[HN Gopher] Astronomers have created the largest ever map of dar...
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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).
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