🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov5.022306.25731@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:

>      In turn, I am much more sympathetic to baryonic dark matter if
>      it can be made to work.  However, we seemed to be talking about
>      'pixie' matter, a quantity that can probably be invented to 
>      explain anything.   About 'fixing up' omega, I am not sympathetic
>      at all.  There seems to be no compelling need from my perspective
>      to have omega be one.

I agree that it's a bit dogmatic to insist that omega be exactly 1; it
seems to me a bit like inventing a problem and then triumphantly
proclaiming that you have a solution.  (And my understanding is that
the folks who work on inflation now agree that omega need not be
exactly 1.)

However, I don't really think that nonbaryonic dark matter is so
unnatural an idea.  Again: most extensions of the Standard Model
predict something or other that could be nonbaryonic dark matter.  Any
one of these possibilities sounds a bit bizarre and fanciful, but this
prediction is so very generic that it doesn't seem too absurd that
*something* or this sort exists.  Nobody believes that the Standard
Model is the full story, so why should it be so surprising if maybe
some of the new non-Standard Model physics is cosmologically
important?

Of course, I'm not suggesting that anyone be so gullible as to believe
everything that particle theorists tell them.  I just think that this
explanation is plausible enough so that we should try to do
experiments to test it.
--
Matthew Austern                   Just keep yelling until you attract a
(510) 644-2618                    crowd, then a constituency, a movement, a
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matt@physics.berkeley.edu         solutions, become a part of the problem!