The Elusiveness of Dark Matter
There was a recent article on Medium by Glenn Rocess entitled Maybe It’s Not Dark Matter, But the Fabric of Space Itself. His opening sentence was: “Maybe we’re forcing ourselves to work with the wrong paradigm”. I added a brief response: “The problem with dark matter may be that astrophysicists are obsessed with explanations based on particles. What alternative paradigm explanations are they willing to contemplate?” To my surprise, within a few days five people have clapped this response. It would seem that this is a topic of general interest.
Since my response, by an interesting coincidence, there was a relevant programme on the radio last week, during which the dark matter issue was discussed¹. Harry Cliff, particle physicist at the University of Cambridge, was quoted: “Whenever you hear the word ‘dark’ in physics, you should get very suspicious, because it usually means we don’t know what we are talking about. All the experiments that have been done so far have failed to detect any evidence of dark matter. That doesn’t mean that dark matter isn’t there; we’re almost certain it is there, but there’s a possibility that it doesn’t interact with any of the forces that the atoms in our bodies feel, in which case we will never be able to access it, and it will always be this mysterious stuff out there in space”.
One of the presenters Ian Blatchford then commented: “The ongoing efforts to detect it directly as a new form of fundamental particle have yielded nothing so far”. I was immediately reminded of my comment: “The problem with dark matter may be that astrophysicists are obsessed with explanations based on particles”.
All this is interesting because scientists are committed to physicalist, naturalistic, materialist explanations. There is a denial of anything supernatural, any levels beyond the material world. Perhaps we seriously need to seek alternative approaches. The esotericist Douglas Baker has said: “The dark matter and energy now being probed by modern science are the mental matter and energies known to ancient sages”². Modern science tends to believe, of course, that the mind (the mental) is a by-product of the brain, and does not accord it any independent existence. (By ‘mental’ Baker is, of course, not referring to anything human, but to other levels of reality.)
The Vedic scholar Robert Cox also says that the existence of dark matter conforms with the wisdom of ancient peoples: “Is it possible that this (dark matter) represents the discovery (or rediscovery) of the galactic field of tamas known to the ancients thousands of years ago?” He also says that the dark-matter halo of modern science “corresponds directly to the dark neck of Shiva, which extends above his galactic torso”³, this last point being expressed in obvious mythological language.
Perhaps particle physicists are indeed working with the wrong paradigm!
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See also an update: https://medium.com/@graham.pemberton/the-elusiveness-of-dark-matter-update-f49794b417ef
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics, and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website www.spiritualityinpolitics.com (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. BBC radio4, The Art of Innovation, episode 20: Imagining Matter
2. Quantum Worlds Beyond the Atom, talk at Theosophical Society London, November 5th 2006
3. Creating the Soul Body, Inner Traditions, 2008, p136, p137
