DescentBB

callmeslick wrote:amazing that I could get to this from a post about GMO labelling referenda.......

I guess you don’t have normal conversations where you come from…

Spidey wrote:

callmeslick wrote:amazing that I could get to this from a post about GMO labelling referenda.......

I guess you don’t have normal conversations where you come from…

they never go that far afield, and I consider them pretty normal........

♫ ♪And so the conversation turned
Until the sun went down
And many fantasies were learned
On that day ♪ ♫

woodchip wrote:

Top Gun wrote: More recently, the term has sometimes been used to refer to the idea that the empty vacuum of space isn't really "empty," at all, but instead has this this crazy sort of "quantum foam" of particles generating and annihilating all the time.

Isn't this what is referred to as Dark Matter?

No, dark matter is something else entirely. Dark matter refers to an anomaly that we've observed when looking at structures in the universe: the rotation patterns of galaxies, the gravitational lensing effect caused by massive galaxy clusters, and the overall large-scale arrangement of the visible universe all point to there being a whole lot of mass out there that we can't see directly. We can observe its gravitational effects, but we can't detect any sort of electromagnetic radiation coming from it, which is where we get the "dark" part of the name. There are different hypotheses as to just what this dark matter is: it could be just normal matter that doesn't emit any radiation that we can observe, or (apparently the more likely case) it could be matter comprised of different subatomic particles than the everyday matter we're used to. There are even a few ideas involving an adjustment to general relativity on very large scales, which to me personally might be the most exciting possibility. It's still very much an area of active research, and hopefully over the next decade or two scientists will come up with some new observations that let us figure out exactly what this matter is.