Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> That's not regular matter.

> Its MACHOs that are made up of regular matter (well, brown dwarfs and black holes).

I mean...isn't this "technically correct" on a level that's beyond even the usual extremes of pedantry? Or maybe I'm missing something?

There's no cheese in my fridge, only blocks of cheese that are made up of cheese...



No, a WIMP is the theoretical dark-matter equivalent of a particle.

A MACHO is a low-energy star or whatever that would explain the apparent presence of dark matter without actually requiring anything exotic like WIMPs. The idea is that these objects are (relatively) massive, numerous, and so low-energy that they are hard to detect and their combined mass would theoretically explain the effects we currently attribute to dark matter.

Or in other words, a WIMP would be like claiming that your fridge is disintegrating your cheese, and a MACHO would be the kid raiding the fridge for cheese at midnight when you're asleep.


The person who started off this comment thread made a sloppy reference to "normal matter (i.e. quarks)". That statement should be read in good faith as meaning the existing known elementary particles as "normal" matter. That implies that some particle which only interacts via gravity and some unknown force is not included in "normal" matter.

To twist that by claiming such a particle would still be viewed as matter just like all the rest of the matter that goes into the stress-energy tensor is where the pedantry started in this thread. The original statement is pretty clear in its intent. The pedantic reading that followed that comment results in "normal" matter just being all matter by definition and hence "normal" is redundant since there can't be abnormal matter. That clearly isn't what the first comment intended since they actually meant something by "normal".




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: