In a previous post I mention emergent order in freely operating complex systems. In this one I want to make a scientific prediction. I believe that it will be discovered that “dark matter” and “dark energy” do not exist. John Moffat’s arguments in “Reinventing Gravity” are strong. I believe dark matter will be found to be like the planet Vulcan, an artifice proposed to explain an aberrant observation within our current system that was eventually proven not to exist, and that instead a refined model is needed. And the refinement of the model will be to include an attractive force that operates on matter that is a function of the degree of order “seen” by the matter in all directions. Matter at the edge of a spiral galaxy “sees” great deal of order in the direction of the galactic core. In other directions it sees randomness, the sum of the order of all distant masses, which gets noisy and random when super-positioned.
I believe that John Moffat at the Perimeter institute in Waterloo has proposed a force that operates similar to gravity, except increasing with distance from the galactic core as opposed to decreasing under an inverse-square law as gravity does, to explain the excessive spectrum-shift of the masses at galactic edges. Sounds good to me.
Could this force arise from the order present in the galaxy in its perfectly self-organized spiral structures? If the second law of thermodynamics is true on scales greater than a steam engine, how can we explain that almost everywhere we look we see great order?
Without a force arising from order, the infinite improbability of our existence leads to contradiction, I feel. Just as we do not know why the apple falls, so too do we not know why order arises. It just does. It seems to settle out at different levels of scale. Look at the order of the periodic table. Molecules. Organisms. Consciousness. Spiral galaxies. Order everywhere, at different scales.
The second law isn’t wrong, it is just limited in application, and further, there is something missing from our current physical theories.
I assert that that missing thing is order. And finding the force of order will make dark matter vanish, just like Vulcan did, save in the imaginations of the Trekkies.
You heard it here first!*
(*or maybe over at tfmetalsreport.com, where I also rant from time to time… 😉
PS: A great book on emergent order is “At Home in the Universe” by Stuart Kauffman.
Addendum: I believe that the mathematical expression that will eventually be derived for the “order function” will need to be expressed in terms of Feigenbaum’s constant. Perception of order is scale-dependent.