• Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      Well, yes, as far as our theories go. But we also “knew” that light was a wave that traveled through the luminiferous aether, which permiated all of space… Until we tested that theory with the Michelson-Morely experiment, and it turned out our theories were completely wrong and physics as we knew it was completely upended.

      Point being, it’s important to actually test our theories instead of assuming they’re completely correct just because most of their predictions are accurate.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Aether was a fudge and pretty sure Einstein knew it. Forgot the exact history, but it was made up from whole cloth to make the math work out.

        • Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          Well yeah. The concensus at the time was that light is a wave, and waves need a medium to travel through, so they just made up some stuff that must be everywhere and called it the aether. The null result of the interferometer experiment is part of what led to the discovery that light is a particle that acts like a wave, and so doesn’t need a medium.

        • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Dark energy is a fudge in a similar way. Eventually we’ll know what it actually is and no longer need it, kinda like alchemy was to chemistry.

    • i_love_FFT@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      It has a positive mass, and in every other way it acts just like normal matter going backwards in time (cpt inversion).

      If, despite its positive mass, it was pushed back by gravity, then it would have given even more weight to the theory that antimatter is just matter moving backwards.

      Since gravity is such a wonky interaction, I’m not even sure this result disproves the time-reversal theory entirely!

      • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Why would inverting charge make particles go backwards in time? Electrons have opposite charge to protons and they don’t seem to. Positrons have the opposite charge to electrons and as far as I know they don’t go backwards?

        I think you’re misinterpreting cpt reversal symmetry, which is if you mirrored the universe in terms of charge, time and parity it would essentially evolve the same