Around twenty five hundred years ago, Greeks had determined that the earth was round and orbited the sun. In a classroom in Neapolis (modern Naples) a twenty five year old pupil, Aeschylius, sat at the feet of Sapphocles, a renowned scientist and teacher.
“I completed my assignment from last week but I just couldn’t come up with your solution.” Aeschylius handed his abacus to his mentor.
“This is the answer I found at first,” he smiled and handed it back. “The problem is that it cannot be true based on the length of our year and the difference in shadow length of a standard staff between here and Alexandria at midsummer at midday.”
“You came up with the same number?”
“At first. Yes.”
“I feel a little better but the number is off by a factor of six or seven from what you published. Not six percent off but six times smaller.”
“I have invented a solution for the discrepancy, young Aesch.”
“Explain, Sir. Please.”
“Dark matter. We are surrounded by it. Can’t see it, feel, smell, taste or hear it but it fills the immensity of space. It alters the paths of planets and stars.”
There was a long period of silence. Aeschylius stood, brushed the dust of his tunic and asked, “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m deadly serious, young man,” he stated with indignation.
“Dark matter? That’s the best you’ve got? I mean, the name shows no class, no chutzpa, no creativity. But,” he raised a finger, “I give you credit for making up a whopper as a fudge factor instead of admitting you have absolutely no idea what’s really operative here.”
“Young man!” He fumed. “The audacity!”
“The mendacity!” he countered.
“You little Aesch! Out! Get out of this school right now!” Sapphocles bellowed at the top of his lungs and pointed to the door.
“People in the future will laugh at you. Ha! Dark matter? Only a sap would accept that.” With that he ran, escaping the hail of epithets and chunks of gypsum.
Twenty five hundred years later theoretical physicists found that the mass at the center of galaxies was too small to keep all the stars together. The mass of the black hole and central massive stars were off by a factor of six or seven. So, they invented dark matter, stuff that can’t be measured or detected and declared that 85% of the universe consisted of it. They didn’t stop there. Dark energy is causing the universe to expand faster then they think it should.
So, we’ve made a great amount of progress in the last two point five millennia. Brilliant.
Oh, lets see how this dark drivel actually fits into the Big Bang Model (Big BM [Too crass? Go with BBM]) If dark matter preexisted the big bang and occupied our space, by its gravitational effects it could have accelerated the initial expansion of the infant universe, which is good because it had to grow at or above the speed of light for a while. If it were created with the Big BM, the universe could not have expanded as quickly as is hypothesized due to excessive gravitational effects. It must, therefore, have existed prior. But that can’t be right because nothing existed before, right? Conundrum.
More likely, the notion of dark matter is simply a compensation for ignorance of physical principles we have not yet defined, perhaps one in which the formula for gravity works accurately at the level of a solar system but not as well at the galactic scale.
Have I ever mentioned how string theory originated in the dark ages? No? Just wait.