Sabine Hossenfelder Evolves on Dark Matter

 

At her blog, Backreaction, Sabine Hossenfelder once again addresses the nature of dark matter. Is it a particle or is it a modification of gravity? Her latest conclusion?

So, the conclusion that I have arrived at is that the distinction between dark matter and modified gravity is a false dichotomy. The answer isn’t either–or, it’s both. The question is just how to combine them.

This isn’t news to me. I’ve been saying for years that dark matter and modified gravity are the same thing (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). What Sabena and her colleagues don’t know is that this phenomenon is a remnant of inflation. Only a small part of the oscillatory energy at the end of inflation decayed into standard model particles. The rest is still there in space, where it causes curvature and mimics matter, although it isn’t matter. You can find a paper here that explains how spacetime curvature without matter can look like space with matter.

So when will physicists learn what dark matter is? I don’t know. Maybe never. They certainly won’t learn it from me because they get very angry and refuse to listen when a nonphysicist tries to tell them anything.

Announcing Publication of My Book!

 

A couple of posts ago, I introduced my new book, The Book of the Universe. At the time, it was available only online. I’m happy to say that it has now been published and copies can be ordered here.

The Black Hole Information Loss Problem Is Unsolvable? Not by a Long Shot!

 

I haven’t been blogging lately because there’s simply no progress being made in fundamental physics, so there’s nothing to blog about. Even Sabine Hossenfelder, one of the most prolific physics bloggers still blogging frequently, has had little current news to comment on for her blog Backreaction and is resorting to pedagogical posts on physics fundamentals, or alternatively, complaining that her physics colleagues are ignoring the need for new approaches to break the impasse in fundamental research in favor of doing the same things as always to ensure a steady paycheck. I don’t know what she expects them to do, and neither do they, and neither does she.

The Book of the Universe

In an attempt to find a more accessible format for the ideas that I’ve been presenting on this blog, I’ve compiled the major ideas into a book, which I call The Book of the Universe. It’s not very long—only about 150 pages—but it’s dense (in ideas, of course). For the time being, you can only access it via the link here.


I’ve never allowed comments on this blog because I’m not interested in arguing about these ideas. However, I am interested in constructive comments on this new book. You can e-mail me at


dicksrealitymail@gmail.com


I won’t answer mean, nasty, or unintelligible messages, but I will do my best to respond as appropriate.

Sean Carroll Disappoints with “Something Deeply Hidden”

Sean Carroll has written a new book called “Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime.” You can find a review of it by Peter Woit here amd another by Sabine Hossenfelder here.

When someone writes a book like this, I’m always hopeful that the last sentence won’t be something like, “So we still don’t have the answers, but I expect that we’ll see significant progress on these difficult puzzles in the near future.” Unfortunately, that’s how Sean’s book ends, so for me it’s a big disappointment.

I promise you that my book, if it ever gets finished and published, will not end that way.

A Thought That Thinks Itself

In an early post on this blog, I pointed out that human consciousness has two aspects: temporal and atemporal. The temporal aspect never changes; ”I” am the same person from birth to death. The temporal aspect reflects all of the changes that take place in my life. The temporal aspect is generated in my brain, while the atemporal aspect is independent of the brain—a thought thinking itself. In this post, I take a closer look at human consciousness, particularly the atemporal aspect.

On the "Hard Problem" of Consciousness and Being One with Everything

Human consciousness is a major puzzle for physicists and philosophers. It is not the same as awareness, which is common to all living things and seems to be explainable by comparatively well-known brain mechanisms.  Consciousness includes an element of subjective feelings that so far has defied explanation. Scientists know it exists and think it is generated in the brain, but they can’t figure out how. This is what philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness (awareness is the easy problem). He calls this subjective element conscious experience. He explains it here:

When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.

On the Mind/Body Problem

Most scientists believe that mind, or consciousness, is an epiphenomenon of brain function, so they would state the mind-body problem as, “How does the brain create the intensely personal experience of consciousness?” David Chalmers calls this “the hard problem” of consciousness; it has never been definitively answered.

Readers of this blog should know that this question has no answer because the brain doesn’t create consciousness. Mind creates itself as a logical entity that is atemporal and aspatial, that is, it has no position in space or time. It does have a logical structure in which all possible logical concepts imply or are implied by each other, combining in all possible ways to form other concepts. As I explained here, this logical structure forms a layered hierarchy of logical concepts in which the layers can be seen as occurring at different times. In this view, mind becomes a physical universe in which there are brains that create temporal or physical pictures of mind that are different in each brain. The reason that philosophers find the mind-body problem so difficult is that they don’t know that there are two aspects to mind and the universe: one atemporal, aspatial, and purely logical, and one temporal, spatial, and physical.  (Actually, you can think of the logical universe as physical too, just in a different sense, and I actually did that in an early post, but lately I’ve been using “physical” to mean just the temporal universe.)

Sabine Hossenfelder Argues for Superfluid Dark Matter

A new paper on the arXiv by Hossenfelder and Mistele shows impressive agreement  between the predictions of a superfluid dark matter model and actual measurements on 64 of a set of 65 galaxies. The model falls somewhere between particle dark matter models and modified gravity models. I find that while the model gets the effects right it attributes them to the wrong physics. However, it may be the best that can be done by physicists who are working in the current paradigm and are unaware of the spacetime model that I’ve been covering in this blog. In this post I’ll show where Sabine is right and where she’s wrong.

Physics Q&A #6. What Is Mass?

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 Question #6. What is mass? For an elementary fermion (lepton or quark), mass is the inverse of the precision with which the location of a stationary particle can be known. This makes sense, because mass is defined as a measure of inertia or resistance to acceleration. Resistance to movement and having a known or fixed location are really the same thing. For a composite particle such as a baryon, mass is mostly binding energy (gluons), the masses of the elementary constituents (quarks) contributing very little to the baryon mass. For a massive gauge boson, mass is the inverse of the range of the force carried by the particle.

The masses of the elementary particles are said to be determined by the Higgs field. See this post to learn all about the Higgs and its relation to mass

Plato and Me

When I stated this blog in 2014, my first couple of posts introduced me, a retired electrical engineer, and the subject matter I hoped to cover, which is the connection between physics and consciousness and how it leads to solutions to nature’s greatest puzzles. Since I’m not trained as a philosopher. It has taken me this long to realize that some of the metaphysical concepts I covered in my third post are very close to Plato’s theory of forms or theory of ideas. I find that his approach is different from mine but reaches some of the same conclusions, and it’s enlightening to look at the subject from both viewpoints. That’s what I’ll try to show in this post, but first I have to say that I think it’s pretty exciting to be exploring the same ground that Plato did 2400 years ago, especially since we seem to agree in important ways.

Physics Q&A #5. Why Is Gravity So Weak?

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 Question #5. Why is gravity so weak? Gravity between spacetime points is actually quite strong, but points where elementary fermions are located are gravitationally decoupled from the overall spacetime by the ratio of the particle's mass to the Planck mass—22 orders of magnitude in the case of the electron. This makes gravity a very weak force for matter.

Our spacetime model adopts a harmonic oscillator model for a stationary electron. In this model, the underlying point's creation time is modulated sinusoidally at frequency ω where, from quantum mechanics, ω = mc²/Ñ. Thus, the wave function includes a phase difference between the local time at a particle point and the global time of the universe, which is the local time at every point that does not contain a particle. It is because the particle is out of phase with spacetime as a whole for most of the time that gravity is so weak for particles.

Sabine Hossenfelder: Looking in the Wrong Places

Looking in the Wrong Places is a new Edge essay by prominent theoretician and prolific writer/blogger Sabine Hossenfelder. It’s basically a lament about the lack of progress that’s hampered theoretical physics for a long time, as summarized in the following paragraph.

The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.

Modified Gravity versus Particle Dark Matter

Sabine Hossenfelder is offering a new version of modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND, which she calls Covariant Emergent Gravity, or CEG. She explains it at her blog Backreaction here and in an arXiv paper here. She shows that CEG fits the data on the radial acceleration of stars in galaxies much better than particle dark matter. There’s no doubt that she’s right. The problem is that there’s ample evidence for the existence of dark matter, and no known reason why the acceleration of gravity should suddenly change at some distance from a center of mass.

Why Is There Something Rather THan Nothing?

“Why is there something rather than nothing? It’s a classic puzzle that’s getting a lot of attention now. Sean Carroll has just posted his opinion on the arXiv—he’s decided there’s no answer. Here’s his abstract:

It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.