[HN Gopher] Astronomers have created the largest ever map of dar... ___________________________________________________________________ Astronomers have created the largest ever map of dark matter Author : chriskanan Score : 39 points Date : 2021-05-29 10:16 UTC (12 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com) | [deleted] | DudeInBasement wrote: | Lol, they haven't even found any yet and they made a map? I guess | you got to do something with that grant money | gus_massa wrote: | Alternative title: " _Group of scientists assuming that the | current model of gravity is correct look at the discrepancies | in the observations and calculate a map of where and how much | matter would be necessary to fix this difference. Some of them | believe this additional mater is real, and some of them doubt, | but meanwhile to make the titles shorter they use the catchy | name of dark matter._ " | Bancakes wrote: | Not to sound hateful but who are the neo-scientists? You go | through school, high school, then you get a bachelor's. Great. | | Then you also go for a master's and a PhD. Maybe even a post- | doc?! | | So you haven't taken part in the economy for 10 years of your | adulthood, you don't have serious job prospects, and you need | mortgage/family money. What do you do? | | Maybe that explains the abundance of cheap, unverifiable, | irreproducible studies. | [deleted] | anticristi wrote: | Not sure who invented the academia-industry dichotomy, but | he/she deserves a society-wide slap. Society loses, the | individual loses. My career is just a big middle finger | pointed at this dichotomy. | Blikkentrekker wrote: | At least where I live, many start earning some salary from | academic contribution of some minor sort during the | bachelor's trajectory, typically by assisting in lessons to | lower classes, most art to do so during master's, and _Ph.D._ | students are employed by the institute that promotes them and | earn a full salary for their research. | | The real issue isn't that, the real issue to me is quite a | few research fields are purely taking part in oeconomy and | entertainment, and essentially funded of sponsorships | generate by spectacular news reports and nothing more. | | A very large quantity of scientific research is purely | infotainment and doesn't actually generate knowledge that is | used for anything but merely interesting to read, which is | what could cause the replication crisis to go unnoticed for | so long among other things: no one found out, as no one was | using it in any way that relied upon it's veracity, and many | even made up data for decades and went unnoticed. | | I recently read a paper that studied some social parts of the | acquisition of language in Japanese, -- quite interesting to | read, and as usual it was quite spectacular because the | findings went against the established ideas, but this | knowledge merely exists to be "fascinating" and it won't ever | be used for anything that assumes it's veracity, and as a | consequence the data could have been pulled from the aether | and no one would ever find out and replication will surely | never occur,and even if it would, it would be too late as | some years would have passed and the original auctor can | always argue that these social matters changed within the | interval. | Mike86534 wrote: | That's one reason why they sell their souls to the Climate UN | / NWO scam and pump out trash papers based on fudged | data/models that backs up the fearmongering narrative. | | https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/02/Groupthink.p. | .. | ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: | You have a bit of a caricatural take on research. | | From a societal perspective, PhDs and postdocs take part in | the economy, they have a job, make money, spend money, | produce research sometimes in partnership with the industry, | sometimes with immediate applications, sometimes theoretical | with applications that will only come decades down the line. | There is no reason to set the line at Bachelors, as a society | we've found it's best to have a subset of the population go | into higher studies. We used to have children participate in | the economy 10 to 15 years earlier in fields and factories | and it wasn't so good. | | From the perspective of the individual, getting a PhD isn't | always much longer than getting a Masters, and teaches you | skill you will not acquire anywhere else. It also opens the | door to research positions that would not be accessible to | you without it. And you can have greater expected monetary | returns on the medium and long term. I've known a lot of | people doing PhDs, a good amount doing it for prestige, | because it was the expected next step after a masters. Many | others were doing it out of passion, for the freedom to study | things they were interested in an amazing environment. So on | an individual level many people find it worth it whether | their priority is money or intellectual pursuits. | Xorlev wrote: | It's clear you didn't even try to read the article. | | They mapped the distortion effects on visible light thought to | be caused by dark matter. They don't know what it is or how it | works, but they know _something_ is causing apparent distortion | to the light. | WesleyHale wrote: | That _something_ might as well be interdemensional pixies. | ben_w wrote: | Sure, just so long as the pixies don't interact | electromagnetically, or strongly with each other by | anything except gravity. | bdamm wrote: | Won't it be interesting when our model of physics is | updated to explain these cosmological phenomena? Who knows | what new technology will be discovered as a result! | ben_w wrote: | My brother once jokingly suggested that Dark Energy is | the waste product of the power sources of alien | civilisations. | | (Neither of us is a physicist, but it's an interesting | idea for a short story). | _Microft wrote: | What's surprising about that if I may ask? | | We have observations that match quite well what would be | expected if there was additional matter in the universe. We | cannot detect this matter though, so the conjecture is that | there must be something that interacts gravitationally with the | rest of the universe but not in other ways. We call it dark | matter for now. We do not yet know what it consists of, there | are even competing theories but mapping the effects of it? That | we can do. | | This approach is not at all unusual. If you want to know about | another example from a different field, look no further than | genetics. | | Gregor Mendel observed rules for inheritance of certain traits | in plants and was able to make predictions from that. He | discovered genetics. In the 1850-60ies. This was a long time | before Crick, Watson and Franklin discovered the structure of | the underlying mechanism for inheritance (DNA). ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-29 23:00 UTC)