dark matter found mathematically?

[quotation]

i've been reading about dark matter lately and stumbled onto a paper (http://milesmathis.com/dark2.pdf) by some chap named miles mathis who makes the following extraordinary claim:

"...it means that the electron is emitting about 35,000 times its own mass every second, as charge. It also means the proton is emitting about 19 times its own mass every second. If we give this charge to real photons instead of to virtual photons,
we have a simple way to estimate the total mass/energy of the photon field. It is 19 times the atomic field, or 95% of the total mass/energy of the universe."

he supports that claim with the following equations (formatting a bit dodgy, but 10^-19 is 10 to the negative nineteenth etc...further he claims the first two equations are well known and he simply combined them to get the third):

e = 1.602 x 10^-19 C
1C = 2 x 10^-7 kg/s
e = 3.204 x 10^-26 kg/s

my question is twofold, 1) are these in fact well known equations and 2) could finding the missing mass of the universe possibly be this simple...seems someone else would have found it by now...or is this bloke bonkers? Thanks,

[loglo]

Well for one, they are not equations of physics. They are just specifying the values of known constants. For two, we already know how to convert from mass to energy, its a real equation with real experimental and theoretical heritage, E=mc². For three he seems not to know that the effects of dark energy and dark matter are actually detected in wildly different parts of the universe, the least dense and the most dense parts. For four ... ah forget it .. yes the bloke is bo.. well, lets just say misguided. (I wouldn't want to offend the clinically insane with a needless comparison).

Hint: Real scientists don't campaign for funds at the bottom of their scientific papers or write under nom de plumes. Nor do they criticise the mainstream model of the day be criticising the wiki article about that model.

[Cougar]

...or is this bloke bonkers?

Yes. He corrects Newton. He corrects Einstein. He says "all math and science since Euclid must be redefined." Since Euclid! He is the first to notice this! If you want to waste your time, you will give this person a second thought.

[quotation]

thanks cougar

[Cougar]

thanks cougar

Ha ha. Thanks for taking that in the right spirit. I say he's a waste of time in the context of so many other authors who are extraordinarily more deserving of one's attention. Namely, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Weinberg, Leon Lederman, Stephen Jay Gould, Victor Weisskopf, Julian Schwinger, Rocky Kolb, Alan Guth, Gerard 't Hooft, Carl Sagan, Tony Rothman, Jared Diamond, Janna Levin, Kip Thorne, James Kaler, Helen Quinn, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Donald Goldsmith, Frank Wilczek, Robert Laughlin, Sean Carroll... To mention a few. There are a lot of excellent scientist/authors out there.

[macaw]

i've been reading about dark matter lately and stumbled onto a paper (http://milesmathis.com/dark2.pdf) by some chap named miles mathis who makes the following extraordinary claim:

You can ignore him, he's a known crank.

[quotation]

my, my, my...mr mathis responds!
http://milesmathis.com/crank2.pdf

[Strange]

Shame he didn't come here to respond. Could have been an interesting discussion.

[antoniseb]

Mathis' response is simply defending himself from ad homs with ad homs. He does nothing in it to clarify Quotation's original question, but it is also the case that Quotation's questions about Mathis' work were fairly shallow, so the answers given by loglo, Cougar, & Macaw, were also fairly shallow.

So, without resorting to ad homs against Mathis, let me say this-

He spends about half of his three page paper trying to cast doubt about what is already known about dark matter and dark energy, and cites a relatively recent (about a decade ago) 15% change in the distance ladder as justification for assuming everything is wrong. He then says that dark matter and dark energy might be the same thing, and then he introduces an equation giving a mass for the electric fields of all protons and electrons (and any other charged particle). He says this accounts for all the missing mass all by itself, though in my mind there are a few open issues, such as:

- The mass of the fields of the protons and electrons in his equations would still be local mass, and should increase the mass of the Earth (for example) by a factor of 20, yet we don't observe this.
- We do observe a difference between dark energy and dark matter, specifically with respect to gravitational lensing.
- His equation gives mass/unit time, which he calls emitting mass. It isn't clear how much time we need to integrate over. He's using one second for reasons unexplained.

What he has posted in the three page doc linked in the OP is relatively simplistic, and he does not discuss the consequences of his hypothesis in terms of observables. I'd be interested in seeing him try to defend his model in our ATM section, but I think that's unrealistic. ...

That being said, he has a website, and makes YouTube videos every few days trying to describe his model. There are a lot of parts of it, but aside from being kind of anti-mainstream (e.g. "five top cards for winning an argument about relativity" is one of his recent updates), it never gets very deep to the point where there is anything to really measure, or possibly be a directly falsifiable statement.

[quotation]

I don't know how unrealistic it would be to invite him to a debate in ATM, as one never knows until one asks, and it certainly would be interesting. He does seem like a clever guy and is definitely an iconoclast, which is undoubtedly part of his appeal, since to many (including myself), who are unversed for example, in tensor calculus and Hamiltonians, much of modern physics (chock full as it is with so much "virtual this and that" and other invisibilities dark or otherwise), seems like one of those old Indian yogis with a beard down to his knees who is in need of a good close shave with occam's razor. Of course, seeking simpler answers could always be sour grapes on my part for not having the discipline to make it past two years of university physics and calculus, but dude, it was the 70's...all i can say is at the very least this guy is entertaining, fun to read, and the time to waste is my own

[Nereid]

I don't know how unrealistic it would be to invite him to a debate in ATM, as one never knows until one asks, and it certainly would be interesting. He does seem like a clever guy and is definitely an iconoclast, which is undoubtedly part of his appeal, since to many (including myself), who are unversed for example, in tensor calculus and Hamiltonians, much of modern physics (chock full as it is with so much "virtual this and that" and other invisibilities dark or otherwise), seems like one of those old Indian yogis with a beard down to his knees who is in need of a good close shave with occam's razor. Of course, seeking simpler answers could always be sour grapes on my part for not having the discipline to make it past two years of university physics and calculus, but dude, it was the 70's...all i can say is at the very least this guy is entertaining, fun to read, and the time to waste is my own

I have encountered (if that's the right word) Mathis several times, on other internet fora, if only at second hand.

antoniseb's comment - "it never gets very deep to the point where there is anything to really measure, or possibly be a directly falsifiable statement" - rings true. AFAIK, he hasn't published anything that one could, in principle, test his ideas against, in terms of observation or experimental result.

In fact, taking a recent example (PM me if you'd like the details), Mathis' analysis is hilariously flawed; in classic crackpot fashion he creates a strawman (i.e. his own, idiosyncratic, characterisation of some standard, textbook physics; one which clearly shows he hasn't understood many fundamental aspects of the standard physics ... or has deliberately chosen to mis-represent them), then uses the logical fallacy of 'argument from incredulity' to demolish it. What's hilarious about this - apart from the silliness of his strawman - is his obvious lack of familiarity with the actual astronomical observations.

Too, his lack of critical thinking is quite breath-taking. For example, he quotes a webpage from a well-known crank website to the effect that images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have been suppressed! (if you don't know why this is so ridiculous, just ask).

[Tensor]

In fact, taking a recent example (PM me if you'd like the details), Mathis' analysis is hilariously flawed; in classic crackpot fashion he creates a strawman (i.e. his own, idiosyncratic, characterisation of some standard, textbook physics; one which clearly shows he hasn't understood many fundamental aspects of the standard physics ... or has deliberately chosen to mis-represent them), then uses the logical fallacy of 'argument from incredulity' to demolish it. What's hilarious about this - apart from the silliness of his strawman - is his obvious lack of familiarity with the actual astronomical observations.

For example, I found this whopper "An acceleration of 7m/s3 must be greater than an acceleration of 7m/s2, right?" Well, ms^-3 (or m/s³) and ms^-2 (or m/s²) are two different terms. ms^-2 is in indeed acceleration, which is a change in velocity. However, ms^-3 is not an acceleration, it is jerk, which is the change in the rate of acceleration.

Too, his lack of critical thinking is quite breath-taking.

Not to mention his logic. He devotes a paper to quite specifically detailing how the math of General Relativity's (GR) use of vectors and tensors are flat out wrong. In other papers, he blithely states he uses Einstein's GR math and reverses the vectors to get accurate answers to several different problems (to be fair, I haven't checked his math, but....). He also points out how wrong calculus, as currently used is. But wait a minute, remember, he says the GR math is wrong and oh by the way, those vector operations, use calculus, so exactly how can he claim his method of reversing operations are correct, when he starts with conditions that are, according to him, wrong?

[quotation]

Yeah, the guy's no scientist for sure (artist would probably be more accurate), but I still enjoy reading his deconstructions of the history behind the maths where one guy might include a constant, for example, that was, well, constant, so needed no background check, not realizing that the "constant" really represented thinking that was no longer contemporary (sometimes by hundreds of years) to his new equation, thus continuing the blunder to infinity and beyond, and I kind of trust Mathis on that given his own background in art history, so his papers, which are also easy to read, are always an entertaining place for me to start learning more about the history of science and its many fascinating practioners, so I'm thankful to him for that regardless of his actual mathematical ablities, which are well beyond my own, and which is why I think he should show up and support this particular dark matter idea in ATM where we all might learn something if the discussion could stay civil, which I'm sure it would given the diligence and courtesy that the moderator team here has always displayed and encouraged, whew.

[Nereid]

Yeah, the guy's no scientist for sure (artist would probably be more accurate), but I still enjoy reading his deconstructions of the history behind the maths where one guy might include a constant, for example, that was, well, constant, so needed no background check, not realizing that the "constant" really represented thinking that was no longer contemporary (sometimes by hundreds of years) to his new equation, thus continuing the blunder to infinity and beyond, and I kind of trust Mathis on that given his own background in art history, so his papers, which are also easy to read, are always an entertaining place for me to start learning more about the history of science and its many fascinating practioners, so I'm thankful to him for that regardless of his actual mathematical ablities, which are well beyond my own, and which is why I think he should show up and support this particular dark matter idea in ATM where we all might learn something if the discussion could stay civil, which I'm sure it would given the diligence and courtesy that the moderator team here has always displayed and encouraged, whew.

Entertaining? I guess so.

Easy to read? On the whole, yes.

His "actual mathematical ablities, which are well beyond [your] "own"? Um, I rather doubt it. Did you see Tensor's post? I mean, seriously, if you'd been asked to think about "An acceleration of 7m/s3 must be greater than an acceleration of 7m/s2, right?", how long would it have taken you to realise that this contains a real whopper?

Given the, at times, appalling misunderstandings of the (usually not too difficult) maths in his writings, I myself would be, from the start, highly sceptical of his take on science history ...

[Selfsim]

Of course Mathis ( http://milesmathis.com/pi3.html ) has also demolished the concept of pi !

This one even denies Euclidian geometry !

One cannot help but wonder about Mathis' motives for such nonsense, particularly as he does now seem to have quite a lot of devotees !

Is it entertainment, or is it Machiavellian ?

Regards

[Nereid]

Of course Mathis http://milesmathis.com/pi3.html has also demolished the concept of pi !

This one even denies Euclidian geometry !

One cannot help but wonder about Mathis' motives for such nonsense, particularly as he does now seem to have quite a lot of devotees !

Is it entertainment, or is it Machiavellian ?

Regards

Well, to give Mathis some credit, the concept of limit(s) is a very tricky one, and it took mathematicians quite a long time, after Newton and Leibniz, to nail it down rigorously.

However, nailed down it was, and for Mathis to completely, and blithely, ignore all the subsequent work on the problem is, um, reprehensible.

This particular demonstration is, however, quite entertaining, and is just the sort of thing undergrad university students, taking Maths 101*, might be given as an advanced homework problem.

So, well-written, entertaining crackpot nonsense as pedagogically powerful teaching material? Sure! In fact, I think that for some students, tackling this sort of thing can be among the most effective way of learning. Unfortunately, I suspect Mathis actually believes the nonsense he publishes (and, apparently, lots of his followers do; sad day for critical thinking).

* OK, maybe a bit too advanced for Maths 101 courses ...

[Perikles]

Of course Mathis http://milesmathis.com/pi3.html has also demolished the concept of pi !

This is hilarious. The really amusing aspect is the plea at the bottom of the page to donate money so that he can continue writing this stuff. Why would anybody want to see more?

[agingjb]

Well, to give Mathis some credit, the concept of limit(s) is a very tricky one, and it took mathematicians quite a long time, after Newton and Leibniz, to nail it down rigorously.

However, nailed down it was, and for Mathis to completely, and blithely, ignore all the subsequent work on the problem is, um, reprehensible.

This particular demonstration is, however, quite entertaining, and is just the sort of thing undergrad university students, taking Maths 101*, might be given as an advanced homework problem.

So, well-written, entertaining crackpot nonsense as pedagogically powerful teaching material? Sure! In fact, I think that for some students, tackling this sort of thing can be among the most effective way of learning. Unfortunately, I suspect Mathis actually believes the nonsense he publishes (and, apparently, lots of his followers do; sad day for critical thinking).

* OK, maybe a bit too advanced for Maths 101 courses ...

Then again the BAUT moderation team flatly declined to extend the concept of "mainstream" to mathematics (the concept of limit being, as it happened, the point at issue).

[Shaula]

As far as I can see his 'derivation' is:
The SI unit the Ampere is defined as "the constant current that will produce an attractive force of 2 × 10–7 newton per metre of length between two straight, parallel conductors of infinite length and negligible circular cross section placed one metre apart in a vacuum".

He takes this method of measuring the current and makes all the experimental detail vanish so he can claim that because the SI unit the Coulomb is defined as "is the quantity of electricity carried in 1 second by a current of 1 ampere" you can say a Coulomb is 2e-7 N/ms. That is when it gets a bit lolwhut. Somehow he makes a Newton per metre equal to a kilogram (in dimensional terms). Either that or his 'equations' are broken because a Newton is kg.m/s^2. So in fact if this were a valid way to work out fundamental relationships (it so isn't) he'd have a Coulomb being somehow equal to 2e-7 kg/s^3.

I wonder how is going to react if they change the definition of an Ampere in 2015 to be based on counting electrons? Essentially he is mixing up the idea of real equations that are part of a model and unit definitions. This is not valid science. Just because placing an elephant on a trampoline produces a depression in the rubber of 2m does not mean that trying to express Newton's equations of motion in terms of some actual physical mechanism involving elephants and trampolines is meaningful.

[Strange]

Of course Mathis has also demolished the concept of pi !

Oddly, he simply dismisses Archimedes calculation of pi (which uses a similar series of approximations) as "wrong" with no justification.

And, apart from anything else, this is trivially falsified using a piece of string. As with so many crackpot ideas, they fall apart as soon as you look at the evidence.

Maybe it is just a form of performance art.

[Nereid]

Then again the BAUT moderation team flatly declined to extend the concept of "mainstream" to mathematics (the concept of limit being, as it happened, the point at issue).

A link would be nice, but I myself fully agree with this.

BAUT is about astronomy, space, astrophysics, cosmology, that sort of thing. Mathematics is going to make many appearances, but largely in supporting roles. Let some other website be the leading internet discussion forum for mathematics ...

[Cougar]

...but dude, it was the 70's...

Dude, I hear ya. I did make it through, but it wasn't pretty.

[Geo Kaplan]

Maybe it is just a form of performance art.

I've often thought the same myself. The stuff on that site is just so over-the-top crackpotty that it reads more like postmodernist theatre of the absurd, or perhaps an extended experiment in net sociology ("watch how scigeeks react when I punk them").

Or maybe it was the 'shrooms, man. The 'shrooms.

[antoniseb]

... Or maybe it was the 'shrooms, man. The 'shrooms.

Since he has taken the time to respond, in some way to this thread, we should afford him the usual avoidance of ad-homs, including dismissing based on presumed drug use or diagnosable mental defect when there is no publicly available record of such. No points given for this, but please, lets all watch it from here on.

[quotation]

Just for kicks, I sent Miles a note yesterday and asked him if he'd care to join this discussion of his work. Here, in part, is what he had to say:

I meant to hit a nerve. My papers are clear. If they [baut] say something worth responding to, I will respond to it...I invite them to say something substantial...But I don't really have time to waste "debating" people who think that the fundamental charge is not real physics...I wrote that paper yesterday just for fun, to blow off a bit of steam...I just checked the page again, three times as long but still nothing substantial. So a jerk isn't an acceleration? What does he think it is? It's a higher order motion, which by definition is an acceleration. m/s, m/s^2, m/s^3...The page was about my three equations. Is anyone going to get around to actually looking at what they say...Tensor "hasn't checked my math" on reversing the vector to solve GR problems. Interesting, since my math is about 4 lines long and Einstein's is about 40 pages long. Are they afraid of actually looking at my math?...By the way, the page is still completely composed of anonymous slurs and refusals to address any real questions. It looks like they don't really want me there, which is understandable. Why would they?

I've also asked (today) about Shaula's analysis of his "derivation", because (in my mind) that was the comment which came closest to actually getting to the crux of whether or not these three equations are a valid progression to defining charge, but haven't heard back yet. We'll see (maybe).

[Shaula]

By his logic acceleration is just velocity, which is just distance- so jerk is also just distance. He is totally wrong there - jerk is a rate of change of acceleration as has been said. Claiming it is just another acceleration is incorrect unless you basically reduce everything down to the fundamental thing being differentiated.

[quotation]

I don't think there's any question he knows the difference between velocity (vector of magnitude and direction) and acceleration (or rate of change of velocity), so in actual fact he's probably saying the same thing: jerk is a rate of change of acceleration, representing what he's calling "higher order motion", hence m/s^3, but you can believe I wish he were here to speak for himself, as any (mis)interpretation of his work by me is likely to muddy the waters even more

[antoniseb]

... I wish he were here to speak for himself, as any (mis)interpretation of his work by me is likely to muddy the waters even more

I can't speak for everyone here, but I don't think it would be fruitful or interesting for him to come and defend his writings. He knows they won't stand any scrutiny, and he's unarmed to support what he's written with anything except handwaving claims that scientists can't see the his insights. It would likely turn into personal attacks, as opposed to any real analysis.

[Tensor]

Just for kicks, I sent Miles a note yesterday and asked him if he'd care to join this discussion of his work. Here, in part, is what he had to say:

I've also asked (today) about Shaula's analysis of his "derivation", because (in my mind) that was the comment which came closest to actually getting to the crux of whether or not these three equations are a valid progression to defining charge, but haven't heard back yet. We'll see (maybe).

So a jerk isn't an acceleration? What does he think it is? It's a higher order motion, which by definition is an acceleration.

Maybe by his definition. As Nereid points out, he uses his own definitions. This is an just an outstanding example of his practice. Acceleration is the rate that velocity changes, jerk is the rate that acceleration changes. The terms are rates of change, not accelerations. At this point I will note that in post 12 I left out "rate of" before "change in velocity", mea culpa.

He also states that "An acceleration of 7m/s3 must be greater than an acceleration of 7m/s2, right?"

Must be? I wonder why he would think that the Jerk, which changes the amount of acceleration over time, must be larger than the acceleration itself? Does this mean that he thinks the Snap must be even larger, since it's terms are to the fourth power )m/s⁴? And if snap is so large, why is it that it is almost never taken into account? Or why the other derivatives of acceleration, which are even larger powers (and by Mile's logic, should be even a greater acceleration) aren't taken into account?

Tensor "hasn't checked my math" on reversing the vector to solve GR problems. Interesting, since my math is about 4 lines long and Einstein's is about 40 pages long.

As I said, why bother? He claims he reverses the vector operations, but in other papers, he claims to show the operations he reverses to be invalid. Reversing invalid operations doesn't get you anywhere, so what's to check?

[Nereid]

I don't think there's any question he knows the difference between velocity (vector of magnitude and direction) and acceleration (or rate of change of velocity), so in actual fact he's probably saying the same thing: jerk is a rate of change of acceleration, representing what he's calling "higher order motion", hence m/s^3, but you can believe I wish he were here to speak for himself, as any (mis)interpretation of his work by me is likely to muddy the waters even more

Back to the reason why, presumably, you started this thread in the first place.

Do you have any questions, concerning space and/or astronomy, on the narrow topic of this thread, that have yet to be answered to your satisfaction?

In any case, I have a question for any and all readers of this thread: how do you, personally, go about addressing, dealing with, understanding, {insert whatever other term is appropriate here} the sort of thing which quotation and Selfsim have introduced to us in this thread?