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Opinion | The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[+] [email protected] -17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The standard model today holds that “normal” matter — the stuff that makes up people and planets and everything else we can see — constitutes only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest is invisible stuff called dark matter and dark energy (roughly 27 percent and 68 percent).

Please use different words - possibly “clear matter” or “invisible matter” and “invisible energy”. It’s so sad when conceptual hurdles are put in place by poorly implemented terminology. It’s fixable, and easily done so . . .

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I’m not sure why that’s a conceptual hurdle. Electromagnetic radiation, including the visible light spectrum, is one of the primary methods in which we gather data about and interpret the universe. To say that the matter is “dark” is to say that it’s not detectable on the electromagnetic spectrum to us as we know it.

It’s not an uncommon turn of phrase, it’s the same reasoning for the colloquial term “going dark” regarding radio communication silence.

To say that it’s “invisible” or “clear” would imply the existence of some property causing it to be so. This would also imply the presence of interpretable data in order to term it as such, when in truth none exists. You could perhaps say “unknown” but then that’s truly arbitrary, “dark” at least implies the opposite of “light”, i.e. detectable and serves a conjectural purpose in that sense.