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by deanCommie 1565 days ago
Atoms is a good example. Are atoms really out there in the way that most people would imagine? ("Electrons orbiting a nucleus of protons and nucleus") Or are they all actually fields of statistical probability or some other concept that is basically impossible to imagine in a physical world but matches our equations?
1 comments
astrange 1565 days ago
They're "actually" what QFT says they are, but the rest isn't wrong either. It's not wrong to say "a house exists" because it's actually a pile of bricks in the shape of a house.

Dark matter must be "matter" if it exists, because there's not a category of things that aren't matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qJptwikRc

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ravi-delia 1564 days ago
> Dark matter must be "matter" if it exists, because there's not a category of things that aren't matter

I mean, ehhh? Like, yes, absolutely, no matter how weird dark matter turns out to be it's the obligation of our definition of matter to adapt to it, but it's also not the same kind of category error as saying atoms don't exist. Depending on how weird gravity's integration into QFT is, dark matter could be arbitrarily divorced from what we expect matter to behave like. If, horror of horrors, there is no such integration, I'd say it's fair to call dark matter something truly other.

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astrange 1564 days ago
Sure, I guess what I mean is it'd still end up in on the table of subatomic particles whether or not it's a new one.

Maybe if it's something like another universe of stuff that only interacts with ours through gravity then we'd just be unable to find out which kind of stuff it is? But I don't know how we'd even get to that point.

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