Dern Funny. . .

 

The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries,
is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
Isaac Asimov

 

About two years ago I got to thinking idly about the dark matter problem—not in any informed way, please note, several years previously I had dismissed it as being obviously a matter of some excess of rogue planets or neutral hydrogen or the like, that would explain the invisibility of the excess gravitation.

Equally idle reading made it appear that people active in the field had not really been so unimaginative, but had made it clear that no such idea could hold water in the light of observations and logic.

So I did more thinking and wrote an essay at: Dern Matter in my blog.

Most of what I write is as about as humble as the speech of a political candidate denigrating a rival party, but in the Dern Matter essay I practically grovelled, and rightly so: it was pure abduction, without even the extenuation of a few mathematical expressions or numerical observations to show willing.

In short, it amounted, and amounts, to handwaving.

Its idea was that the sources of the excess gravitation might be in other universes. To appreciate the joke, you must realise that my personal view of external universes other than our observable universe, had long been one of summary disbelief.

And yet, as you might read at: Dern Matter, my idea had invoked an indefinite number of universes with at least largely matching coordinates in at least four, but as many as you like, space-time dimensions.

And one of those universes you and I would be sharing as I write and you read.

But they would share at least one extra dimension, that I call the Z‑axis, in which they had no coordinates in common, though their separation in those extra Z‑axis dimensions would vary indefinitely.

Now, no matter how close any two such universes happened to be along the Z‑axis, they would be entirely irrelevant to each other in every other way, except that their gravitation would leak across to some extent. Since their internal coordinates would match sufficiently, bodies in each pair of universes would be attracted to their mutual centres of mass.

About the closest that  Dern Matter came to suggesting anything falsifiable, was to remark that one prediction of any such scheme should be that we should see lensing from apparently empty volumes, and I was not aware of anything of the type.

My speculation had other weaknesses as well, such as that it would predict some radically non‑Newtonian trajectories in space, but one could generally expect such effects to be rare and subtle; after all, bodies in space are usually not close enough together to be seen to manoeuvre abruptly.

So I had dismissed my speculation as unsupported, until I happened to encounter a recent report of just such an unexplained lensing.  At gravitational imaging, just such a one is under discussion.

Now, I am quite aware of the volatility of such observations and speculations in cutting-edge science, and I realise that my suggestion has chinks and crannies, and that without mathematical analysis it is hardly worth the paper that I never printed it on, but I do feel a little less humble than I did before reading that article.

After all, if the invisible gravitational influence is so powerful, say, a super black hole in a neighbouring Z‑axis universe, it would be quite powerful enough to produce a job lot of orphan bodies from a neighbouring solar system.

And if masses in several coinciding Z‑axis universes coincided, that could explain the 6‑to‑1 apparent mass discrepancy in our apparent galactic masses.

And once great masses coincided in Z‑axis universes, they would stay stably together.

One more time: yes, even I can see some of the funny bits, but at the least I am moved to repeat Asimov's foregoing funny epigraph:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries,
is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'