Let's face it, "dark matter" sounds like the title of a bad science fiction movie, but, no matter our first impression, it is a scientific reality.

All around us are invisible things, whether they are orchids which are invisible to our ears, an ocean which is just out of sight, or something as bewilderingly intangible and mysterious as dark matter.

For years, scientists were dumbfounded. Through all of their mathematics, they could not possibly explain how galaxies held themselves together without flying apart due to the centrifical motion. In short, there was more energy in the centrifical motion of orbiting objects than there was in the gravity from the objects. This is a bit tricky to understand, but it means that the fact that solar systems and galaxies were able to remain intact was due to more gravity than was mathematically possible. Now, mass is the biggest factor in gravity. The more mass, the more powerful the force of gravity. What scientists had was more gravitational force within solar systems than the mass accounted for. It was like having a balance, with three 1-lb. weights on one side, and only two on the other, and yet having them balance perfectly. In such a case, there can be only two solutions. The first is that the balance is broken, and the second is that there is more weight on the side with only two weights than we can see. When this applies to the gravity vs. centrifical force problem, we can immediately eliminate the first idea. The laws of science aren't "broken", and certainly can't be replaced. The second, however, offered more of a realistic explanation. For gravity and centrifical force to balance in any galaxy, it could only mean that there was more mass within the galaxy than met the eye. Mass from something "invisible", something that we could not see or sense by normal means, but still had mass and therefore contributed to the gravity of the system. This "invisible" something came to be known as "dark matter".

Why do we have dark matter? Scientists, upon considering this thought, theorized that dark matter was a reflection. But... a reflection from where?

Allow me to digress for a moment. Before we consider where a "reflection" of matter would come from, consider this: according to Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell, a object moving from point a to point b does not take just one path. Rather, the object will take an infinite number of paths to point b, but they are all cancelled out except for one.* This one which is not cancelled out is the one that we see. But what about all of the others? Well, this law of every possibility taken applies not just to one object moving, but to the movements of a galaxy, and universe. What it implies is that everything that could happen does happen, but we can only see one outcome, as all others cancel out in our perspective. It means that the other possiblilities take place somewhere else, in the countless other versions of our universe which exist as outcomes that, here in our single universe, are cancelled out.

This leads to some interesting conclusions. First, the universe is finite. It has physical boundries. Second, we are not the only universe. On other levels, on other planes, there exists an infinite amount of other universes acting out all of the other possibilities that could ever occur. Every possiblity that we could ever dream up is playing out somewhere else in the multiverse. In one version, perhaps George W. Bush died when he choked on that pretzel. Or maybe, the earth orbited too close to the sun, and could not support life at all. In one version, perhaps birds are the dominating intelligent life on Earth, or maybe people can weild strange power by converting the energy of their thoughts into heat, light, sound, or kinetic energy. Any and every possibility is acted out in the multiverse and, what is fantasy or science fiction to us, may be reality in a distant universe.

Let's return to our original subject of dark matter. Scientists speculated that dark matter was a "reflection", and, indeed, a reflection from another plane or universe closeby. Imagine how a large star warps spacetime -- it bends it, curves it around it by means of gravity. Now, imagine spacetime in 2D, for a moment. Imagine the spacetime of two universes as flat planes. If you were to set a heavy object on one, both planes would sink and bend under its weight, right? Well, this is exactly what happens when a large star exists in one universe; a closeby universe receives a "reflection" of the star by seeing its effects without seeing the star itself. Large patches of dark matter appear to be empty space, but warp timespace like a large, material object (a star), because the gravity and effects are not limited just to one universe.

If this explanation has seemed rather hard to follow, here are the two main points that it presents, simply. First, we live in a multiverse, with an infinite amount of universes each enacting every possibility. Second, these universes effect eachother, as dark matter proves. So, these universes are not quite as separate as one might think.

If any of this catches your interest, please, I encourage you to continue exploring this site, The Realm of Awakening, to find out more about what these things mean. The next explanation is "Invisible" People. Thanks, once more, for stopping by.

Rynthae

* As a side note, this leads me to believe that infinity, while obviously not calculable as a finite value (because that would be a bit of an oxymoron), has the properties of an odd number.