Title text:

In addition to gravity, burritos interact through the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, which is believed to be a major contributor to their popularity.

Transcript:

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Source: https://xkcd.com/3085/

explainxkcd for #3085

  • bloup@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    4·
    6 hours ago

    This is a funny comic, but it really does disturb me how certain most theoretical physicists are about the nature of dark matter, despite there not really being any good philosophical reason for us to expect these anomalies to be caused by a particle that interacts non-gravitationally.

    • addie@feddit.ukEnglish
      20·
      6 hours ago

      Well, we know that our understanding of physics isn’t correct - galaxies rotate faster than we think they ought to based on the amount of matter that we think is in them based on our theories of gravity and the evolution of the universe.

      The “simplest” explanation is that there’s a particle that only interacts gravitationally, and has no other interaction with matter, hence being dark. Gravity might work differently on galactic scales, although it’s hard to make that maths work; or neutrinos (which are also ‘dark’) don’t have the gravitational interaction that we expect from theory.

      Simple answer is that we don’t know, and “dark matter” is the useful placeholder term until we work it out. Could be a lot of things, although there’s a lot of things that we know it isn’t.

      Wikipedia has a big list of all the things that don’t fit our current model, and which a proper theory of everything would have to explain. Dark matter ticks all the boxes, whereas other theories work for one or two but can’t explain the rest.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter