Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Need for Dark Matter Questioned

physorg.com has this article about a theory that replaces Dark Matter with the idea that the extra gravitational attraction that is assumed to be caused by Dark Matter is actually caused by the Quantum Foam that fills the universe. The author of the quoted paper suggests that particles and antiparticles have opposite gravitational polarities. So the Quantum Foam would be gravitationally polarized and could cause the apparent excess mass that caused Dark Matter to be suggested.

The biggest doubt I have is that so far there has been no indication that particles and their antiparticles have opposite gravitational polarity. I believe that there have been some tests but none of them so far have been able to tell.

Bill Gill

I have good QM grounds to disagree and this is one area where particle physics is colliding head on with QM.

An anti-particle is simply a reversal of charge. From a QM field theory perspective this is called the Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation (after Ernst Stueckelberg & Richard Feynman)

Background is at the bottom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiparticle)

It leads to a conclusion => antiparticle have equal mass m and spin J but opposite charges q.

Given Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation contains our good old favourite renormalization I won't call the theory dead but lets just say it's against the current best QM understanding and I would require observational evidence before I would throw Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation out.

Well, I don't have great hope for the idea. The author of the paper agrees that there is a long way to go before the idea is accepted. But it is nice that people are thinking somewhat outside the box. He apparently does have some math that shows the idea works, if the assumption of particles and antiparticles having oppositely polarized gravity should be true. So it seems that it is worth consideration.

Bill Gill