Is it just me, or does dark matter and energy sound a lot like phlogiston? 96% of the matter and energy missing required to explain why galaxies move in the way they do is an astoundingly large number. I realize that they’ve “detected” dark matter through a technique known as “lensing”. This technique is also used to detect black holes. In a nutshell, lensing is a technique whereby the bending of light is detected, allowing the astronomer to infer the presence of massive bodies like black holes that are bending the path of the light. The picture in the upper right hand corner of this post gives a sense of how this curvature appears. Similarly, dark matter is detected by tracking the curvature of light. In other words, we don’t encounter dark matter or energy directly but only through its effects on other things.
Fascinatingly, physicists have actually mapped the dark matter in the universe through this sort of inferential process. It is clear that something is producing these effects, but the whole question is what this something is. And dark matter and energy are indeed strange critters that are conveniently undetectable by more direct means. It passes right through the sort of matter we’re acquainted with, and as a result is not detectable by our instruments insofar as those instruments are all constructed of the sort of matter through which dark matter passes. In a decade of research with specially designed instruments laying about 2300 meters beneath the earth (in Montana) to shield it from solar particle, we have yet to detect a single instance of dark matter. In some respects, dark matter is the perfect exemplification of object-oriented ontology, especially in its Harmanian formulation. For Graham all objects are vacuum packed and withdraw from one another. Dark matter and energy are perfect examples of this thesis. We only encounter it, in my formulation, through the differences it produces in other things. Yet here we have the interesting epistemological question of why we should affirm its existence at all. It quite literally is a ghost. Perhaps the physicist readers of this blog can help me out here. Dark matter is certainly very strange stuff.
UPDATE: Over at object-oriented philosophy Graham got the impression that I was suggesting that his withdrawn objects are like phlogiston. This is my fault. I wrote this post in haste while cooking dinner and watching a documentary on dark matter, so I wasn’t as clear as I should have been. Two distinct things are going on in this post. On the one hand, I’m raising questions about whether or not something like dark matter actually exists and what reason we have for believing that it exists. To my eyes it looks a lot like an ad hoc scientific hypothesis reflective of serious problems at the heart of our physics. However, on the other hand, if dark matter does exist, and if it has the properties physicists attribute to it, then 1) it would not be equivalent to phlogiston, and 2) it would be an excellent example of Graham’s withdrawn objects. Apologies to Graham. I did not mean to give the impression that I was lampooning his withdrawn objects as phlogiston. Quite the contrary.
Larval Subjects . 
September 30, 2009 at 4:28 am
It’s still a theory and there are others that account for the observed effects:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327164.200-phantom-menace-to-dark-matter-theory.html
I’m no philosopher but wouldn’t the Konisbery broadcast said that everthing was an inference?
We affirm the existence of something producing effects.
‘Therefore, being outside one’s experience simply means that one’s onticity – and, thus, one’s ontological condition – is not directly involved in these things’ inner causation; not that they cannot interact outwardly with one’s own causal acts (e.g., a stone resisting my efforts to lift it, portions of my brain resisting my efforts to reimagine a known name), thereby showing their causal powers and, consequently, their existence.
Thus one knows the things outside one’s experience as far as they affect one’s ontic consistency sensorially – a point clarified by Plato in Sophist 247 d9–e4 and illustratively exemplified by current astronomy’ research on unseen dark matter (thought some 30% of our subuniverse ) and unseen dark energy or quintessence (thought to be another 65% of our subuniverse, as energy lurking in the vacuum of space and responsible for the newly discovered net acceleration of the cosmological expansion); this dark matter and energy are quite elusive to affect our electronic detectors so as to finally arrive to our senses.’ (Crocco, Palindrome).’
September 30, 2009 at 4:58 am
Paul,
I’m wary of the expression that “x is just a theory”, mostly because of how this expression has functioned in an American political context. You seem to have a certain eagerness to claim that everything is a theory. As I understand it, a theory is not *less than* a fact, but is an *explanation* of facts. Theories get stronger or weaker by virtue of the number of facts they are able to enlist. If we wish to critique a theory we should not say “it’s a theory”, but should examine the facts that the theory enlists. Dark matter enlists some pretty good facts such as the peculiarities of motion at the edges of galaxies as well as the curvature of light. It is able to *explain* these facts. If we wish to argue with this we require theories that not only explain these facts but can evoke a host of other facts as well. Otherwise we should just drop the conversation altogether.
September 30, 2009 at 5:41 am
Levi,
I’ve got nothing against theories that account for our experience. Life wouldn’t be the same without them.
I was simply struck by a recent New Scientist article that proposed another theory (not ‘just’ a theory) attempting to explain the same effects – given that ‘dark matter’ is almost taken for granted as the explanation.
Yes, dark matter attempts to ‘explain’ certain ‘peculiarities of motion.’
It is one current theory (not ‘just’ a theory), certainly the one most widely known, and when I referred to the New Scientist article, it was simply to point to another ‘theory’ seeking to explain the same observed phenomena.
No doubt one day a community of scientists will be able to convince their peers that they are acting as reliable witnesses for the cause of those effects.
And then they will say ‘dark matter exists’ or perhaps something else:
” Now an Israeli physicist predicts that a similar but far more subtle anomaly in the orbits of the planets, if detected, might prove his own theory, known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND.
This provides an alternative theory to dark matter to explain why stars orbiting at the edge of spiral galaxies are not flung out into space. These stars are travelling at speeds too fast for conventional gravity from the mass at the heart of a spiral galaxy to hold them in their orbits, so something else must be keeping them on track.
One theory is that invisible dark matter provides that extra pull. But an alternative is MOND, devised in the early 1980s by Mordehai Milgrom, now at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.’
These terms like ‘one theory’ are not mine but those of a quite influential science journal (The New Scientist) – which is certainly not into some kind of social constructivism.
What might be interesting is whether this will be decided in our lifetimes!
I have only recently learned that Kant advanced many theories ahead of his time such as the origin of Saturn’s rings, the slowdown of the earth’s rotation under tidal drag, …and others. But you’re right, we should drop the conversation.
September 30, 2009 at 5:56 am
Yeah Paul, I agree… In maths, physics, neurology, and biology we’re witnessing a rennaissance. It’ll be interesting to see how it all shakes out. Interestingly in his later work Latour has abandoned the term “construction” and replaced it, following Souriau with the term “instauration”. In this way he thinks he better captures the sense in which it is a variety of actors that produce something, not just a subject-object relationship.
September 30, 2009 at 10:39 am
Yes, LS, there are some dark matters here: something we don’t know. But, dark energy would be like the King of Dark Matter, and I expect that it will ultimately be an emperor with no clothes.
Ron Cowen’s 2009-08-15 Science News feature,”Stars Go KaBOOM, Spilling Cosmic Secrets”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/46029/title/Stars_go_kaboom%2C_spilling_cosmic_secrets
puffs on simplistic standard-candle concepts of cosmology that have left us blown away by mysterious Dark Energy. My naive suggestion is that what they’re measuring is a pulsation rather than a ‘degree of acceleration’ and ‘expansion rate’ is too simplistic a term for what is happening to the universe.
Cowen seems to confirm some of my folk theory, discussing the most recent efforts to model type 1a supernovas, the “standard lightbulb” for measuring the distance of remote cosmic explosions. What the models find is that these supernovas may not be standard at all, which would certainly impact ideas of accelerating cosmic expansion that create this spectre of ‘Dark Energy’. I may be misunderstanding the implications here, but if ancient supernovas were brighter than more recent supernovas, this could imply that the universe is NOT expanding at an accelerating rate, which could lower the absurdly large estimates of Dark Energy.
Furthermore, these studies may even shed some light on the fluid dynamics of bio-contagious events! Cowen writes that approximations “do not apply to supernovas, which are highly asymmetrical, involve complex, turbulent flows, and explode under conditions of high density and extreme gravity”. There are two stages: “sluggish burning is known as DEFLAGRATION”; but, when “the flame travels sypersonically, a burning known as DETONATION” occurs. Some researchers now propose that “a hybrid model, in which a supernova begins as a deflagration and transitions to the more rapid detonation, might be the most likely scenario… But the underlying physics that would cause a transition from deflagration to detonation remains unclear”.
There’s another great article in that issue for the thinking of “differencing”, Susan Milius’s “Smart from the Start”: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/46034/title/Smart_from_the_start
September 30, 2009 at 10:46 am
To the present day, there are several ideas of what dark matter could be, even if there are still those who believe that the inconsistencies in observations can be better explained by revised theories of gravity (such as the MOND one indicated by Paul). I’d say that most physicists would tell you that someone will directly detect DM in the next 10 years (hence buying him/herself a sure Nobel Prize). Still, the example of withdrawing objects as applied to DM might fail, since DM might not interact much with ordinary matter, but it might as well have its own set of forces that allow it to interact in its ‘dark’ sector which in turn have effects on the distribution of our conventional matter [see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-theories-dark-matter%5D.
As for dark energy, the issue is different, because there the uncertainty around what it might be is much higher, because there is no way that DE can be experimentally detected at local scales. Properly said, DM is ‘indirectly observed’, while DE is just ‘inferred’ (still, you would say that it does exist in a way, since it has produced effects within the ‘network’ sice around it emerged, as possible explainations, other (unprovable) ideas such as the multiverse one, with its potential of scientifically resolving anthropic issues…but that is another big can of worms [http://astroweb1.physics.ox.ac.uk/~philcosmo2009/purpose.shtml]). Given its ‘inferred’ status, theories which explain and theories which explain away (local inhomogeneities in the expansion of the universe) have pretty much the same status.
However, as a general observation, I would be careful in picking ‘scientific’ objects to exemplify OOP. I believe that Graham would say that we should not confuse dark matter which has weak physical causal interactions, with his objects which are ontologically withdrawing from one another and interact vicariously. It can work as a metaphor, not as an example. This in order to both conserve the independence of OOP and to avoid being target of fatal objections by belligerant physicists with a dislike for philosophers.
September 30, 2009 at 2:27 pm
We only encounter it, in my formulation, through the differences it produces in other things
Is this untrue for any other thing humans perceive?
September 30, 2009 at 4:25 pm
[…] goes for Levi’s disappointing RELAPSE into saying that dark matter is like phlogiston and my objects are like dark matter, therefore […]
September 30, 2009 at 5:58 pm
[…] September 30, 2009 In an update to his last post: “UPDATE: Over at object-oriented philosophy Graham got the impression that I was suggesting th… […]
October 10, 2013 at 1:02 pm
We will make a new approach for an effect known as “Dark Energy” by an effect on gravitational field.
In an accelerated rocket, the dimensions of space towards movement due to ‘Lorentz Contraction’ are on continuous reduction.
Using the equivalence principle, we presume that in the gravitational field, the same thing would happen.
In this implicates in ‘dark energy effect’. The calculi show that in a 7%-contraction for each billion years would explain our observation of galaxies in accelerated separation.
Lorentz Contraction
If we suppose that gravitational field contracts the space around it (including everything within), we can explain the accelerated separation from galaxy through this contraction without postulating ‘dark energy’.
The contraction of space made by gravity would cause a kind of ‘illusion of optic’, seem like, as presented below, that galaxies depart fastly.
The contraction of space would be equivalent to relativistic effect which occurs in a special nave in high-speed L.M.: With regard to an observer in an inertial referential stopped compared to a nave, the observer and everything is on it, including own nave, has its dimension contracted towards to movement of nave compared to a stopped observer (Lorentz Contraction).
This means that the ‘rule’ (measuring instruments) within the nave is smaller than the observer outside of moving nave.
The consequence is, with this ‘reduced rule’, this moving observer would measure things bigger than the observer would measure out of nave.
An accelerated rocket and its continuous contraction
In the same way, if we think of an accelerated increasing speed rocket, its length towards movement – compared to an inertial reference – will be smaller, and ‘rule’ within the nave will decrease continuously compared to this observer.
We would think of ‘equivalence principle’ to justify that gravitational field would have the same effect on ‘rules’ (measuring instruments) as an accelerated rocket would do within the nave, but, now, towards all gravitational field and not, in the case of rocket, only at acceleration speed.
I.e., the gravitational field would make that all rules within this field would be continuously smaller regarded to an observer outside of gravitational field and this would make, as we can see, these observers see things out of field be away fastly.
Anyway, even if “equivalence principle” can’t be applied into a gravitational field to show that the space is contracting around it, we can take it as a new effect on gravitational fields and this would explain the ‘dark energy effect’.
The “dark energy” through gravitational contraction:
Let’s think what would happen if a light emitted by a star from a distant galaxy would arrive into our planet:
Our galaxy, as well as distant galaxies, would be in continuous contraction, as seen before, due to gravity.
A photon emitted by a star from this distant galaxy, after living its galaxy, would go through by an “empty” big space, without so much gravitational influence, until finally arrives into our galaxy and, lastly, to our planet.
During this long coursed way (sometimes billion years), this photon would suffer few gravitational effect and its wavelength would be little affected.
However, during this period, our system (our rules) would still decreasing due to gravitational field, and when this photon finally arrives here, we would measure its wavelength with a reduced ‘rule’ compared to what we had had at the moment when this photon was emitted from galaxy.
So, in our measurement would verify if this photon had suffered Redshift because, with reduced rule, we would measure a wavelength longer than those was measured. The traditional explanation is “Shift for Red” happened due to Doppler Effect compared to galaxy separation speed!
End of Dark Energy
Farthest a galaxy is from viewpoint, more time this light will take to arrive us and more shrunken our ‘rule’ will be to measure this photon since it had been emitted; so it would be bigger than wavelength, which would induce us to think of faster galaxy separation speed.
This acceleration (this new explanation, only visible) from distant galaxies took astronomers to postulate the existence of a “Dark Energy” would have a repulsive effect, seems like they are getting away faster.
But if acceleration is due to our own scale reduction, this dark energy wouldn’t be necessary anymore, because what makes this separation accelerated is, actually, our own special contraction. This would be the end of dark energy.