History of Science and Technology Q&A (August 21, 2024)

[@yrebrac]

Super interesting, thank you Stephen 🙏🏼

[@wwkk4964]

The last answer was amazing.

[@soopergoof232]

Dear Dr. Wolfram, I just caught your interview with Brian Keating, and am profoundly astounded (in a good way) with your 'caloric fluid' analogy, and your intuition that dark matter is likely something right under our noses. We currently perceive "space" to be vacuum or 'nothingness' interspersed here and there with matter. But provisionally, for the sake of discussion, let's posit space to be a great universe-filling 'Ocean' or Plenum. The word means fullness, the uttermost opposite of vacuum. So how might the Plenum be conceptualized? And how might this relate to DM? Conceptualizing it might be easier by way of analogy at first (in the same vein as your use of 'caloric fluid'). Picture a fish deep in the ocean. He has no concept of "water" or "ocean", 'water molecules', pressure or density. To his perception, his domain is simply "space", a great void of 'nothing'. He feels no physical presence or pressure, because he's composed of and immersed in, the perceived "no-thing". And he's neutrally buoyant in it. In like manner, our perception of "space" is a 'no-thing' or nothingness. We're oblivious that we, even down to our constituent atoms, are full of and swimming in one great 'Ocean', the Plenum of space. Our very atoms, down to their quantum and subquantum constituency, are FULL of It. It's said that an atom is 99.9999% or so "empty space", which translates to it being 99.9999% FULL of 'Plenum stuff'. As with Mr. Fish, we're also in hydraulic equalibrium with it, sensing no physical presence of it. And because its 'cellularity' is SUB-PLANCKIAN, below our sensory and EM resolution, we go on perceiving It as 'void' or nothing, just as "water molecules" would be to Mr. Fish in his domain of "nothing". In like manner, we, our planet and our Cosmos are dwellers in our element, the 'Ocean' of subPlanckian space. The perceived "void". This little vid contains a neat metaphor of 'particles' popping out of and back into "nothing". Begins at 3: 40 kzbin.info/www/bejne/nIqboaiZg8aUfpI The water is "space"; the bubbles are metaphoric "particles". The non-Keplerian or 'flat' rotation of spiral galaxies is easily explainable by _co-entrainment_ of matter and subPlanckian 'space' moving and co-rotating more or less in unison, with the stars 'hooked into' the bulk flow and forming the spiral arms. There would be no question of whether dark matter exists or not, because DM and 'space' would be one and the same thing(!). Its constituency being subPlanckian, below our sensory and EM resolution, causes it to appear 'void' hence "dark" to our perception. Thus we go on in the futile search for DM, all the while we are embedded in and swimming in it. There seems to be a de facto "transPlanckian taboo" forbidding any serious enquiry into this most primal and PRIMARY substratum. And one thing it is NOT: It is not the fictitious "aether". Then there's that other attribution of DM, gravitational lensing, which invokes the fluidic and highly-mobile nature of the Plenum. But that's a discussion for another day. Cheers

[@mitchellhayman381]

Thank you Stephen

[@rich_in_paradise]

Moles per acre 🤣

[@paularmstrong88]

boring