The Stark Truth: What if Dark Matter / Energy are not "real"; only Emergent Properties?

[amberwolf]

A thought I have had jelling within me for at least a decade, maybe longer, that I could never catch and tease the thread out into words on a page:


The Stark Truth:
What if my side your side myside yourside mysideyourside meant something *else*?

What if our universe is just the emergent properties of the metabolic byproduct of the other side of the brane it resides within?

A very very simplified picture is a magnet on one side of a sheet of paper, and iron filings on the other (our side). Any change or move of the magnet directly restructures our side.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy are not truly understood.

I can't do math, so I can't know anything about it, but I don' think dark matter is matter, or any other kind of object. i don't think there is actually any *thing* there to look for or find. I think it is ripples or deformations in spacetime itself that were created during the expansion of same. Like the distortions you get in the weave of a fabric as you unroll it, only in three, or even four dimensions. Or more. The way it distorts is the same way gravity caused by mass does, so it does the same thing and causes actual mass to collect in the "folds and creases" and other warp/weft damage to the fabric.

Certain interactions, like the Bullet Galaxy Cluster: Perhaps the warped space time (or rather whatever underlies it) simply keeps rippling thru, like picking up a sheet and doing whatever you call it to straighten it out cross the bed? The ripples can interact with each other just like gravity interacts with itself, because it isn't thing, it's an effect, an emergent property. The wind isn't a thing, it's just a pressure gradient in a gas.

We don't actually understand spacetime itself, we have analogies for it that work up to some level, and we have at least a handful of conflicting math models that all are right about some things but wehn you get to some point none of them are perfectly predictive.

From the other way of thinking: We haven't found actaul dark matter particles yet, but just because we didn't detect a particle form of DM in 40 years doesn't mean it isn't there. it means we didnt' detect it. Why we didn't detect it matters, for what it is--is it because it doesn't interact except gravitationally, and that in our deep well it's effects are too small to see, or because it cannot work inside a well like this, unless it is the thing causing the well, like the galaxy halo, or the filaments galaxys form along.

If it acts like matter gravitationally, what if it is matter (or something) in another "plane' that we can't see? It's stuff in some other dimension and we will *NEVER* be able to detect it becaues it is not *HERE*.

DM can't radiate energy here. if it did we could detect it. It would interact with photons and regualr matter. But if DM does radiate...in another universe...it loses energy *there*, and that affects how it gravitates *here*. We could detect *that*, if we weren't stuck in the well masking it?

Either way, i don't believe it's here as a thing, just an effect of something else.

From various leading theories, Dark Energy is almost certainly the energy of spacetime itself, where away from matter it *increases*. It could even be the energy lost from that other universe where DM "lives". The two are part of the same brane, one on each "side" of it, so it is a system and the rules we know of still apply--no energy loss from a system as a whole, so the energy lost there via whatever mechanism translates into our spacetime and causes the expansion, dragging that other universe along with it, etc.?

Right now, within our universe, there is (appears to be) actual energy gain, meaning thermodynamics doesn't actually work on universe scale, and that's a problem because it should work at all scales. But, thermodynamics does hold within the expanding spacetime if that includes the other "side" of the brane. If the other side of the brane is contracting as we expand, there is no energy loss or gain. it just moves from one side to the other. We can't see this geometry change because it is the brane itself and we exist within it and thus cannot detect it. Any change to it changes the actual measuring instrument itself and everything around it equally, so there is no change to detect, other than the energy transfer. Unfortunately that means that true or not, we can never know that, it is unfalsifiable and unverifiable.




Now, that said:

If this concept is true, would that make it possible to *manipulate* the phenomenon? We can't manipulate DE or DM directly because it simply isn't possible with the concepts as what they are in current "models" (theories?) right? but...if they are emergent phenomena instead...maybe something could. It might even be that they cannot be manipulated from this side.

So....if there were a civilization (or being, or whatever) capaable of manipulating sufficient masses, it could enginner changes in the emergent properties that cause our universe (or the other one) to do what it's doing.

What if, something being done on the other side of the brane caused the accelertion of the expansion of the universe on this side? Because they had some reason to want to hurry along their contraction?

Doesn't matter if they were aware of us, or cared. Just that "they" might be trying to force a change in their own universe to some self-advantage. They might even never have learned about or considered the 2sided brane model at all. They may not even have science as we understand it. They just know how to move things, make them do this stuff, and can. Perhaps that life is an emergent property of their spacetime/matter itself, and not restricted to tiny planetary scales, and never was. (this could also be true on our side, but if we put this on the other one then it doesn't require explanation as it can't be detected always hide your mirrors, magnets, and ring-joints in your magic tricks).

For our purposes it doesn't actually matter what causes it, the effects we already know about and they are happening. But it is fun to imagine what might be happening and why.

We don't even know what that side "looks" like. it could be a single gigantic mass with no space or that is all of space. it doesn't have to have any of our rules, beyond having the constraint that energy is a constant between the two systems. It could be a single gigantic "cell", or even a boltzmann brain. :lol: It would effectively be our god even if it doesn't know we exist, because it's simple act of existing creates us by reordering our universe. They don't have to have stars, galaxies, or anything resembling our matter at all.

 

[harrisonpatm]

Dark matter isn't a thing to look for. It's observations that attempt to explain what we don't know about the universe. We don't know what it is out there that we don't see, therefore, the phrase we use to describe what we don't know is "dark matter."

 

[offGridDownUnder]

A particle isn't a "thing".

It's a collection of observations that reliably accompany each other - thus we associate them. And it's a theory that the observations accompany each other because there is "something" there.

Refining this, due to our experience in (human) bodies interacting with what we encounter and keeping track (memory) we organize our experience in an approach that works well presuming that there are "things" that are independent of other "things" - this bit of matter is independent of that bit of matter and each continues through "time" with their own identity.

That last bit is critical - we presume persistence through time - that a "thing" is the same "thing", as if a particle has some identity that does not change through time. However, our experience/observation is just of the properties of the phenomenon - there is no characteristic independent of the experience/observation/measurement that identifies a particle - no identity. We are just relying on the time/location aspect and presuming there is a thing there that persists through time. We are grouping observations and assigning identity.

All we actually observe, however, is that our experience/observation/measurements seem to persist vs. our organization of time and location. That indicates recurring phenomena, but does not require recurring existence.

We presume "time" and "matter" and "space" as rather fundamental components of anything else we attempt to make sense of, and thus we generally compose new ideas of how to organize our experiences (observations) in terms of those components.

What does all this have to do with what you are writing? I'm glad you asked.

The purpose of a theory is to provide a basis for proposing tests. A test is a proposal for an experience/observation/measurement which can support or contradict the theory. That's it. It goes no further.

Kurt Godel showed that there are truths that cannot be proven, despite being true - he's worth reading up on. @amberwolf your theory is as valid as any other, in that it may lead to testable proposals? Perhaps something that I've written here may be of interest to you. I wrote it because I thought what you wrote was interesting.

 

[Sturmey]

The Stark Truth: What if Dark Matter / Energy are not "real"; only Emergent Properties?​

Your title alone is not that far off a common philosophical position. Immanuel Kant for example thinks that we can never as such know reality, 'the thing in itself '. But we can observe its effects, the phenomena. This position was not far off earlier 13 century Thomas Aquinas position that we can 'only know God by his effects'. Both of the above do not deny reality but Idealist's would go further and possibly say, 'If we can know nothing about reality, how can we say it exists'. i.e. All we can ever talk about is Phenomena. It is from observing phenomena that we posit existence to objects. i.e. We create objects by naming them (Nominalism). Objects then become mere ideas in our heads.
The great Irish idealist philosopher George Berkeley is often associated with the question, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" There are different ways of seeing things. (perspectivism ?)

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[offGridDownUnder]

All we can ever talk about is Phenomena. It is from observing phenomena that we posit existence to objects. i.e. We create objects by naming them

There is actually quite a bit in this phrasing. I would beware of the presumption that 'objects' have primary meaning and existence, for instance (not you, @Sturmey, I mean the royal you).

I distinguish between what is so, and what I can prove. I distinguish between what I can know and what I can prove.

It is difficult to prove that, of course. <= Yes, I mean to be clever writing that, but I consider the distinction to be bedrock.