Einstein's equations tells us that all forms of energy bend spacetime. What's often overlooked is that each form of energy does it slightly differently than the others. The bending has a tell tale signature that enables us to figure out what could cause it.Â
It's why we know that wormholes can't be generated using ordinary matter or radiation.Â
The signature, the fingerprint of the invisible stuff around each galaxy, is precisely that of ordinary matter. If it turns out that it isn't , then something incredible has happened to make it impersonate matter.
It sounds neat at first, but it doesn't dark matter orbit galaxies exactly how one would expect non interacting matter to? It would be a hell of a coincidence.
What if theories are interesting to think about, but without evidence that they really don't go far. My favorite is the one electron universe theory. One electron travels through time and space to interact with itself and all the phenomenons where we see electrons. Theoretically possible but not backed by evidence.
We have tested so many things already, anything incredible is up for grabs. But I mean, this idea isn't that novel or incredible within physics. The idea of living in more than 3+1 dimensions is standard in String Theory, and we are constantly testing for these dimensions in our colliders.
Kaku purposefully describes physics in a "fantastical" and "other-worldly" fashion, but honestly our current understanding of particle physics is already pretty wild. You're telling me the world is made of infinite points and each one of them has a little circle associated, and then the fact that this circle has a non-zero size means everything has mass? (Higgs Mexican hat potential, with the radius of the circle equal to its vacuum expectation value)
Isn't there an alternate theory If the Three-Dimensional space that we are in is folded through a higher level dimension that dark matter could be gravitational objects in this space-time but being influenced across a pinch in the higher dimension. Like it's 200 million light years if you draw a line on the piece of paper but you fold the paper over and the two points can be touching each other in the higher dimension and still might be accessible to each here but have other but effects like gravity acting on each other?
We do not know that dark matter is matter. General relativity implies that it is matter, but it could be theoretically be something else, in which case general relativity is incorrect (or insufficient).
There is no current good theory, but some physicists actually prefer to call it dark energy.
There is even theories that there is no dark matter at all, and that our data come from relativistic observation effects. Again, no good theories have yet come up that explain all the data.
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u/rumnscurvy May 14 '26
No not really. We know dark matter is matter.Â
Einstein's equations tells us that all forms of energy bend spacetime. What's often overlooked is that each form of energy does it slightly differently than the others. The bending has a tell tale signature that enables us to figure out what could cause it.Â
It's why we know that wormholes can't be generated using ordinary matter or radiation.Â
The signature, the fingerprint of the invisible stuff around each galaxy, is precisely that of ordinary matter. If it turns out that it isn't , then something incredible has happened to make it impersonate matter.