Ahh… hmm. In some ways it is literally inaccessible, because we can’t observe it directly. All of our experimental (e.g. real) subatomic knowledge comes from smashing particles into each other at near-light speed and observing the bits that come out, which is somewhat like dropping a smartphone off the Empire State building and trying to figure out how it works by picking up the broken pieces off the sidewalk. We can probe the structure of molecules with electron microscopes, but there are no tools for directly observing anything smaller than that. We draw conclusions for how smaller things behave through inference.
Also as Heisenberg found, at a certain point things get blurry not because our instruments don’t have the technical capabilities, but because what we are looking at is fundamentally blurry.
The idea behind dark matter is pretty easy to understand and not that mysterious. Something doesn’t interact with the EM force so it’s just invisible and passes right through things. Since there’s plenty of examples of field specific quanta, it’s not really an out there idea.
Angular momentum of particles requires math and theories that require too much effort for me to understand them.
So in short, it all make sense in math, but when you try to convert it into actual words it doesn’t make sense or it’s so difficult to understand that unless you know the math you can’t understand.
Precisely! Language is a tool we use to understand the world around us and english simply lacks the vocabulary to describe many aspects of physics that the language of mathematics has
The name was too cool. If they called it something super long like Non-electromagnetic interacting granular happening (NEIGH) we would all say it’s too confusing and I don’t understand, as opposed to “I get it and it must be wrong for reasons so simple a layman has thougnt of them.”
Actually that does have a confusing name: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. WIMPs. Yes, really.
It’s a common misconception that Dark Matter = WIMPs because it’s the leading theory right now. Dark Matter really just means “whatever happens to be the cause of certain cosmological measurement discrepancies” even if that cause isn’t in any way “matter” at all. It’s a very misleading name.
I highly recommend the YouTube channel pbs spacetime if you want a good explanation. It goes slightly more in depth than other channels which is what I like but its not math heavy. They have series to slowly build up knowledge as playlists too.
Quantum mechanics (and spin) isn’t really mysterious or inaccessible, it’s just not intuitive.
Ahh… hmm. In some ways it is literally inaccessible, because we can’t observe it directly. All of our experimental (e.g. real) subatomic knowledge comes from smashing particles into each other at near-light speed and observing the bits that come out, which is somewhat like dropping a smartphone off the Empire State building and trying to figure out how it works by picking up the broken pieces off the sidewalk. We can probe the structure of molecules with electron microscopes, but there are no tools for directly observing anything smaller than that. We draw conclusions for how smaller things behave through inference.
And frankly, the entire concept of spinors and the relationship to observed properties like electron charge is pretty mysterious, and nobody really understands wave-particle duality, that’s just the best explanation we have for what we observe.
Also as Heisenberg found, at a certain point things get blurry not because our instruments don’t have the technical capabilities, but because what we are looking at is fundamentally blurry.
How about dark matter and dark energy.
The idea behind dark matter is pretty easy to understand and not that mysterious. Something doesn’t interact with the EM force so it’s just invisible and passes right through things. Since there’s plenty of examples of field specific quanta, it’s not really an out there idea.
Angular momentum of particles requires math and theories that require too much effort for me to understand them.
So in short, it all make sense in math, but when you try to convert it into actual words it doesn’t make sense or it’s so difficult to understand that unless you know the math you can’t understand.
Precisely! Language is a tool we use to understand the world around us and english simply lacks the vocabulary to describe many aspects of physics that the language of mathematics has
The name was too cool. If they called it something super long like Non-electromagnetic interacting granular happening (NEIGH) we would all say it’s too confusing and I don’t understand, as opposed to “I get it and it must be wrong for reasons so simple a layman has thougnt of them.”
Actually that does have a confusing name: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. WIMPs. Yes, really.
It’s a common misconception that Dark Matter = WIMPs because it’s the leading theory right now. Dark Matter really just means “whatever happens to be the cause of certain cosmological measurement discrepancies” even if that cause isn’t in any way “matter” at all. It’s a very misleading name.
Additional variables introduced to make current theoretical models fit the observed data.
I highly recommend the YouTube channel pbs spacetime if you want a good explanation. It goes slightly more in depth than other channels which is what I like but its not math heavy. They have series to slowly build up knowledge as playlists too.