• Sam_Bass@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    imho gravitons are the key to interstellar travel. we need to find a way to aggregate and harness them

  • TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 hours ago

    This guy is mostly famous from poor quality history channel scifi bullshit “documentaries”.

  • HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub
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    7 hours ago

    To be fair, this is the level of physics where if they discover things right out of fantasy book (teleportation, mind reading, transmutation etc) I wouldn’t be even surprised.

      • Bluewing@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        There are a few that have had tea with Cthulu. Not many, but a few. Physics at this level is sometimes about taking a good hit from a pipe and going, “What if” and “What might happen if”

        Then they let real mathematicians and engineers figure it out to see if they hit on a lucky guess, Oh and Grad students. Can’t forget the all important Grad students.

    • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      He maybe means a parallel universe. Or a higher order dimension like in string theory. This guy is a string theorist so probably the latter.

    • Zacryon@feddit.org
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      4 hours ago

      If you can place a dimension that is orthogonal between two dimensions, then those two dimensions are parallel. /j

    • cmhe@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      That is true for space dimensions, but there is also a time dimension, and would another dimension, that is ‘orthogonal’ to a time dimension not be some kind of dimension that offers alternative time lines?

    • deft@lemmy.wtf
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      10 hours ago

      There is not a single thing we know about dimensions. I don’t believe it

    • Impractical_Island@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Orthogonality is relative in the human condition.

      So we have six primary orthogonal directions (up/down, left/right, back/forth), and with seven colors we get the 42 permutations of entanglement that make up the human condition.

      But no, seriously, you have cube with six orthogonal directions, yea? But if you cut a corner off, that’s a fundamentally different orthogonal indicator as the other still-existing six, right? So that corner can be used as an indicator of a seventh orthogonal direction in three dimensional space. Thus, our neurons are calculating higher dimensional entanglements through a complex simulation of countless abelien sandpile models to detect aberrations in permuability that allow us to predict the future several seconds in advance, and so we are not IN a simulation, but rather each of us are our OWN simulation derived by the parameters of a topological matrix; that which causes the shadows on the cave wall.

        • Impractical_Island@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          I literally stated the primary orthogonal directions of the three dimensions we physically navigate, which you literally quoted, but the Earth is not a real physical objective external to us nor is linear causality the only plane of causality and there are eleven dimensions relative to our independent phenomenon, though any being can möbiate beyond that through perceiving and undoing the karmic fetters that bind them to the existence-illusion complex, so I can understand how you could have gotten confused.

  • 58008@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    I thought this guy was a legit scientist, but I read his recent book Quantum Supremacy and it was all shit like “with quantum computing, in the future you will be able to solve athlete’s foot”. Literally everything you can think of is going to be quantummaxxed by cubits, according to him. Need your car serviced but the garage isn’t open on Sundays? Quantum computing. Need your mother-in-law to dial down the snarky comments about your new house? QUANTUM COMPUTING. Frequently walk into a room, forget why you went in there, leave, then immediately remember why you went in the second you cross the threshold? MOTHERFUCKING QUANTUM COMPUTING!

    I’m sure he is a legit scientist, of course, but as a science communicator and terminal book-hawker, he’s no better than Joe Rogan.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      he’s 80. he’s just old and losing it and trying to stay relevant.

      he is legit and was dope in the 90s/2000s, he has just started losing his mind due to being old.

      sort of like trump and tariffs. those were suppose to solve my athlete’s foot too.

      • square@lemmy.zip
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        7 hours ago

        Shit, he’s 80? I guess I haven’t seen him in a while. Back when the cable stations with educational names actually had educational programming, and not just reality trash, he was pretty dope.

    • CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      A young woman from Washington state university has already proven classical computers can solve just as well as quantum if you give them equal advantages. Everything saying quantum computing is faster is operating on the unspoken principle of having the entire data grid already preloaded and comparing it to classical computers who do not have the entire data grid preloaded but when you give them both the magic preload pill quantum computers aren’t any better than classical

      https://www.geekwire.com/2018/uw-grad-student-researching-quantum-computing-proved-classical-computers-better-thought/

  • Iced Raktajino@startrek.website
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    1 day ago

    The thing with dark matter is it’s just a placeholder term for “we don’t know what the hell it is”, and aren’t most hypotheses pulled out of the ass before experimentation to prove them?

    Plus, Dr. Kaku is a string theorist so wacky is pretty much par for the course in that field. Granted, I consider him more of a TV personality these days and grew up watching him as a speaker on [insert any number of Discovery Channel shows here].

    Maybe I’m just biased and enjoy the wacky theories because I’m more interested in seeing them proven right or wrong and thinking about the implications if they happen to prove correct.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      14 hours ago

      Yeah, I like to think of it this way:

      Dark matter is not a theory or even a hypothesis. It is a collection of observations.

      Having “matter” in the name is kind of a presumptive thing, like “our observations act like there’s too much gravity, and matter creates gravity, and we can’t see any extra shit, so…”

      • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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        8 hours ago

        As I understand it, the “matter” part is a hold over from physicists trying to fix their faulty calculations.

        Looking for “matter” that only interacts with gravity is a bit like looking for the perfectly smooth frictionless plane. I mean, somethings gotta account for the sums being off, but the real world explanation is anybody’s guess.

    • megopie@beehaw.org
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      12 hours ago

      For a theory to be useful, there needs to be a way that it can be proven wrong. If there is no way the theory can be proven wrong, then it’s not a theory. Something that can’t potentially be proven false also can’t potentially be proven to be true.

      The problem with this kind of off the cuff “but what if” stuff is that not enough thought has gone in to it to even know what could be tested.

    • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      I’m not smart enough to prove my hypothesis, nor am I smart enough to understand any proof that I am wrong, but I’m not entirely 100% convinced that dark matter exists as an attractive phenomenon inside galaxies the way it is often described.

      The way I see it, it might as well be a repulsive force between galaxies. This way it could also help explain Dark Energy.

      • Zagorath@quokk.au
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        5 hours ago

        The primary thing we have detected is an attractive force within galaxies. Whether that’s otherwise-undetectable particles or a mistake in how we calculate gravity or something else, we definitely know it’s that there is more attractive force holding galaxies together than there should be based on detectable matter and general relativity.

        Simply put: galaxies rotate too fast. Much, much too fast. That can’t be caused by repulsion between galaxies. Only by the stars within a galaxy being pulled towards the centre of that galaxy my than we would expect. Similar to how you have to spin faster to hold a big bucket of water horizontal without spilling than to hold a small bucket of water.

      • i_love_FFT@jlai.lu
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        1 day ago

        While there may be a part of it being “different gravity”, dark matter cannot 100% be explained by modified gravity of any kind.

        Why do we know this? Well there are observable galaxies that survived collisions and have been stripped of their dark matter, and the reverse is also true (galaxy-sized dark matter blobs without baryonic matter in it).

        I can refer you to this wonderful PBS Spacetime video about it: https://youtu.be/5t0jaE--l0Y

        • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          We have never detected dark matter. Dunno what you’re talking about. It’s existence was posited because of differences in observed velocities at the edge of galaxies vs what we expected to see.

          • i_love_FFT@jlai.lu
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            22 hours ago

            What is your definition of “detected”? If only direct interaction using the EM field is required, then we have never detected anything…

            There are lots of gravitational lensing images of dark matter, we can even see some structures in its shape and distribution.

            Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster

              • i_love_FFT@jlai.lu
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                2 hours ago

                How do you explain the mounting evidences of double images and observing the same event twice (or more) with exactly the expected delay by grav lensing?

                Anyhow, no new physics ever went against the old math, it always just adds corrective terms. Any new mathematics will need to be able to make the same predictions as GR in the limited cases of whatever this new limit will be (small distance or something?)

                The old saying that “Einstein proved Newton was wrong” is a gross misunderstanding. A nevessary base principle for GR to be accepter was that it reduces to Newtonian mechanics at low speeds.

            • someacnt@sh.itjust.works
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              16 hours ago

              I really don’t get the prevalence of the attitude “If we don’t see it with light, it does not exist”. Is it that improbable that there is some matter which does not interact with light? imo, similar argument could be made to deny existence of atoms - we cannot see it directly.

              • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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                13 hours ago

                A big argument for “not all matter must necessarily interact electromagnetically” is that we know of particles which don’t interact with the strong force - why should that fundamental force be special?

            • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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              15 hours ago

              Read your source. There’s lots of criticism in the source itself. If gravitational lensing was proof of dark matter, many someone’s would already have a Nobel prize for it. They don’t.

              • Soulg@ani.social
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                21 hours ago

                What are you talking about? We know for a fact dark matter exists. We just have absolutely no idea what it is.

                • skibidi@lemmy.world
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                  18 hours ago

                  What we know is that general relativity fails to explain gravitational interactions at very large scales for the matter we can see in telescopes.

                  The simplest answer for this conundrum is that there is extra matter that we can’t see in telescopes - aka it is ‘dark’ matter. This substance doesn’t appear to interact at all outside of gravity - which is a property we haven’t observed anywhere else. Further, in order to explain the motions we see, it would have to outweigh all the visible matter in the universe by a factor of 5, which seems to strain credibility given that - again - we have never seen anything like it.

                  Another answer for the observations is we are wrong about gravity, that it behaves differently at very large scales. This doesn’t require a massive amount of invisible magic substance conveniently spread throughout the universe, but to date no theory has been able to explain all the strange observations - and Dark Matter remains the moderate consensus view.

                  This doesn’t mean dark matter absolutely exists, it is just a hole in our current understanding. We’ve been looking for it for nearly a century and have yet to find direct evidence. In fact, there isn’t even one theory of Dark Matter because it also has difficulty explaining every available observation.

                  In summary: we have mountains and mountains of evidence that our current theory of gravity fail to explain the big stuff, we have exceedingly little evidence as to what the disconnect with reality is.

                • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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                  21 hours ago

                  Right, we don’t know what it is, where it is, how it interacts. We only know that our observations don’t match, so it must be there 🙄

          • Björn@swg-empire.de
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            23 hours ago

            Dark matter can be detected through gravitational lensing. Rotation curves was just the first way we detected it.

      • LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz
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        24 hours ago

        We know that’s not the case because we can see different galaxies with different levels of dark matter.

        Dark matter doesn’t interact with anything else except by gravity, we don’t know why, but we can detect that behavior by seeing the way it clumps together.

        We can also see that galaxies that collide with each other have different levels of dark matter than galaxies that haven’t recently done so. The dark matter appears to just pass through each other and continue on while the regular matter hits each other and stays generally together in one group.

        It’s pretty interesting when you work through the details of what we do and don’t know.

      • Iced Raktajino@startrek.website
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        1 day ago

        I’m not entirely 100% dark matter exists in galaxies the way often described. … The way I see it, it might as well be a repulsive force between galaxies opposed to the current understanding of it being am attractive force. Plus, if it were a phenomenon that pushed things apart, it could also explain Dark Energy.

        And to me, that’s a perfectly valid theory. Like other proposed explanations for dark matter or dark energy or “whatever the hell it is we can detect the effect of but can’t identify”, it’s difficult to test.

        That’s why I enjoy science. It’s like a big puzzle, and sometimes you get halfway done and realize you put it together wrong and have to start over.

        • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          I would like to emphasize the first part of my previous comment. As I am a hillbilly occasionally cosplaying as a smart and educated person, I am incapable of exploring my statement further than just making the claim. And for that I must insist on referring to it as an hypothesis, unless someone shows me some math that it could actually work. And I hope anyone showing me said math brings the necessary crayons and puppets to explain it in a manner that I can understand.

          • Iced Raktajino@startrek.website
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            1 day ago

            I am a hillbilly occasionally cosplaying as a smart and educated person

            Same. Which explains why I (twice, lol) incorrectly used the terms “theory” and “hypothesis” interchangeably when those are totally different things in sciences.

          • ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zip
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            1 day ago

            Unfortunately of course such hypotheses are extraordinarily difficult to actually test. However intuitively I do kind of like where you’re coming from. I’ve always been fascinated by how everything that we conceptually are aware of has a sorta polar opposite that we kind of define it by.

      • four@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        Wouldn’t that mean that that force would be stronger on the edges of the galaxies, instead of the center? I imagine this is something we could figure out

      • wholookshere@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        Plausible!

        I had a bachelor’s in physics a decade ago.

        But here’s how my memory describes how we discovered, or at least how we did it in my computational physics class.

        You have stars of known size, and there for light output as its directly proportional to size. You also have a known distance.

        You can then calculate how bright the star should be. But its wrong.

        Meaning there’s things in the way thats blocking light.

        So we call it dark matter because it hasn’t been directly observed and its clearly there. It could be our fundamentals are wrong, but that’s unlikely.

        It could very well follow gravitational fields, and then attracted to galaxies with large masses.

        But it could also be something in the vacuum. We just have no evidence to suggest either way.

      • ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        I guess on a similar note, my own wacky theory is that our dimension can be affected at any given time by up to 13 other dimensions, but which 13 can change amongst a potentially infinite number. I imagine certain dimensions would more likely be co-terminus (I term I believe I’m borrowing from a Dungeons and Dragons type source) with ours than others but who knows.

        • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          One of the biggest harms sci fi and fantays did to public scientific literacy is the abuse of the word “dimension”

          D&D’s astral and ethereral planes are not seperate dimenions so much as they are four-dimensional planes seperated from the really mortals live along a axis of reality.

          The “11 dimensional reality” idea is an attempt to explain the asymmetry of the four fundamental forces by postulating that there are additional axis straught line axis that those forces propagate through.

          • ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zip
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            1 day ago

            Oh, I hear ya. And although obviously inspired by RPGs, I do conceptualize my wacky theory more in the context of string theory and related ideas.

    • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
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      22 hours ago

      It’s not even “we dont know what the hell it is” because we don’t even know that there’s an it.

      It’s more like “our numbers dont add up but wouldn’t it be cool if there was something invisible that explained it?”

  • Bronstein_Tardigrade@lemmygrad.ml
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    13 hours ago

    27% of the matter in the universe isn’t a leak, it’s a deluge. With that much gravitational force, seems like the other dimension would be pulling part of our universe into theirs.

    • MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip
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      12 hours ago

      Correction: 27% of all the everything (“total mass-energy content”), not just the matter. Dark matter actually “outweighs” (so to speak) normal matter by a factor of 5 or so.

      • icelimit@lemmy.ml
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        6 hours ago

        So we are the internal organs/blood vessels in a dude standing in a super packed subway and the dude is getting squeezed on all sides by 250kg Walmart shoppers.

  • Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca
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    19 hours ago

    What if dark matter is a time artifact of gravitational waves over time/space as particles with mass travel through time/space? (I am not a physicist and I don’t understand jack shit.)

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      how can time be real if we don’t even know how magnets work?

      and how can magnets the whole thing if our eyes aren’t real?

      while we’re at it, if our eyes aren’t real how can we dream that you, um, you had, your, you- you could, you’ll do, you- you wants, you, you could do so, you- you’ll do, you could- you, you want, you want him to do you so much you could do anything?

    • Juice@midwest.social
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      16 hours ago

      Oh shit, reverse the flow to the warp coils! Dump all energy from life support into forward shields and laser missiles, our only chance to defeat the psychic alien is to reverse and restart time for .00001 second, creating a terminal in the psychic time loop. Once free, we can concentrate our dark matter on the psychic alien, stunning him for just long enough to get him to buy a sketchy timeshare on Mars.

      Thank you science word rearranger celebrity with NGL pretty good hair

    • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      What if time and space are but a dream that was merely a concept and we’re just the avatars?

      (Also not a physicist but mildly interested enough to be uncomfortable yet intrigued )

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    I’ve been insisting this for years:

    it eradicates the bullshit of hyperinflation being required to smooth the CMB,

    it explains why gravity’s sooo weak, compared with the contained-within-this-3d-space forces, like electromagnitism,

    it explains why there exist galaxies of dark-matter which don’t have any conventional-matter,

    it explains why there exist galaxies of conventional-matter which don’t have any dark-matter.

    The gravity’s diffusing through MANY 3D-spaces, not just ours.

    the other forces are contained-within-this-3D-space.

    Therefore OUR gravity is “dark matter” in other 3D-spaces, too.

    The smoothing-of-the-CMB is simple: instead of 1x 3D-space having hyperinflation, there are thousands of 3D-spaces ( or zillions: whatever the math says matches ), & EACH of them inflated at speed-of-light or less, not at zillions-of-times-c.

    The painting-method called “glazing” is essentially the same idea:

    da Vince used many many thin layers of paint, to make ultra-smooth tones…

    the many-many-many-3D-spaces all “underlying” each-other smoothes-out the gravity among them all, so local-lumpiness simply isn’t a significant part of the equation, as it would appear.


    Part of this is on the E = speed-of-gravity * mass * speed-of-light, though, so it’s arithmetically identical to the conventional E=mc^2 rendition,

    but would gravity & light both be traveling at the same mps speed through say a 100km of quartz?

    XOR would the refractive-index be different for gravity & light?

    That structural difference is what the speed-of-gravity * mass * speed-of-light variant was trying to show.

    _ /\ _

  • OrganicMustard@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    What he’s probably saying is not that far out.

    Dark matter was proposed initially because at galaxy scales the gravity force doesn’t seem to match the one created by the visible matter in that galaxy, while others tried to propose modified laws of gravity at that scale. He is probably defending the later via compactified dimensions, so at some scales gravity stops transmitting at one over the distance squared, as those extra dimensions start to make an effect somehow.

    • OrganicMustard@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      In case someone thinks I’m saying something crazy imagine a universe that is an infinite straw. When you zoom a lot in the surface you see two flat dimensions, so gravity would propagate at one over the distance. When you zoom out you stop seeing the dimension that loops over itself and only see one, so gravity gets constant at that scale.

      You could get the same with a lot more complex manifolds, that look like 3+1 dimensions at some scales.

  • addie@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    Scientific method and all that. Any conjecture is okay.

    Now, what’s the hypothesis that you can make out of it? We’ve plenty of observations that don’t match theory, which we believe to be on account of dark matter - galaxy rotation speeds, what happens in the core of a type 2 supernova, and so on. Does this hypothesis explain those problems better than what we have?

    If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, discard it. Repeat, until we’ve solved all the mysteries of the universe by banging our heads against them.

    This strikes me as the kind of conjecture that has no predictive power, and therefore must be discarded, but I’m no PhD-level theoretical physicist.

    • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      19 hours ago

      This strikes me as the kind of conjecture that has no predictive power, and therefore must be discarded

      Maybe it doesn’t provide much in itself, but can help with providing an alternate framework for thinking about observational anomalies in the future.

      Heliocentrism didn’t actually improve the predictions of planet movement over geocentric models with epicycles, at least until Kepler swapped out circles for ellipses. So heliocentrism didn’t give an immediate advantage, but laid the groundwork for later improvements that could surpass the limits of geocentrism.

    • Kefla [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      24 hours ago

      As a theoretical physicist (my degree is theoretical don’t ask to see it) I think dark matter is trillions of little spacebugs scurrying all around the place

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    1 day ago

    Interesting but i suggest it might be normal matter that had a bad childhood experience and turned evil. We can save it tho

  • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I see nothing wrong with suggesting that, so long as it is made clear he is discussing one of many theoretical possibilities.

    Is he a kook? He does kinda look like one, but so do a lot of legit scientists, so that’s not a good measure.

    • CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Not a kook. Legit scientist. He has a PhD in theoretical physics, not a theoretical PhD in physics. While he spends a lot of time as a science communicator, he has his bona fides.

      Yes, it’s all just theories and intuition like all nascent science.

      • Brummbaer@pawb.social
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        1 day ago

        A PhD is not a “get out of Jail” card for kookery.

        He is definitely part of the “woo” people in his field.

        • dalekcaan@feddit.nl
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          18 hours ago

          I read a book of his once about theoretical ways to make sci-fi technology a reality. It was interesting in a hard sci-fi kind of way, but what really annoyed me was that he kept presenting his ideas as how they would work rather than how they could work.

          Just looking at what people 100 years ago thought life would be like today should be a good indication that while theorizing about the future is interesting and a good way to get ideas moving, future technology is never going to be exactly what you think it will. If we knew exactly how this stuff would work, we wouldn’t be imagining it, we’d just make it.

      • Korval@lemmy.today
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        1 day ago

        You can be both credentialed and a kook, can’t you? I remember him from his regular guest appearances on Art Bell’s radio show.

      • wholookshere@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        21 hours ago

        There are plenty of crazies who have their PhD in some branch of physics/math. One of the reasons I stopped at a bachelor’s in physics.

        Its almost a prerequisite. But from what I’ve read of him in the past, he’s pretty far out there.

      • ZeroHora@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        I remember from a podcast with a guy in the same area of Kaku saying that he’s not seem with good eyes in their community for saying things that doesn’t make much sense.

        • CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          That’s a tad vague. Who said the quote?

          “Never shall two scientists of the same trade meet, but the conversation ends in a fight over semantics and one-upmanship.”

          It was probably me, but I’m paraphrasing here.

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
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      1 day ago

      He’s a heavily published professor of theoretical physics that has been working on string theory, and working as a science communicator, for decades. I have one of his books from the 90s. Globally well-respected smart dude.

      By comparison, you kind of seem like a kook because you can’t search a name before making assumptions about someone based on physicality alone.