I’m embracing my geekiness with this post. I read an article stating some astrophysicists speculate the observed phenomena described as “dark matter” may be grouped into particles like baryonic matter. This is Spock-fascinating stuff for me, but before I geek out on it, let me explain why.
First off, a primer on “baryonic matter." In school we're taught the basic building blocks of stuff are protons, neutrons and electrons. This was avant-garde material when I was young but it’s way out of date now. Today, instead of the basic three particles there are a whole slew of them not to mention several different ways to classify them. Based upon what’s called the “Standard Model,” there are quarks, leptons, bosons and the Higgs-boson. How many isn’t germane to the discussion, you just need to know there are lots of them. All are lumped under the category of “baryonic” matter. In effect, baryons make everything you see around you, including light and even electricity.
Gravity appears to be the glue that holds the universe, galaxies, stars and planets together and dancing along. Earth is round because of gravity. It orbits the sun because of it. The sun shines because its constituent mass is held so tightly together fusion occurs. You get the idea: gravity makes the universe go round.
Here’s the nub: there’s not enough matter in the universe to explain the behavior scientists see. Here’s why: when scientists run their computer models, they’ve found galaxies spin so fast they should be flinging stars all over creation. They’re not. Since the math for this is pretty inflexible, they had to find a way, some magic sauce, to make the equations work. That magic sauce is “dark matter” and “dark energy.” The amount they determined was needed to explain how the universe worked was a lot higher than they expected. They computed, baryonic matter makes up less than five percent of the total. The rest came from these two other sources.
This is old stuff for astrophysicists. What geeked me out, is now there are indications dark matter may not be a single type of particle but a bunch of different types like baryons. In sophisticated circles, dark matter, goes by the moniker, “WIMP.” It's an acronym for "weakly interacting massive particles." It means wimps exert a weak gravitational pull on baryons. Because of this, galaxies spin along the way we see them and all is good. They don’t interact with baryons in any other observed way. A bazillion wimps could shoot through you right now and you’d never know the difference.
If that seems hard to believe consider this: atoms are mostly empty space. "How empty," you ask? Hydrogen the simplest atom, consists of one proton and one electron. The proton is the center, the electron “orbits” it. Now for the scale. Make the proton the size of the sun. Guess where’s the Jupiter-sized the electron is. Give up? It's further away than Pluto. That's a LOT of empty space!
Let’s step back from the geek brink for a second. Given this scale, what makes matter look solid is not what it’s made of but the forces these particles give off and interact with. You see, touch, eat, feel and essentially live because force of fields bouncing off of each other at the sub-atomic scale. Without them, you're a ghost!
So, now into the über-geekness of this post. Some scientists speculate this wimp-matter may not only have different types of particles, but also its own set of forces. Forces which could give it the ability to form stars, planets and even life. All unobserved and unaffected by us, yet occupying the same volume of space we do.
Because they are bound by gravity, who’s to say this spatial overlap isn't more granular than just at the galactic level. What if they overlap at the stellar and planetary level too? Imagine our baryon Earth and a wimp Earth, both occupying the same volume of space moving together. The baryon-Earth orbits the baryon-sun we see while the wimp-Earth orbits a wimp-sun.
The cool part is comments by Joseph Smith argue for this interpretation. Just a couple are: “Angels are from this Earth.” Maybe the baryon-Earth and the “wimp-Earth” are a single world in God's eye? There’s also, “spirit is matter too, just more refined.” The word “refined” may not be the best choice, but given he said it in the 1830’s he can’t be faulted for not knowing words we don’t yet know ourselves.
A wimp-universe makes a lot of sense. And while we call it dark, I suspect it’s anything but. We call it that for the same reason a blind man calls a sun-lit room dark — he can’t see the light. Now maybe, as we learn more about “dark matter” this understanding will change. Time will tell. For now, I think the “spirit world,” where we lived before coming to mortality, is this wimp-Earth. The universe it’s in is the “real” one. And the baryon-universe we can see is the temporary test environment.
Stretch your brain….
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