re: Dark matter and dark energy.

quote:

---

I doubt it much like I doubt inflation theory but who am I to argue with the brightest minds in the world?

---

Yeah, you're definitely swimming against the stream in science.

But that's okay. A lot of people are and that's what keeps science honest. Pity that it doesn't work as well in religion and politics.

quote:

---

We have for a long time been desperate to understand gravity so much so that anything that works mathematically seems to be easily accepted to the point that some really believe our universe is just a brane floating on another infinite brane world of universes or some shite like it.

---

It's called M Theory. No one knows how the name for the theory originated but it deals with circumstances outside our Universe. According to the theory, our Universe originated as the result of two branes, short for membranes, bumping together.

It's strange, but physicists are finding that they must set aside any built-in human biases if they are to understand the cosmos. They must think outside the human box. That's very difficult but I personally find that reductionism helps very much.

quote:

---

Mathematics in general relativity predict that white holes are theoretically possible but just because the math is there doesn't mean we should predict an impossible object to actually exist.

---

Math is a great tool for predicting and describing the physical world. We must recognize, however, that everything it predicts is not necessarily real or possible. For example, math says that time travel is possible both forward and backward. Travel into the future has been proved but going back in time is not possible.

Neither are white holes. Once thought to be the "other end" of black holes, they have fallen out of favor since Leonard Susskind won his battle with Stephen Hawking about whether or not information is conserved or lost in a black hole. Hawking argued that information is lost forever when an object enters a black hole. Susskind successfully argued the opposite, that the laws of physics prevented a loss of info.

Amazingly, when Hawking accepted his defeat and viewed black holes from Susskind's perspective, he discovered that black holes actually leak radiation and will evaporate over trillions of years.

quote:

---

We may never understand gravity and maybe singularities are really there and we will never know what lies beyond.

---

One of the rules of physics theories is that when you come up against a singularity, your math is off. It's a dead end. Like a rat in a maze, you have to go in a new direction. That's why Edward Witten's work is so astounding. He is not hitting any singularities.

Perhaps there aren't any singularities in existence. That seems logical. Maybe there's no smallest or largest. I like to think that existence is some weird version of a circle; that when you get to a certain point there's no difference in large and small. Existence is strange but hopefully not stranger than we can imagine.