Goodbye to Dark Matter

Neither Wikipedia, nor any other intelligences, artificial or real, have been consulted in the composition of this article.

I remember reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets in college, all 154 of them, and wondering for the entire Spring Term who could possibly have been the woman alluded to in sonnets 127-152, who has entered literary history as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Was she Anne Hathaway, or just a bit of all right on the side? You never know with Shakespeare. Or was she the raven-haired beauty and straying wife of John Florio, a lexicographer, poet, and translator, who contributed more words to the English language than anyone except Chaucer and Shakespeare?

I remember reading Lolita and trying to puzzle out who stood behind that mysterious haunting name of Clare Quilty’s playwrighting collaborator, Vivian Darkbloom, present partout, visible nulle part. 

I remember the first time I heard the “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” played and sung by Fats Waller (he died, at the age of 39, on Dec. 15, 1943, of pneumonia, while sitting in a train — the Super Chief, if memory serves — just outside Kansas City). Four thousand people attended his funeral at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr, was the pastor.

I remember my favorite lines in James Joyce’s Ulysses, a quatrain that he had lifted from “The Rogue’s Delight in Praise of a Strolling Mort”:

White thy fambles, red thy gan,
And thy quarrons dainty is.
Catch a hogshead with me then,
In the Darkmans clip and kiss.

I remember Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” that sings his “full-hearted evensong.”

I remember Browning’s poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” its title borrowed from some nonsense verse spoken by legitimate Edgar, playing Tom O’Bedlam, in King Lear.

I remember Milton’s Samson, in Samson Agonistes, blinded by the Philistines, exclaiming that for him, eyeless in Gaza, the world had become “’O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon/Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse/Without all hope of day!'”

I remember Dante’s “Dark Forest” at the very beginning of the Commedia: “Nel mezzo del cammin/Di nostra vita/Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura…”

And I remember “Dark Is the Night,” a Russian song from 1943 that has something to do with love in a time of war, sung by Mark Bernes. I used to play this song over and over when I was studying in Russia.

As you by now have guessed, I have a certain fondness for “dark” things. I always liked the idea of Dark Matter. Mysterious, seductive, beckoning with bedroom eyes.. Not to be confused with Black Holes, of the Calcutta or any other kind, though some scientists insist on equating, or confusing, the two. So I was distressed to learn that Dark Matter does not exist. Just like that. You can’t find it anywhere. Look high, look low, you’ll be wasting your space-time. That’s the latest news on the universe. More on this amazing development can be found here:

Dark matter, the mysterious substance long thought to be one of the most important building blocks in the universe, may actually be completely unnecessary and, in fact, cannot exist at all, according to a new study.

The study’s findings were published in the peer-reviewed academic periodical The Astrophysical Journal.

The results of this study challenge our understanding of the universe, casting doubt on long-held scientific knowledge of its fabric.

Nothing really (dark) matters: Our tenuous grasp of comprehension of the universe has been shattered…

If dark matter is supposed to be so important, and there is so much evidence of its existence, then how could Gupta seemingly disprove it?

The answer lies in a model combining two theories about the cosmos, covarying coupling constants, and tired light.

The first of these concerns a principle in physics regarding how much force is needed in an interaction and how those forces decrease over time. Tired light is something that seeks to address the nature of light and distance, suggesting that light seems to lose energy over time as it flies through space due to colliding with other objects or particles. This was an explanation for redshifting, which is why faraway objects in space appear redder in proportion to their distance….

The study covers everything from star formation, sound horizon, cosmic microwave background radiation, and more. It even proposes to have solved the impossible early galaxy mystery, when galaxies were discovered in the early days of the universe that shouldn’t have been able to exist. It also reaffirms prior research that indicated that the universe is around twice as old as we thought it was….

We also see it with gravitational lensing, when something is so massive that it bends the light around it with its gravity, letting scientists see things that should be blocked. Gravitational lensing should be able to help infer how much mass something has, which can, therefore, help deduce how much dark matter is in a given galaxy, even if we can’t see it.

Coupling constants, tired light, redshifting, the early galaxy theory, gravitational lensing — fetching words and phrases that appear in this new model that unveils not Dark Matter — as anyone through a glass undarkly can now see is not there and never was — but the Absence of Dark Matter. My hat’s off to Professor Rajendra Gupta.