Thursday, November 13, 2014

Win Some, Lose Some


A couple of new takes on dark matter showed up this week. One is completely wrong and the other is exactly right in concept if not in the model proposed to explain the concept.

In Physical Review Letters, a group of British and Italian physicists has published their conclusion that dark energy is increasing as it feeds off dark matter. As we saw here, dark energy is the proliferation of spacetime points by self-reproduction. It drives inflation, ultimately leaving spacetime in a state of coherent oscillation. The oscillation energy is dark matter, some of which decays to form luminous ordinary matter. So these scientists have it exactly backwards, Dark matter comes from dark energy; it doesn’t decay to dark energy.

On the arXiv, P.Q. Hung and K.J. Ludwick have come out with a model that has the inflaton (the field that drives inflation, which we know is dark energy) decaying to dark matter (correct), a proportion of which decays to luminous matter (correct). Their mathematical analysis is based on something called the luminogenesis model, which isn’t a very widely accepted model. I don’t understand the mathematics, but it looks way too complicated to be correct. However, it’s remarkable that they have the basic interaction right. Unfortunately, their fellow physicists will probably ignore it.