SSM Plebiscite

[PaulP]

Well that isn't surprising.

But even your Comos article doesn't support your claims, it's not debating the existence of those things(dark or light) whatever they may be, it's debating the explanations and understanding of them, and that is exactly what science is about!

I know you realise none of this affects your religion, science is not an attack on religion, it never was and never will be. But you cannot claim science is dogmatic or a religion if a scientists asks you for proof, that is a religious perspective imposed on science.

You cannot prove religion by disproving science, it's a false premise.

I haven't been anywhere near a church for over 30 years, save for the odd wedding (getting rarer) and the odd funeral (getting more common). I can assure you I'm not religious.

Let me give you my understanding of this cosmological boob job that we're discussing.

The idea that the amount of matter and energy is conserved is originally a theological and philosophical idea, from the Ancient Greek materialist philosophers, who like their modern counterparts were atheists, and thus had no need for God. In their eyes, there was no mystery, no funny buggers, no weird forces, everything was just matter. This idea was taken up in the 17th Century scientific revolution, when it was proposed that the Universe was made up of a fixed amount of matter, put there by God at the beginning, and therefore unchanging. As for energy, the idea was that God basically started the whole universe going by pressing the start button and so all movement that we observe and all energy is unchanging because it is divine and god given. There is in fact no evidence anywhere that matter and energy in the universe does not change. This is an assumption. This assumption is just a part of science and is not really questioned.

In the 1980's, it was noticed that the stars of certain galaxies were revolving around the centres of those galaxies much too quickly based on the amount of matter within them, and certain galaxies were attracting each other far too strongly for the amount of matter present. AT this point there are two options :
1. the theory of gravity / galaxies is wrong and there may be other explanations
2. there must be some other extra matter there that we can't detect i.e dark matter.

Why was the first option never investigated ?

Following on from this, now that we have all this extra matter in the universe, it follows that the forces of gravitation must also be much stronger. According to the calcs, this extra gravity meant that firstly the rate of the expansion of the universe should slow down, and then once its stops expanding it starts to contract and becomes smaller and smaller and eventually ends up as the big Crunch. Around the year 2000, it was discovered that galaxies at the edge of our universe were not slowing down as the model expected, the rate of expansion was in fact speeding up. So once again, rather than looking at alternative explanations for this mismatch, physicists said there must be some form of energy that is pushing against all this extra mass to keep the universe expanding, and we'll call it dark energy. Once again, no evidence for this at all.

I can tell you, in all honesty, I really want there to be dark matter and dark energy, because if it's true it means that the universe has a deep dark subconscious that controls the bits we can see, just like us. An idea that I find incredibly appealing.

"Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest."