Month: February 2022

The invisible matter might be a better name for it. It cannot be seen or detected by any instrument. We only know it’s there because of its gravitational effects on regular matter and light.

In 1933 Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky, working at Caltech, was studying the Coma Cluster of galaxies. The Coma Cluster, about 320 million light-years away from us contains over 1,000 galaxies. It is the nearest cluster to our home cluster, the Virgo Cluster, which contains our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Galaxies in a cluster are held together by gravity and rotate around the center of the cluster. They don’t all rotate in the same direction but rather all rotate in different directions. Zwicky noticed something strange about their rotational speed. They were all rotating way too fast. That is the amount of visible matter in the cluster was not nearly enough to hold the galaxies inside the cluster, they should have long ago escaped the cluster. Zwicky calculated that the cluster needed 400 times as much matter as was apparent from observation to hold the cluster together. (Since Zwicky’s time that number has been reduced but the cluster still rotates far too fast for the assumed matter present.) Zwicky assumed that there had to be far more matter in the cluster than could be observed. He called this matter “dark matter”.

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I have been told that I don’t understand infinity. That there is a hierarchy of infinities therefore my use of the word is, or must somehow be, incorrect. Yes, there is a hierarchy of infinities as explained in this 8-minute video. You don’t really need to watch that video because the hierarchy of infinities has nothing to do with my argument. I post the link only for those who think it does.

A Hierarchy of Infinities

I used the term as: “There are an infinite number of numbers.”  Those numbers can be either whole or fractional. But that number can never be reached, either by counting or as an actual number of physical entities.

An example, if there were a sphere 200 billion light-years in diameter, filled with neutrons packed as tightly as they are inside a neutron star, their numbers would not approach infinity. Multiply that number by a trillion, and you are still nowhere close to having an infinite number of neutrons. Then multiply that number by a trillion trillion, and you are not closer to infinity than you ever were. There can never exist an infinite number of anything physical, be neutrons, bowling balls, or universes. Read More