though I touched on this in the previous post, with string theory!

@Ex_Adyto_Cordis@xanga - Yup, same.

Oh, and is Dark Matter intelligent?

have we actually discovered dark matter yet?  It has been since high-school that I did anything regarding astronomy-- back then dark matter was a theory; it was not fully understood and the evidence that it existed was speculative.  I'm just curious- did they finally figure it out?

People have been calling mysterious phenomenon God since the dawn of man - there was a point when the movement of the spheres, rain, thunder, disease, etc was God. It perplexes me as to why people would still think this way on a literal level given the history of such a thought process.

I wouldn't really consider it a good analogy either - Dark matter and energy (in addition to being detectable) are necessary to complete functions of physics and observable phenomenon - God isn't.

@When_We_Were_Both_Cats@xanga -  indeed!

I hate when people use god to explain something they don't understand.  Before we knew how thunder/lightning worked people believed god was angry.  god is just a convenient way to explain what we don't understand.

You TA is ignorant.  I wouldn't bother trying to learn anything from him. 

@When_We_Were_Both_Cats@xanga - "Dark matter and energy (in addition to being
detectable) are necessary to complete functions of physics and
observable phenomenon - God isn't."

And how do ya think God would feel being tied down to some physical stuff floating around in the universe that He made?

When we consider what glory is (according to Jewish tradition) it sounds a lot like dark matter (as defined in this blog).

Creator God is in the dark matter and the trees and the waves and the wind and the sun. He is in his creation but not of it. He is outside it and united with it at the same time. He is not His creation but the creation belongs to him and derives from him. At times, he controls aspects of his creation. It may rain because Creator God is pleased with his people who pray for crops  in as much as it may rain because he is displeased. It may also rain because he allowed his creation to go about it's processes.

Space is neat.

@Ex_Adyto_Cordis@xanga, @deepestrecesses, @TheGreatBout@xanga, and @gmx0@xanga - If I were blind, I could still "observe" a chair even though I couldn't see it: I could bump into it, throw rocks at it, etc.  The more ways I interact with it, the more certain I am that the thing I bumped into is a chair: I can determine its shape, hardness, density, etc.

Actually, even if I weren't blind--and I'm not--I still couldn't see the chair.  The chair reflects light from a source (like a lamp or the sun) into my eyes; so I'm actually observing reflectedphotons.  The chair also glows. That is, it emits infrared light (just like you and me!), so I can observe emittedphotons as well.  Basically, I can never observe the chair itself, just light that's been reflected off of or emitted by the chair.

Black holes are so dense that they neither glow nor reflect light, so they're hard to observe with detectors like eyeballs.  That's why they're called "black."  They do, however, interact with other objects via gravity.  So, like a blind person observing a chair, we, too, can observe a black hole (even though we can't see it in a proper sense) by measuring its gravitational effects on nearby objects.  The more measurements we make, the more certain we can be that the thing we are "looking" at is indeed a black hole.  There is very strong evidence, for instance, that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy: it's called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A star").

The story is similar for dark matter.  Although dark matter glows (it's not nearly as dense as a black hole), it's too dark for us to see.  That's why it's called "dark."  Like for black holes, the way we can observe dark matter is through its gravitational interaction with other bodies.  The Bullet Cluster (two colliding galaxies) is an exellent example of such an interaction.  However, the blind man in this case has only just bumped into a piece of furniture.  While he is certain that he bumped into something, he is not sure whether it's a chair, table, or couch.

If the blind man thinks the furniture he bumped into is a chair, but then later discovers it was larger, softer, and had more cushions than he initially suspected, he is free to discard his original theory as "correct within the limits of available data, but requiring slight modifications to be compatible with current observations" and claim that he's pretty sure that he bumped into a couch.  (They're both furniture, but now we know what kind!)

So... dark matter is not unobservable, it's just hard
to observe.  We've seen it (or something quite like it) already; we
just need to feel it out a bit more before we can provide a detailed
picture of what it's made of.

In this sense, God is nothing like dark matter.  We cannot perform a new, creative experiment that will sharpen our image of Him.  Religion sadly offers us no such freedom.

Me: "I refuse to think of God as dark matter in the universe. If God
were the dark matter, it would mean He is tangible somewhere and
somehow, and He would be a part of this earth and world He created. And
I refuse to believe that God is something in this world."
Him: "Well, are you saying then that God is an observer looking inside at the world He created?"
Me: "No."

...wait, what?