A couple of days ago, a facebook friend of mine, who frequently just poses a question and then opens the floor for debate, posed the question “What is your opinion of dark matter.”
Despite the fact that this led to a very spirited debate between two or three (mostly two) people who knew much more about the subject than I do, I thought “What a silly question.”
This is not a matter of opinion. Dark matter may exist or it may not, and it’s up to science to prove or disprove it. Whichever way it goes, it is a matter of fact, not opinion. Asking “what is your opinion?” is like asking “what is your opinion about Jupiter? Is it just too darned big or what?”
What is your opinion about the origins of the universe? Did it not exist one second and then the next second it was there, which is the big bang theory and also consistent with the book of Genesis, btw, or is it more like something that was always there, maybe there is a whole web of universes, being birthed through black holes in a never ending series of interactions, and if something is never ending, could it extend in time infinitely in the other direction, and there was no beginning, existence is just the natural state of….well, of existence? The mind boggles, but it boggles with any theory of origin as well, because what came before the origin?
I suspect that knowing, and truly understanding, the whole universe may be an ultimate impossibility, like exceeding the speed of light or traveling in time, because we can never observe the universe from outside the universe, we are like fish trying to understand the nature of water.
But there’s a difference between an opinion and a best guess. An opinion implies judgment, it implies preference. I don’t really care if dark matter exists or not. I think it’s wonderful that people are trying to find out and if they ever do it may lead to great advances in technology, but if it doesn’t exist something else does, which will undoubtedly be just as cool.
The universe is an amazing place.
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