Correct me if I'm wrong (please), but don't we still lack any kind of fundamental definition of what dark energy/matter is other than..."the cause of the difference between what is calculated, and what is observed"? To the point that we aren't even really sure that there is such a "thing" as dark matter (in that it exists in any conventional sense)?
From Wikipedia: "Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe...The primary evidence for dark matter comes from calculations showing that many galaxies would behave quite differently if they did not contain a large amount of unseen matter. Some galaxies would not have formed at all and others would not move as they currently do."
85% is kind of a lot of "stuff" to be missing...
I find it kind of funny that humans are so confident that our models of reality are correct that we truly think it's more likely there's just hidden "stuff" than there's just something hugely wrong with our idea of what the universe really is, and how it works. Our physics works great in a lot of circumstances, but to be missing 85% of the damn universe might imply we are wildly off base when it comes down to the true nature of things.
Obviously, I don't have an explanation myself, and I understand that we can only work with the evidence we have, but I think it's a sign we need to radically rework our basic assumptions about reality, and not just look for our missing keys...
Perhaps black holes are the right place to look, but not as a cubby hole for our missing stuff - rather, as a path to transforming our assumptions about reality.
> I find it kind of funny that humans are so confident that our models of reality are correct that we truly think it's more likely there's just hidden "stuff" than there's just something hugely wrong with our idea of what the universe really is, and how it works.
That's not how it works.
Many a physics PhD has spent their career trying to come up with better models, including different sorts models of gravity or indeed "to radically rework our basic assumptions about reality,".
Surprisingly, physics professors aren't idiots and have thought of this. It's just that, so far, invisible matter is still the thing that best fits the data compared to the (non-overfitted) modified gravity models people have been able to come up with so far.
I mean, we already know about existing "dark" matter particles. The Neutrino comes to mind, though it's not massive enough to explain the gravitational phenomena. LCDM really isn't that weird or unexpected, since it's a lot like what we already observe, and we already think more particles should exist.
Hypothetical "dark matter" doesn't interact with ordinary matter, except gravitationally. Neutrinos do interact with ordinary matter; otherwise we wouldn't be able to build neutrino detectors. Therefore neutrinos are not an example of dark matter.
> "dark matter" doesn't interact with ordinary matter, except gravitationally.
It's possible that this is the case, but particles that also interact with the weak force (hence WIMPs: weakly interacting massive particles) are generally considered better candidates.
They are, because they have mass and don't interact electromagnetically. They are just not cold dark matter, because their mass is so low they behave more like radiation than matter, i.e. the scale as a^4 instead of a^3, where a is the scale factor. A sterile neutrino, if it existed, could still be a dark matter candidate.
Every one of those parameters is associated with a field that does symmetry breaking. Every one of those fields has a particle associated. Every one of those particles has been observed, studied, and found to have properties in line with what would be required for the fields to have the values that we measure.
So yes, that's a lot of free parameters. But they are intrinsic to the theory. And we have considerable experimental evidence that they represent something real.
For those who don't know what symmetry breaking is, the Standard Model has a lot more symmetries than the observed universe. For example the theory does not specify that electromagnetism is long range while the strong nuclear force is short range. Or that the muon weighs more than the electron. But for each symmetry in the theory that we don't see in practice, there is a field that specifies the value of the observed asymmetry. Each field is carried by a particle. Each particle has properties that reflect the value of all of the fields. Every particle has been found and almost all have the predicted properties (to within measurement error).
The last particle found was the Higgs boson. The Higgs field determines the relative masses of different particles.
The "almost all" is the fact that the neutrino has 3 versions and oscillates between them in flight. Also the neutrino is not massless. While the Standard Theory can adapt to match this, this isn't what was originally predicted.
Right, and some physicists have a nagging feeling that the addition of another symmetry would result in the reduction in free parameters. "We've done it before, so why shouldn't it work again?" is their thought process. So they devise a model which replicates the standard model in observable ranges and to make it testable, doesn't replicate the standard model outside of the observable range. This is an attempt to make the model falsifiable and thus scientific. Then they advocate for expensive accelerators to falsify the model.
You'd be hard pressed to derive a model for the coarse structure of the universe from the Standard Model, considering the Standard Model can't describe gravity. Maybe this is part of the problem..
Dark matter is the name for unexplained mass that doesn't interact like typical matter. The existence of such mass is needed because there are galaxies that don't match what is predicted by general relativity. So either general relativity is wrong on the particular predications or there is extra matter.
The universe is expanding. However, not only is it expanding, but the expansion is accelerating. It isn't clear what is driving this, and source of the acceleration was given the name dark energy.
The "dark" in these names are part we don't know what these things are yet and part we can't see them yet with our current observational methods.
> I find it kind of funny that humans are so confident that our models of reality are correct
I don't think this is the case. If you have another model that replaces general relativity, I think people would be very interested in it. People have tried several times to explain the observations that led to dark matter by modifying various forms of gravity. They all work less well than general relativity. So the search continues: keep adjust the models but also don't be afraid that there are new things in the universe that we didn't previously know about. There are several experimental approaches that are searching for ways to directly detect dark matter.
> People have tried several times to explain the observations that led to dark matter
The observations that led to Dark Matter have been sufficiently explained without the need for Dark Matter.[1] Apparently, subsequent observations that got lumped into Dark Matter have not yet been sufficiently explained, and Science is paradigmatic, so Dark Matter persists.
> I find it kind of funny that humans are so confident that our models of reality are correct that we truly think it's more likely there's just hidden "stuff" than there's just something hugely wrong with our idea of what the universe really is.
> Obviously, I don't have an explanation myself, and I understand that we can only work with the evidence we have, but I think it's a sign we need to radically rework our basic assumptions about reality, and not just look for our missing keys...
Looking for missing keys is fine. This is how models are validated or invalidated. For example, Neptune's location was predicted in the 19th century before it was observed due to discrepencies in Uranus' observed orbit and what was modeled.
There are alternative theories that could replace dark matter/dark energy (e.g. MOND for dark matter, inhomologous cosmologies for dark energy).
>I find it kind of funny that humans are so confident that our models of reality are correct
The models used aren't used because scientists think they are correct, but because they are the best models that fit existing experimental data. Best normally meaning 'simplest that explain all data', but it isn't quite always that simple. There are scientists who spend the latter parts of their careers trying to find even better models or even proposing worse models that are useful to keep in a folder somewhere in case they ever do become relevant or we come across data the current model can't explain. At the cutting edge of science you even find that the current models aren't matching all the data, but there is no consensus on a better model and scientists are working to either expand or replace the current model to fit the new data and to explore the non-matching data to either see if it is an error (which does happen) or if it gives hints on a better model.
Anyone who thinks that the model is correct is someone who is lacking a foundation in what science is saying. Often scientists don't talk about the distinction because it is too detailed for the public to care about, but that's not the same as not recognizing the distinction. (Much like how programmers talk about computers as if they are intelligent beings making decisions, often to the programmer's detriment, despite any good programmer knowing that isn't the case, newest models of AI tentatively excluded.)
> "the cause of the difference between what is calculated, and what is observed"
Dark energy / the cosmological constant Λ is a completely natural parameter to the field equations, not a corrective term (even though it might feel that way if you follow the history of cosmology). It's not that we calculated Λ to be zero but observations forced us to set it to something non-zero. We had no clue what it's value should be and simply deduced from observations that it happens to be non-zero. End of story.
Now, particle physicists / field theorists have been looking for a particle physics-based explanation for Λ and preliminarily called it "dark energy". But there's no guarantee there is one. Maybe Λ is indeed just a boring parameter.
"...humans are so confident that our models of reality are correct..."
Dark Matter is just a hypotheses to explain our current observations. Future discoveries may back up dark matter, or point towards something different. This is how Science works.
> Correct me if I'm wrong (please), but don't we still lack any kind of fundamental definition of what dark energy/matter is other than..."the cause of the difference between what is calculated, and what is observed"?
Sure. You seem to take issue with this notion. However, this very strategy lead to the discovery of elementary particles (neutrino) and planets (Neptune) in the past. It's how science works.
> Obviously, I don't have an explanation myself, and I understand that we can only work with the evidence we have, but I think it's a sign we need to radically rework our basic assumptions about reality, and not just look for our missing keys...
This is an extremely common opinion among laymen (relevant: https://xkcd.com/1758/). I find it a bit patronizing, because it implies that scientists haven't considered everything under the sun to explain the observations. Please take it from me, who got a PhD in cosmology, that every single person I encountered during my graduate studies was extremely bright, in particular the professors. They have thought of everything a layman can think of a billion times over. The knowledge gap in a field as unintuitive as cosmology between a professor and a layman is basically that of an adult and a toddler.
That's not saying that dark matter or dark energy is beyond any doubt, just that "we need something radically different" is not a very helpful take. You're basically saying "We just need another Einstein", except better data is harder and harder to come by. It's not sufficient anymore to just observe the perihelion shift of mercury. We now need to do things like measure the shapes of billions of galaxies to make any progress, and hope that the billions of galaxies we can observe (there is an upper bound) will yield sufficient precision to even tell two theories apart. We need to build gigantic particle accelerators and build humongous particle detectors in the antarctic to even hope to make some progress.
We know how gravity works locally (for various definitions of local). We can calculate and predict with a lot of accuracy how objects in our immediate vicinity will behave.
All of the evidence is pointing to confirmation of our understanding of the situation.
Then this bullshit star three dozen light years away says "fuck that noise" and does something completely wild. Either we're wrong about all of our math or we missed something.
The "we missed something" crowd is the "dark energy"/"dark matter" people. And by "dark", they just mean "undetectable by current instruments". They believe our math is right. I believe the other crowd is the "Grand Unified Theory" people. That the math itself changes at scale.
And why is "85% of matter is undetectable at distance" not transformative to our assumptions? Do you realize the implications of that? That if 85% of what we should be able to perceive is imperceptible, then the "great silence" may be here sooner than we expect. Maybe that 85% is stuff that is just beyond the speed at which we'd be able to perceive it.
I feel the same way about the red 'N', and that association on a large scale is very bad for business. Once your logo becomes a marker for something to avoid, your brand is toast. Very hard to reverse such a perception.
It's interesting how legacy companies are not making exciting consumer/commercial products anymore, but infrastructure and technical projects are booming.
Google TensorFlow and DeepMind, Microsoft WSL2, Meta AI, etc. Also worth mentioning the many quiet efforts to get quantum computing off the ground.
Indeed. For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work" but what he fails to realize is that humans have not actually merged with robots yet, and we still have human needs.
If innovation and brilliant thinking are part of your brand, you actually get higher quality work, sustained over a longer period of time, if you actually back off on the whip-cracking and just give people what they need to produce great work.
You get slightly slower growth, but more area under the curve in the long run.
>For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work"
And Musk is the perfect example of "do as I say, not as I do", as he sends teams into a death march of insane hours, wherever he is, while he's shitposting on Twitter from his multi million dollar house paid for by company funds and pretending he's doing 120 hour work weeks
I think there is a middle area between being a "nice boss" and being a boss who calls out internal engineering implementation concerns (rightly or not) on Twitter. And then fire people who disagree in a response.
Hewlett and Packard were relatively low on the asshole scale, at least for their employees. [1]
Early support for company health insurance, flextime, work-from-home, free coffee breaks, decentralized decision making, etc.
See the HP Memory Project at https://www.hpmemoryproject.org for some of the stories. ("Jim Catlin's Packard Story" and Packard's 11 rules, "Bill Hewlett and the HP Medical Plan" for their anonymous payment for medical bills for an employee's premature baby, etc.)
I don’t think it’s nice or not thing but more a management strategy thing. Hard-driving can be great at extracting value from an organization but it isn’t as effective at exploring potential as other management styles.
(Thinking of how much the Artemis cost vs. total SpaceX subsidy here, but subsidies are everywhere and look suspiciously like legalised corruption and/or voter manipulation to me even when I like the thing being subsidised).
Counterpoint: open source software, of which there are many great works without anyone being forced or pressured into making it. There are many more ways of getting motivation than applying "some pressure". Indeed, people are inherently curious and motivated, but it can easily be suppressed by environmental factors. In particular "stick and carrot"-type reward systems.
For a (much more) elaborate expansion on this, see the book Drive by Daniel H. Pink.
All this musk-style motivation 101 BS is direct from the CIA's manual on domestic espionage - frustration from within.
The means define the ends. If you treat people like shit, or as morons who need BS pressure techniques, you'll get a demoralised company.
Treat people well, set them clear targets and say it without fluff when they're slacking. If you can't tell somebody they're not good enough, you cannot help them to be good enough. None of this psychobabble BS where you're constantly second-guessing in a failed attempt to retain them on the rat-race for the rest of their life. Stop building ratrace companies.
They build rat-races because they are all still rats at heart.
Endemic crisis of leadership and vision bred men who cannot think
outside the maze. No amount of climbing extended their horizons or
released them from slavery to money and the misery it brings.
> released them from slavery to money and the misery it brings
Good point. I often wonder what motivates a billionaire to keep making more money. For most it seems like ego, greed, and inability to rethink their life. I suppose they climbed so high by being relentless and not stopping. This is what makes the example of Yvon Chouinard so interesting.
The vast majority of open source done in peoples free time is unfinished and at best of limited use. The serious projects very often have payed developers. The good ones done by unpaid developers have some pressure in terms of expectations by their community or the developers put pressure on themselves to achieve some self goal.
You are quite right that open source done purely in free time usually takes much longer to be "finished" but that is more a question of the time available to spend on it than absence of pressure.
OSS projects that have paid developers often manage to avoid much of the pressure that occurs in closed source.
Some OSS projects like the kernel manage to harness companies as way of funding full time developers without giving them too much say in details or deadlines. A feature ships in Linux when it is ready and accepted by the maintainers and Linus not when some manager says it has to ship.
Of course this works far better for large projects that are essentially a "commons" like the kernel, less so for open source projects where most of the developers work for a single company.
OSS projects are also prone to leadership issues and tend to have "good ol boys" clubs. It's utlimately human nature, OSS or not. See Linus Torvals or some of the things that went on in Rust community. Also, StackOverflow mods that volunteer their free time have so many issues. Wikipedia editors and Reddit moderators. Same.
Putting a OSS lipstick isn't doing any favors to understanding the human nature and how to create a good governance model to keep people happy. I suspect this is never going to be "solved", only solved in one person's views or ideological bias.
We barely recently got decent open source computers (but not smartphones), now try to imagine a GPL car...
That said it wouldn't it be cool have some sort of open source VW Bug. Stainless steel cyberbug, EV for the people. Low tech, curb lasts whole century, ubiquitous parts.
> That said it wouldn't it be cool have some sort of open source VW Bug. Stainless steel cyberbug, EV for the people. Low tech, curb lasts whole century, ubiquitous parts.
AWS would just fork it, package it as a SaaS, give nothing back to the project and it would then slowly atrophy and cease to exist.
Exactly, which is why I am advocating precisely for giving people what they need. Some people need pressure to perform optimally, others don't. Some people need to put in 80 hours of work per week, others don't. It is simple and humane to approach it this way.
I think motivation is more important. Solving problems should be fun and engaging activity. There are always bad apples literally in every single company no matter how good or faithful their culture. So, there is no way around it.
To give Elon credit, he does try to motivate people. Sleeping on the factory floor, doing more work than his subordinates, inspiring people about grand goals and "anti-bureacratic" philosophy – all contribute to motivation. He sent out an email to Tesla employees that literally said "If a rule becomes a Dilbert joke, then change the rule".
I am trying to steelman Elon's way of governing and personally know several people at SpaceX that are not dying from overwork, but actually happy. I also have a few friends who couldn't stand SpaceX and quit within the first year.
Spoiler alert: they had help. Robinhood is a wolf in sheep's clothing - they are controlled by, and beholden to, criminal enterprises such as Citadel. This "in-house" trade clearing system is actually Ken Griffin's personal honeypot. It is built for one, and only one purpose, and that is to fleece retail investors at all costs while simultaneously creating the appearance of being retail's champion.
It's a neat trick, and I'd almost respect their enginuity if they weren't robbing people blind. I wouldn't touch Robinhood's products or common stock with a 100 foot pole, and neither should you.
Edit: See my other comments below for an idea of how/why this works.
I also would ever use Robinhood instead of a reputable broker like TD Fidelity Vanguard IB etc. But not for the reasons you stipulated. Back office systems aren't put in place to "fleece" anyone.
Back office systems are exactly where Citadel, the market maker, could put a tiny little window to peep at data they shouldn't, so they can frontrun every trade retail investors make!!
Wouldn't it be wild if a market maker also controlled a hedge fund, and also had members installed on regulating bodies, but then like, PINKY PROMISED they wouldn't abuse their positions? And then imagine if the SEC were complicit because it's run by an ex-Goldman henchman?
I really hate to do this because it sounds lazy, but I strongly encourage you to watch The Problem with Jon Stewart's episode on this. He explains it very well, and it's a lot of information, so if you are genuinely curious, I would highly recommend it. It will open your eyes to a level of criminal activity at the highest levels of our markets that will hopefully surprise you. It explains this, and more.
This is straight out of /r/superstonk or /r/wallstreetbets. The conspiracy theories about Citadel, Ken Griffin and Robinhood rival QAnon levels of culting. I've heard it said that these theories, including GME, are like QAnon for people interested in personal finance rather than politics.
Lol, right, because things like this have never happened before. In particular, the years 1998 - 2008 were devoid of financial crime, and are a decade of restrained, ethical capitalism that we should all aspire to. Gentlemen of Wall Street today are just trying to return us to that gilded age, and any suggestion to the contrary is conspiratorial madness I do say, good chap!
Thank you for pointing out my severe mental illness and inability to think clearly about such lofty matters. I'll go take my meds now.
Well, I suppose there is no rehabilitating cult members. Your reasoning also doesn't make much sense, we can agree that there is financial crime in that time period while also acknowledging that superstonk-esque manipulation isn't happening. You're basically trying to equivocate that just because something in the category of financial crime happened before that it must also be the case that your Ken Griffin conspiracy theory is also true. It's a more general fallacy that is often seen online, not just in this instance.
You very strongly compared my theories with QAnon, which is actual Alice-in-Wonderland level crazy. To compare financial crime theories that (given the precedent) could very well be true , to fucking QAnon is ridiculous, and I found it extremely condescending.
You can disagree, and you can bring up valid arguments, but your posture was offensive and has no place here.
Crime had very little relevance to 2008. I'm sure there was a certain amount of fraud going on, just as at every store there's a certain amount of "shrinkage", but the crisis was a good old-fashioned boom-and-bust cycle.
Right back at you. You're making a whole bunch of assertions which are, to say the least, not widely accepted, and unsupported by any evidence or logic.
That falls under "a certain amount of fraud going on". Yes, there were a lot of bogus AAA ratings going around. But everyone knew they were bogus - you don't get AAA paper that pays a 10% return. Any investment banker from the GFC era who tries to tell you they're a poor innocent rube who was taken advantage of by a dastardly ratings agency is having you on. The people buying the CDOs were sophisticated professionals who did their own analysis and bragged about how smart they were.
Let's just embrace the chaos and develop a new flavor for every browser until there are precisely 31 different flavors of Markdown. We cap it there, Baskin Robbins style, and then watch the world burn.
We could have a higher level language and tooling that transpiles everything to all known markdown flavors and bundles them all. But I guess one of these 31 flavors already does that.
If I may suggest something unorthodox - have you tried psychedelic therapy? And I don't mean just taking a psychedelic, I mean working with a therapist to go on an intentional healing journey.
I admit, although not medically prescribed or supervised, doing mushrooms has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Although I still have persistent nightmares it changed my understanding of other people and their perspectives to the point my anxiety in a lot of situations has vanished.
I don't think people should go nuts with them but I do think it's a good idea for some people with anxiety to find a clean pleasant care-free place to try them. Even if it just allows them to spend a few hours immersing themselves in completely different thought patterns and potentially gain something from them.
Exactly! It makes no difference to the compiler what you call a variable, but it makes a difference to the human.
Whenever I do a pandas dataframe melt, I name the variable "melted_cheese". I could just name it something plain/boring, but life is simplybetter with melted cheese.
Agreed. A certain amount of word–play is necessary for a happy and healthy life. Sadly I once worked on a team that didn’t understand this.
I had been given the task to add an insignificant feature to a minor subsystem, and by chance the first two methods I added to my class had names that started with the letter A. I had to “ask” the user for confirmation, and I had to “authenticate” a widget. To keep myself interested, I pushed myself to continue the trend. I needed names for about six or eight methods, and the last two were the hardest. I had to lock some files to deny anyone permission to read them, and I had to record the actions taken in a database. I had the implementations written and tested, I just needed good names.
I ended up with the names “afsluiten” (literally “off–close”, or “to close off”) and “αναγράφω” (“anagrapho”, to inscribe, record, or publish). I laughed so much when I found both of them. They were perfect! I committed, pushed to a branch, wrote up a pull request, and then started a two–week vacation the next morning.
I anticipated that on my return we would all laugh at these funny names in our weekly meeting, that the team lead would request that I rename these two methods, and that I would then push to master with English names. Instead, I had a meeting with HR and the VP of Engineering about how I was mocking them, disrespecting their work, how unprofessional it was, and on and on and on. Apparently the team had been stewing on this “insult” for the whole two weeks, making it worse and worse in their minds.
I was rather sad when they fired me, but I have been so much better off ever since; the people I work with now actually know what humor is, and how to play. They can even express admiration and wonder when someone does something clever or slick. It’s like night and day.
Oh my...what an awful way to get back from vacation! It's such a shame when egos get involved like that.
I deeply appreciate that level of wordplay though! Glad it worked out for you in the end, and I hope you have continued to express true creativity in your code :)
I came across a council system for recording the holes that ultility companies dig in roads. Often a specific job would require several additional "associated" holes to be dug around the main one.
The programmer chose the filenames: "holes" and "assholes". kudos!
NB: This was MSDOS days when filenames could be a maximum of 8 characters.
From Wikipedia: "Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe...The primary evidence for dark matter comes from calculations showing that many galaxies would behave quite differently if they did not contain a large amount of unseen matter. Some galaxies would not have formed at all and others would not move as they currently do."
85% is kind of a lot of "stuff" to be missing...
I find it kind of funny that humans are so confident that our models of reality are correct that we truly think it's more likely there's just hidden "stuff" than there's just something hugely wrong with our idea of what the universe really is, and how it works. Our physics works great in a lot of circumstances, but to be missing 85% of the damn universe might imply we are wildly off base when it comes down to the true nature of things.
Obviously, I don't have an explanation myself, and I understand that we can only work with the evidence we have, but I think it's a sign we need to radically rework our basic assumptions about reality, and not just look for our missing keys...
Perhaps black holes are the right place to look, but not as a cubby hole for our missing stuff - rather, as a path to transforming our assumptions about reality.