“What are you doing?”
“What do you mean? This? Oh! This is my Happystuff detector.”
“Your what?”
“You hearing challenged? Happystuff detector. You know, a gizmo that will detect the previously unseen material that sometimes makes life fabulous and controls people’s happiness.”
“No such stuff.”
“Come on. Think. There has to be something that without warning affects the feeling of fabulousness in people. We just haven’t seen it yet, so I built this detector to detect it.”
“You’re telling me that feeling fabulous is the result of a physical substance that you can detect if you have the right apparatus. Feeling fabulous is in the mind, maybe driven by hormones, by neurotransmitters suffusing a brain kick-started by some pleasing or beneficial happenstance like an engagement proposal, an award, a beautiful scene.”
“Oh! Ye of little faith. Science has determined that there has to be something that we just haven’t detected yet. It goes by different names, such as the oxymoronic Dark Happiness. I think I finally have the detector that will find it. We have hypothesized its existence by its obvious effect: People walking around elated. It must be there because we see its result.”
“Are you sure you’re just not like string theorists and dark matter physicists? They keep looking for what they hypothesize by effects, string theory’s effect on the mathematics of Grand Unifying Theory or Dark Matter’s effect on the rotation of galaxies. That reminds me. Did you see the report by the DAMA/LIBRA experiment in Italy, where the apparatus is sodium iodide crystals that flash when Dark Matter hits them? * Did you also see the counter report from the COSINE-100 experimenters who say they found no signs of Dark Matter in their pile of sodium iodide?”
“Your point? So, you think I’m chasing after something that either exists but is undetectable by its very nature or doesn’t exist and, therefore, will never be detectable.”
“Yeah. Something like that. Sodium iodide crystals also flash when they are hit by alpha particles from natural radiation emitted by many sources. How do you figure out what is causing the flashes? How do you figure out that you are detecting the substance you believe is causing the feeling of fabulousness?
“Maybe the universe still holds many secrets, so we are destined to hypothesize and experiment without resolving issues that are beyond our capacities to invent adequate detectors. The string theorists can argue that strings are just too tiny to detect, but that they provide all the math we need to unify the four fundamental forces, assuming that Dark Energy isn’t a fifth fundamental force. The Dark Matter physicists can continue to say that it exists simply because they have no other explanation for the unexpected rotational speeds of galaxies. No string could be detected by any apparatus we have at this time or apparatus in the planning stage because we just can’t get to that level of tiny or into other dimensions. And Dark Matter, though seeming to show its effects, just doesn’t seem to interact with anything in particular, neither with individual atoms nor with molecules. ** And there you are, trying to detect what makes people happy, a condition that appears unexpectedly and in the strangest of circumstances.”
“I’m still going to keep on looking.”
“Godspeed. I just hope you aren’t chasing after a mental construct you deem necessary because you don’t have some tangible object you can detect. I suppose you’re encouraged by the discovery of the Higgs boson, but that took billions of dollars to detect something that fits nicely into the Standard Model of the universe, another construct, one could argue, that includes quarks that are individually unseeable.”
“You know, I was feeling fabulous until you came along with your anti-fabulism comments. I’m going to keep looking because I see happy people out there, and I know there must be something that makes them happy. I just have to find the right apparatus.”
*Conover, Emily. A controversial sighting of dark matter is looking even shakier: The COSINE-100 experiement finds no evidence of the evasive subatomic particles. ScienceNews, December 5, 2018. Online at https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dark-matter-claim-dama-cosine Accessed January 15, 2019.
**You are probably aware of gravitational lensing, that bending of light’s path as it passes by a galaxy or group of galaxies (or, as Eddington proved, by the Sun as Einstein predicted). The lensing is apparent to even an amateur who looks at any published photos of the effect. The extensive reach of gravity around galaxies and clusters of galaxies has been attributed to Dark Matter, but now a recent study finds that the bending of light far from a galaxy or group of galaxies can be attributed to the amount of visible matter, with no reliance on the unseen Dark Matter. See Margot M. Brouwer et al. First test of Verlinde's theory of Emergent Gravity using Weak Gravitational Lensing measurements, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2016). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw3192 , On Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03034 and https://phys.org/news/2016-12-verlinde-theory-gravity.html Accessed on January 16, 2019
“What do you mean? This? Oh! This is my Happystuff detector.”
“Your what?”
“You hearing challenged? Happystuff detector. You know, a gizmo that will detect the previously unseen material that sometimes makes life fabulous and controls people’s happiness.”
“No such stuff.”
“Come on. Think. There has to be something that without warning affects the feeling of fabulousness in people. We just haven’t seen it yet, so I built this detector to detect it.”
“You’re telling me that feeling fabulous is the result of a physical substance that you can detect if you have the right apparatus. Feeling fabulous is in the mind, maybe driven by hormones, by neurotransmitters suffusing a brain kick-started by some pleasing or beneficial happenstance like an engagement proposal, an award, a beautiful scene.”
“Oh! Ye of little faith. Science has determined that there has to be something that we just haven’t detected yet. It goes by different names, such as the oxymoronic Dark Happiness. I think I finally have the detector that will find it. We have hypothesized its existence by its obvious effect: People walking around elated. It must be there because we see its result.”
“Are you sure you’re just not like string theorists and dark matter physicists? They keep looking for what they hypothesize by effects, string theory’s effect on the mathematics of Grand Unifying Theory or Dark Matter’s effect on the rotation of galaxies. That reminds me. Did you see the report by the DAMA/LIBRA experiment in Italy, where the apparatus is sodium iodide crystals that flash when Dark Matter hits them? * Did you also see the counter report from the COSINE-100 experimenters who say they found no signs of Dark Matter in their pile of sodium iodide?”
“Your point? So, you think I’m chasing after something that either exists but is undetectable by its very nature or doesn’t exist and, therefore, will never be detectable.”
“Yeah. Something like that. Sodium iodide crystals also flash when they are hit by alpha particles from natural radiation emitted by many sources. How do you figure out what is causing the flashes? How do you figure out that you are detecting the substance you believe is causing the feeling of fabulousness?
“Maybe the universe still holds many secrets, so we are destined to hypothesize and experiment without resolving issues that are beyond our capacities to invent adequate detectors. The string theorists can argue that strings are just too tiny to detect, but that they provide all the math we need to unify the four fundamental forces, assuming that Dark Energy isn’t a fifth fundamental force. The Dark Matter physicists can continue to say that it exists simply because they have no other explanation for the unexpected rotational speeds of galaxies. No string could be detected by any apparatus we have at this time or apparatus in the planning stage because we just can’t get to that level of tiny or into other dimensions. And Dark Matter, though seeming to show its effects, just doesn’t seem to interact with anything in particular, neither with individual atoms nor with molecules. ** And there you are, trying to detect what makes people happy, a condition that appears unexpectedly and in the strangest of circumstances.”
“I’m still going to keep on looking.”
“Godspeed. I just hope you aren’t chasing after a mental construct you deem necessary because you don’t have some tangible object you can detect. I suppose you’re encouraged by the discovery of the Higgs boson, but that took billions of dollars to detect something that fits nicely into the Standard Model of the universe, another construct, one could argue, that includes quarks that are individually unseeable.”
“You know, I was feeling fabulous until you came along with your anti-fabulism comments. I’m going to keep looking because I see happy people out there, and I know there must be something that makes them happy. I just have to find the right apparatus.”
*Conover, Emily. A controversial sighting of dark matter is looking even shakier: The COSINE-100 experiement finds no evidence of the evasive subatomic particles. ScienceNews, December 5, 2018. Online at https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dark-matter-claim-dama-cosine Accessed January 15, 2019.
**You are probably aware of gravitational lensing, that bending of light’s path as it passes by a galaxy or group of galaxies (or, as Eddington proved, by the Sun as Einstein predicted). The lensing is apparent to even an amateur who looks at any published photos of the effect. The extensive reach of gravity around galaxies and clusters of galaxies has been attributed to Dark Matter, but now a recent study finds that the bending of light far from a galaxy or group of galaxies can be attributed to the amount of visible matter, with no reliance on the unseen Dark Matter. See Margot M. Brouwer et al. First test of Verlinde's theory of Emergent Gravity using Weak Gravitational Lensing measurements, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2016). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw3192 , On Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03034 and https://phys.org/news/2016-12-verlinde-theory-gravity.html Accessed on January 16, 2019
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