Kevin's Watch

(The opening line of Coriolanus.)

I read in a book recently that in the universe there is "only one kind of stuff - matter". I wondered if this was still true - and also if it could only be true? With the discovery that the Universe has way more (something - gravity? mass?) than it should do, physicists have come up with the idea of dark matter in order to make up the missing stuff. My question is, will this new stuff - dark matter - be the same type of stuff that we can normally, but just concentrated or hidden in places that we can't see it (think in other rolled up dimensions, inside black holes etc) or will it be 'something else' - something that has mass, has gravitational pull, but is not matter in the sense that we have to date encountered it?

And forgetting even trying to find the stuff, does the math even allow for the existence of mass, or gravity or whatever, to be attached to something different other than matter as we know it. Can stuff even theoretically be of a different order?

Idle speculation - no matter.

peter wrote:(The opening line of Coriolanus.)

I read in a book recently that in the universe there is "only one kind of stuff - matter". I wondered if this was still true - and also if it could only be true? With the discovery that the Universe has way more (something - gravity? mass?) than it should do, physicists have come up with the idea of dark matter in order to make up the missing stuff. My question is, will this new stuff - dark matter - be the same type of stuff that we can normally, but just concentrated or hidden in places that we can't see it (think in other rolled up dimensions, inside black holes etc) or will it be 'something else' - something that has mass, has gravitational pull, but is not matter in the sense that we have to date encountered it?

And forgetting even trying to find the stuff, does the math even allow for the existence of mass, or gravity or whatever, to be attached to something different other than matter as we know it. Can stuff even theoretically be of a different order?

Idle speculation - no matter.

I say, "yes".
Glad that I can be here for you, peter!

Your avatar and your post Cord Hurn, tell me that your presence along side me will be a benifience of significant magnitude by any standard - you have my gratitude!

I believe in matter!

I find the idea of dark matter somehow comforting, though I'm not sure yet why that is. Maybe because it feels like a comforting celestial blanket around us.

I think I like it because we don't know what it is. It lends the Universe a degree of mystery, of otherness - and why not should it have a few secrets of its own: can we deny it that?

peter wrote:I think I like it because we don't know what it is. It lends the Universe a degree of mystery, of otherness - and why not should it have a few secrets of its own: can we deny it that?

I say, absolutely not!

Methinks there are matters dark enough in what we already know of the universe for us to have the need for yet more. Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof etc. ( )