The other night I watched a program about dark matter. You've all probably heard about dark matter, I'm sure. It comes up now and again, gets bandied around like any other household term and then rightfully relegated to page 5E and only seen again by really persistent nerds and your grandpa, who scans every word of every paper just in case. "Dark matter" is not a good term, or at least it's an ill-used term. It is a sexy and vacant term for a really exciting astronomical thing which thousands of geeks are wrestling with every day, a concept that is breeding ulcers and midnight inspirations all over the place. It is really heady stuff, and you can sum it up pretty directly with a short phrase:
"We don't know what the fuck."
The term "dark matter" comes from a man with a suitably fantastical name: Fritz Zwicky. And just to be clear, it isn't called dark matter because of it's raven hue - we have no idea what this stuff looks like - but because it is obscured, unobservable. We are In The Dark about it. The central reasoning postulating the mere existence of the stuff is this: It has to exist, or else the universe isn't behaving correctly. If dark matter does exist, then all of the observable rules we have come to understand governing physics are off. To put it in perspective, if we are NOT wrong in our calculations, normal matter (that is to say, atoms as you or I understand them) makes up a whopping 4.6% of the stuff in the universe.
Every insanely, incomprehensibly titanic monster of a star, every Jupiter-sized hulk of a gas giant, every single particle of hydrogen drifting in the untold vastness between solar systems, added in total, make up 1/20th of what should be there. Every single observable thing, e.g. the universe as any person without clinical insanity or an astrophysics degree, is a tiny fraction of everything. The vast majority of the universe is made up of Who The Fuck Knows, mixed with We Have No Idea. Whatever it is, it is completely transparent to any method of observation we've thought of and can only be inferred by the fact that it's mass alters how planets, stars, etc dance. Whatever dark matter is made of, it's not made of regular-issue atoms.
So. To sum up: the entirety of everything is a vast gulf of unknowable Whoknowsium upon which our quaint little raft of baryonic matter floats, getting shoved around by vast tides of dark matter. Our entire universe is like a swimmer on a floating sedan in a sizable swimming pool filled with invisible, untouchable water which we only assume exists because otherwise, how would the chair float? This bizarre and borderline insane state of affairs has been the high drama of astronomy for seventy years, because the other option is that we're wrong about everything else. Either the universe is crazy, or we are.
What a wonderful, inspiring, beautiful state of affairs.
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