The mythic associations of “dark matter”(nautil.us)
nautil.us
The mythic associations of “dark matter”
http://nautil.us/blog/dark-matter-is-in-our-dna
11 comments
>dark matter was truly “discovered” in the 1970s by Vera Rubin
as a nit: dark matter was actually discovered in the 50's with the first direct detection of neutrinos, which is why-in the 70's- "maybe there's just a bunch of matter not interacting with photons" wasn't laughed out of the room.
as a nit: dark matter was actually discovered in the 50's with the first direct detection of neutrinos, which is why-in the 70's- "maybe there's just a bunch of matter not interacting with photons" wasn't laughed out of the room.
Neutrinos are no longer considered to be 'dark matter'.
Before the 1980s it was, though.
Neutrinos aren't the dark matter responsible for the bullet cluster, rotation curves etc... But dark matter as a term is just a catch all for particles that don't interact with photons, hence hot (neutrinos) and cold (what we need for galaxies)
Dark matter was actually discovered in the early 1800s when the first double-slit experiment was performed, as it is the medium that waves.
The headline writer here has evidently decided to take an article about one of physicists’ pet peeves and include a biologist pet peeve—saying something is “in our DNA” to mean it’s an apparently inherent part of our cultural legacy, without making any reference to actual biology.
But the article is actually making a case against the pet peeve.
We replaced the title with representative language from the article.
Is this something that should be flagged?
I don’t think so. It is in the headline on Nautilus, and while I think there’s room for yet another article where a scientist carps about how the lay press misuses scientific terms, this whole article is about why “Dark Matter” as a term is evocative, and “in our DNA” has also come to mean something beyond “is encoded in the sequence of our chromosomes“.
Was hoping for an article about how dark matter affects genetics.
And Zwicky found that galaxies were moving too fast for the matter we see in clusters yet the clusters weren't flying apart. This seems exactly analagous to Rubin's discovery so it is not clear why the author considers it not the true "discovery".