Existence of Dark Matter Challenged

A recent paper is causing a stir among cosmologists and bloggers because it appears to present evidence that dark matter may not exist. The authors’ observations reveal a strong correlation between the gravitational acceleration observed to be acting on stars in galaxies and the gravitational acceleration inferred from the distribution of luminous (baryonic) matter. If dark matter is a particle, as almost everyone has been assuming, it can’t explain this behavior. Ethan Siegel at Starts with a Bang comments on the situation here and Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction discusses it here.

Physics Q&A#4. The Cosmological Constant

I spend a lot of time on this blog explaining a physical spacetime model and the underlying metaphysics. In this series of posts, each entry poses a physics question for the spacetime model, along with the answer.

Physics Qustion #4. The Cosmological Constant Problem (Dark Energy Problem).
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation confirm that the universe is flat. There is not enough matter in it to explain this, so it is thought that there must be some "dark energy" that acts like Einstein's cosmological constant and has just the right value to make the universe flat. Supernova measurements show that the universal expansion is accelerating, and the dark energy is thought to be responsible for this effect as well. Physicists have no idea what this dark energy might be or how it gets so finely tuned as to make the universe perfectly flat. The best candidate, vacuum energy density, doesn't work, because the cosmological constant is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than the vacuum energy density calculated using the Standard Model.

Has Ed Witten Given Up On Consciousness?

Sad to say, but many physicists seem to be on the verge of giving up. Some think they’ll never know how the universe came to be, The multiverse is basically a cop-out, an excuse for abandoning the search for answers. The other big bugaboo is consciousness. As John Horgan reports on Scientific American’s Cross-Check, no less a superstar than Edward Witten now believes that consciousness “will remain a mystery.” All this pessimism comes as a result of many decades of failure to make significant progress on the hard questions.

Smolin and Unger Get It Spectacularly Wrong

Physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute has been saying for some years tht physics and cosmology are in crisis. The standard models are highly successful as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough, and for decades, there’s been a frustrating failure of all attempts to go beyond them. Sabine Hossenfelder agrees. In a post for Fortune, she writes:

750-GeV Bump Is A Third-Generation Higgs Boson--Not

Update August 5, 2016: The LHC collaborations have announced that the 750-GeV bump they saw in their 2015 data is not there in their 2016 data. It was a statistical fluke, so you can ignore this post--it's wrong. It shows once again that in physics,if you know the answer you're looking for, you can always find a way to get it.

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A small excess of decays to two photons at a mass of 750 GeV, seen by both the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the LHC, has the physics community in a tizzy. If confirmed, the bump is evidence for a new particle that isn’t predicted by the Standard Model, thereby qualifying as the long-sought “new physics” that could break the current doldrums in particle physics. Theorists have already published dozens of papers attempting to explain the small bump in the data. The new particle would be a boson, most closely resembling a heavy Higgs boson with six times the 125-GeV mass of the known Higgs.

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think the LHC’s bump is real. I predict that it is in fact a heavy Higgs boson. It turns out that such a particle can be easily explained in the context of the spacetime model that is the subject of this blog.

Proton Structure Isn't Fixed

Science Alert reports that, “Physicists are about to test a hypothesis that could rewrite the textbooks.” This momentous hypothesis is that the structure of the proton varies. If the proton is in an atomic nucleus, its structure may be different than if it’s a free proton.

According to the model that I’m presenting in this blog, this hypothesis is true! To see this, we can use the standard proton model which says that the proton is composed of three quarks. When the proton is in an atomic nucleus with other protons and neutrons, the quarks in all of the nucleons interpenetrate, that is, they get all mixed up so it’s impossible to tell which quarks belong to which nucleon. That’s why it’s impossible to separate the nucleons without applying enormous force and breaking them into a zillion pieces. It’s said that they are held together by the strong force, one of nature’s four forces, along with gravity, the electromagnetic force and the weak force.

If the proposed test is well done, I predict it will succeed.

Time Goes Backwards, But Not In A Mirror

An item on Quartz reports that two separate groups of scientists have decided that there may be a “mirror universe” in which time moves backwards. That time moves backwards shouldn’t surprise readers of this blog. However, this doesn’t happen in some mirror universe, but in our very own world. As I explained here, time in our universe takes a step backwards for every step forwards, so we live in a superposition of forward-time and backward-time universes. We only see the forward-time universe because the expansion of the universe guarantees that one direction of time always has more spacetime points and therefore more particles than antiparticles. All the antiparticles were annihilated, leaving essentially no trace of the backward-time universe. However, all of the backward-time spacetime points are still around  because points don’t annihilate. This is a good thing because we couldn’t explain the stardard model without them. Follow the link for more information.

750-GeV Bunp Excites Theorists

At A Quantum Diaries Survivor, Tommaso Dorigo estimates that since the LHC collaborations announced that they had found a small bump in their data at 750 GeV, more than 200 papers attempting to explain it have appeared. He maintains a healthy skepticism about the significance of the bump and opines that most of the papers probably don’t have the answer. nor do I. He singles out one paper that he thinks is worth reading, but unfortunately, it depends on supersymmetry, which doesn’t exist.

 This sudden deluge of papers triggered by an unverified bump shows how desperate the theorists are to find something new to theorize about. They’ve had essentially nothing for thirty years, and they’re starving. It’s frustrating to watch them stumbling around in the dark when so many of the answers they’re seeking are right here.

Want To Put The Fizz Back In Physics? Try A New Paradigm.

On Scientific American’s Cross-Check, blogger John Horgan offers a post entitled “How Physics Lost Its Fizz,” arguing that “Physics, which decades ago seemed capable of answering the deepest mysteries of existence, is now just recycling once-exciting ideas.” That’s true, of course, but what I want to tell you about isn’t John’s thoughts but a comment from one of his readers, identified only as daktari.

The comment is about the need for a new paradigm from time to time to allow continued progress in science, a point of view that I blogged on here. The spacetime model that I talk about in this blog is such a new paradigm, capable of putting the fizz back in physics.

Physics Q&A #3. Fate of the Universe

I spend a lot of time on this blog explaining a physical spacetime model and the underlying metaphysics. In this series of posts, each entry poses a physics question for the spacetime model, along with the answer. A separate series of posts will answer metaphysics questions.

Physics Question #3. Will the universe expand forever or eventually collapse? The recently observed acceleration of the expansion of the universe seems to say that the universe will expand forever. In my spacetime model, the structure of spacetime is determined by a lattice of fermionic points pushed together by gravity and held apart by the degeneracy pressure that comes from their fermionic nature, that is, they obey the Pauli exclusion principle. In astrophysics, it is well established that dying stars can have a similar balance of forces. If large enough, such stars will collapse to form black holes. If too small, they remain dead stars--neutron stars, for example. The spacetime of the inflaton spacetime model is expanding, so it is like a degenerate star that is getting bigger. Eventually, its gravity should overcome its degeneracy pressure, and the universe should collapse to a black hole. The final state is different from the initial state, so there would probably not be a bounce leading to a new big bang.