DARK MATTER MAY BE MORE COMPLEX THAN PHYSICISTS THOUGHT

DARK MATTER—THE UNSEEN 80 percent of the universe’s mass—doesn’t emit, absorb or reflect light. Astronomers know it exists only because it interacts with our slice of the ordinary universe through gravity. Hence the hunt for this missing mass has focused on so-called WIMPs—Weakly Interacting Massive Particles—which interact with each other as infrequently as they interact with normal matter.

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“Bullock thinks that dark matter might instead be complex, something that interacts with itself strongly in the way that ordinary matter interacts with itself to form intricate structures like atoms and atomic elements. Such a self-interacting dark matter, Bullock suspects, could exist in a “dark sector,” somewhat parallel to our own light sector, but detectable only through the way it affects gravity.”

OK. I’m open to suggestions on dark matter, as I’m out of ideas except for a nagging feeling that perhaps the true answer was suggested a hundred years ago and that it’s been missed. Something perhaps as weird as Einstein’s attempts in the 1940s to use affine connections to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics, or perhaps something pre-Einstein that is as fundamental as the Bianchi identities.

How complex is thought?

dv said:

How complex is thought?

I can refer you to an excellent series of 14 small books on the topic.