My understanding of the astrophysical notion of black matter could fit into a neutrino with room to spare. And I don’t even know what a neutrino is. But, that won’t stop me. I have a theory.
Here’s how I understand dark matter. My entire grasp of this extraordinary concept is derived from listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson on a talk show. So, if I’m wrong, blame Neil and Stephen Colbert.
Apparently, the most up to date scientific knowledge tells us that there is more gravity in the universe than there should be. It seems that all mass gives off gravity, so, if you calculate all of the mass in the universe and then figure from that how much gravity there should be, the number comes up short. If only the gravity of the known mass was all there was, then the stars would not be held in their places and they would long ago have hurtled off far beyond even where fans of Synchronized Swimming come from. In fact, I think I heard Neil say that we know the source of only 15% of the amount of gravity that there is.
And, if that’s not enough, there’s also this thing called “ dark energy.” It, simply put (which is the only way I can put it) accounts for why the universe is expanding even in the face of all that damn gravity. Like “dark matter”, there is not enough energy created by known matter to account for this expansion, and, so, there has to be more.
Where do these unknown forces come from? No one has a fucking clue. The smartest, cleverest, and geekiest of all the minds who’ve ever studied this question have no idea. Of course, they haven’t asked Donald Trump yet, but it’s probably safe to assume that even though he is, “like, really smart”, even he doesn’t know (but, he will say that he does).
Scientists have given these mysteries a clever (although somewhat racist) name – “dark” – hence “dark matter” and “dark energy.” But, just because it has a name doesn’t ‘t mean that we know what it is. And therein lies my theory.
Maybe we can understand the concept of God by how we don’t understand the concept of dark stuff.
Dark stuff is something that we think must exist, but we can’t prove it. We can’t explain the world around us without it and yet we can’t explain it either. Dark stuff is a mystery whose very nature is unknown. Yet, we have given it a name. The name means nothing except as a placeholder that allows us to refer to that unknown. What does that sound like?
Isn’t the word, “God” also a placeholder for a mystery that we also cannot understand? Like dark stuff, doesn’t there have to be more about the nature of things than what we now can comprehend? I am reminded of what the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, said, “Science explains howthings work, but not why.”The word we now use for “why” is “God.”
I am not saying that dark stuff is God. Just like dark stuff, the thing we call “God” has to exist. But, by giving it a name, that doesn’t mean that we know what it is. More than that, we shouldn’t even think that we know what we can’t know. And, finally, more than that, we certainly shouldn’t be hating and killing each other over something none of us can understand.
Dark matter. Dark energy. Dark God? Maybe.
We were right 