I understand Space-Time is sort of flat and smooth except in the region of a mass which deforms it. But suppose it was possible for Space-Time to be deformed similarly to how it is with a mass in the region even when there is no mass in the region. Suppose that's just how Space-Time is shaped in some places. Maybe due to how it was created during the expansive turbulence of the big bang. Suppose all the mal-deformities of Space-Time now attributed to dark matter are really just natural deformities of Space-Time left over from the big bang.

Rather than the universe being like the surface of a smooth, locally flat globe with a few dents in it from bits of matter it's more wrinkled with hills and valleys all over it along with the matter dents.


PairTheBoard

It is pretty old, so probably wrinkly.

Space-Time is a religion, and a bad one as most religions are. Ignore it. And concentrate on the important things in life; like making money, cheating on your taxes, and beer drinking.

Looks like this post has been viewed by my Microsoft SPY-AI. This just in on my clickbait page:

Faint gravitational waves may be from primordial fractures in space-time
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...5d554111&ei=19


PairTheBoard

Aren't the gravitational waves the wrinkles?

I was thinking fractures in space-time might be something like the wrinkles I'm imagining, more or less stationary. As I understand the article it was the process of fracturing that could have generated gravitational waves.

As far as dark matter goes, they may have more evidence for it than its impact on gravity. I really don't know that much about it.


PairTheBoard

If you read the actual research paper (there is a link in the news article to the abstract and from there to the full paper), I think you will find that it either provides support for your idea or it does not.

I don't think it said anything about anything (including domain walls) being stationary or long-lasting. It said something or other about them decaying.

I wouldn't expect what they're talking about in the article to have a direct connection to the idea of the OP. Only that the idea of the OP isn't as far fetched as it might seem at first glance. If strange things happened with space-time during the big bang as described in the article then maybe other strange things also happened like the misshapen space-time of the OP.

The thing is, they never really discovered dark matter with their observations. What they observed was that in some regions space-time was not shaped the way it should be according to the deformations attributed to the known mass in the area. They jumped to the conclusion that the only way space-time could be so misshapen was if there was extra matter in the area that was otherwise undetectable. The idea of the OP is that it might be possible for space-time to just be misshapen in some places. That might seem strange and far fetched. But so do the suggestions about space-time mentioned in the article.


PairTheBoard

Most likely, space or spacetime is emergent, and doesn't really have a shape. The curvature is just apparent, empirically. Think of the spacetime that "exists" in a first person video game. What shape is it?

If spacetime is not physical, like a canvas on which the universe is painted, but "emergent" and only empirically "apparent", does this put is back to the inconvenient notion for gravitatioal attraction being some kind of magical action at a distance?

In a first person video game where apples fall to the ground I'd say there is a virtual spacetime defined by the programmers to be shaped the same as the one we live in on Earth yet without the necessity of a virtual Earth forcing its shape. Sort of like what I imagine in the OP without the necessity of dark matter forcing the shape.


PairTheBoard

"Action at a distance" is usually solved by postulating fields and/or virtual particles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton

Space is the absence of matter, like a shadow is the absence of light. Space is just a concept, a word in the dictionary - if you will. Like a shadow, space does not exist as a thing, and therefore space cannot have properties (like wrinkled nor curved). It's just common sense that has been muddied by high IQ autists with math and word-magic.

Except that physics begs to differ. Spacetime is a thing. It is curved by energy (of which matter is one form). The curvature of spacetime manifests as the gravitational field. Massive bodies are not attracted to each other; they follow straight paths through a spacetime that is curved. The apparent deviation from straight paths, ie acceleration near massive bodies, is actually just bodies following geodesic paths.

This is basically the content of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Maybe GR is wrong. However it made some pretty unintuitive predictions, such as clocks at higher elevations run slower than clocks at lower elevations, light appears to be bent when passing near massive bodies, orbits around celestial bodies are not closed ellipses, but instead open curves that do not precisely retrace themselves, and trajectories of bodies through space near a rotating body will be different than predicted by classical mechanics. All of these predictions and more have actually been verified. In fact, there has never been a physical system found where GR gives a wrong prediction. Maybe there will be someday, but for now, there is very good evidence that spacetime is real and it has a curved geometry.

Physics does not actually say this. Spacetime curvature is an interpretation of Einstein's equations, but it is not the only possible interpretation. As a classical theory, General Relativity will probably be superseded by a quantum theory of gravity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton

I.E. If Einstein never produced GR, we could have come to it via quantum field theory, without any need for the equivalence principle or spacetime curvature.

So when light takes that bent path near massive bodies, is it following a geodesic path in curved spacetime, or are those photons experiencing a force mediated by gravitons?