[b33j0r]

When Sabine Hossenfelder and Sean Caroll agree on something, I pay attention.

I do take some humility there. We have stunningly brilliant contrarians who would be the first to dismantle dark matter on the public stage, and instead they tell us, “no, it’s a real thing. We just haven’t seen it in a lab on earth much yet.”

Now if Eric Weinstein started saying dark matter is actually the consequence of a massively egocentric MOND, and everyone else is a WIMP, I might start believing that too ;)

[mr_mitm]

What do Hossenfelder and Carroll agree on? It was my understanding that Hossenfelder thinks we need both DM and MoND while Carroll is firmly in the conventional DM camp.

[b33j0r]

You caught me, in that she’s 100% open to new evidence. Kinda why she is so effective.

So, over the past decade, Hossenfelder made a series of videos and talks about “dark matter is real.” And then “is dark matter real?”

Her opinion evolves. But the conclusions are generally that the data points to a measurable thing along many lines of evidence.

I find the cosmic web the most compelling, personally. Like, what else could that be besides a mystery? You can’t draw the web in some other configuration, it’s a real thing somehow.

From my understanding. Her hesitation that she expresses is more linked to an underlying intuition: the universe is completely deterministic—we just can’t see all of the rules being computed, and the initial conditions are intractable.

I also find that pretty compelling.