigm altogether. For example, we could go the route touted by Stephen Wolfram: the computational route as an alternative of sorts to mathematics (at least in the way of thinking). This won’t invalidate mathematics, of course, but maybe we need a new perspective to unify quantum mechanics with relativity, for one.
June 25, 2021 at 3:08 pmI would say that math simply exists, just like logic, in an abstract realm. By that token, it’s eternal and indestructible. It could be that it’s more than just abstract, maybe it has ontological powers, maybe math is “God” – something that is not bound by space and time and doesn’t need a creator. In a sense, it has no choice but to exist.
June 24, 2021 at 4:52 pmYes, maybe this will help us create nanobots that would have predictable, programmable behavior instead of just random behavior. This could be really useful in medicine or even material science where the nanobots could identify mini-fractures in materials (say, in an aircraft wing) and fix them.
June 24, 2021 at 4:47 pmI guess most of the energy goes into maintaining our low entropy (organized) configuration through metabolic processes. For example, the function of the neurons depends on a sodium pump which requires energy; same can be said about muscle activity and pretty much every process in the body (the brain consumes a lot of energy as well).
June 21, 2021 at 2:17 pmIt’s fine to have theories that haven’t been proven experimentally yet and then think about creative ways of testing them. If they’re not testable even in principle then they just become philosophy and that’s fine, it’s still interesting to talk about them. They shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, especially if their math is consistent.
June 21, 2021 at 1:53 pmThank you for the link, I’m really interested in white holes. I think they are key for understanding quantum gravity and I even believe our Big Bang could be one: it has a singularity in the past and you’d need to travel back in time to enter it, the exact opposite of a black hole which has a singularity in the future and you’d need to travel back in time to exit it. Not only that but a black hole is “maximum entropy” while our universe started from very low entropy – maybe a white hole’s property is to have low entropy, just the opposite of a black hole. I wish more scientists would study black holes seriously as I think they hide in their math something big.
June 21, 2021 at 1:26 pmI guess time is emergent, just like space, and both of them are probably just a way of describing the relationship between some “fundamental nodes” of reality. It could be that fundamentally the quantum fields (or whatever their ontology is) are “what’s real” and then if you describe their relationship (for example as a measure of entanglement) then you end up with what we classically call space and time.
June 21, 2021 at 11:39 amI think I would just say “that’s how Nature is”. Although it is unusual to think of it as “indetermined” based on our macroscopic experience. Maybe the Many Worlds Interpretation is correct and anything that can happen does happen, otherwise you have to explain how did Nature decide for a thing to happen and not another (for example, a particle in superposition being observed at position A to the detriment of position B, although they both had a 50-50 chance of being observed).
