The thing with dark matter is it's just a placeholder term for "we don't know what the hell it is", and aren't most hypotheses pulled out of the ass before experimentation to prove them?

Plus, Dr. Kaku is a string theorist so wacky is pretty much par for the course in that field. Granted, I consider him more of a TV personality these days and grew up watching him as a speaker on [insert any number of Discovery Channel shows here].

Maybe I'm just biased and enjoy the wacky theories because I'm more interested in seeing them proven right or wrong and thinking about the implications if they happen to prove correct.

Quick! Get the Flexseal.

I thought this guy was a legit scientist, but I read his recent book Quantum Supremacy and it was all shit like "with quantum computing, in the future you will be able to solve athlete's foot". Literally everything you can think of is going to be quantummaxxed by cubits, according to him. Need your car serviced but the garage isn't open on Sundays? Quantum computing. Need your mother-in-law to dial down the snarky comments about your new house? QUANTUM COMPUTING. Frequently walk into a room, forget why you went in there, leave, then immediately remember why you went in the second you cross the threshold? MOTHERFUCKING QUANTUM COMPUTING!

I'm sure he is a legit scientist, of course, but as a science communicator and terminal book-hawker, he's no better than Joe Rogan.

parallel dimension

Aren't dimensions by definition orthogonal?

This guy is mostly famous from poor quality history channel scifi bullshit "documentaries".

To be fair, this is the level of physics where if they discover things right out of fantasy book (teleportation, mind reading, transmutation etc) I wouldn't be even surprised.

Interesting but i suggest it might be normal matter that had a bad childhood experience and turned evil. We can save it tho

the moment i see this guy appear on screen i know ive fucked up

Scientific method and all that. Any conjecture is okay.

Now, what's the hypothesis that you can make out of it? We've plenty of observations that don't match theory, which we believe to be on account of dark matter - galaxy rotation speeds, what happens in the core of a type 2 supernova, and so on. Does this hypothesis explain those problems better than what we have?

If it does, keep it. If it doesn't, discard it. Repeat, until we've solved all the mysteries of the universe by banging our heads against them.

This strikes me as the kind of conjecture that has no predictive power, and therefore must be discarded, but I'm no PhD-level theoretical physicist.

What he's probably saying is not that far out.

Dark matter was proposed initially because at galaxy scales the gravity force doesn't seem to match the one created by the visible matter in that galaxy, while others tried to propose modified laws of gravity at that scale. He is probably defending the later via compactified dimensions, so at some scales gravity stops transmitting at one over the distance squared, as those extra dimensions start to make an effect somehow.

I see nothing wrong with suggesting that, so long as it is made clear he is discussing one of many theoretical possibilities.

Is he a kook? He does kinda look like one, but so do a lot of legit scientists, so that's not a good measure.

What if dark matter is a time artifact of gravitational waves over time/space as particles with mass travel through time/space? (I am not a physicist and I don't understand jack shit.)

Yeah, this guy is so full of shit.

Edit: Whoever doesn't like it, go watch his discussion with Roger Penrose, etc. He's so obviously out of his depth when he's not talking about speculative pop science bullshit.

quick, get the xkcd

imho gravitons are the key to interstellar travel. we need to find a way to aggregate and harness them

As long as we do not know what Dark Matter or Dark Energy is, any hypothesis is valid. Scientific method is to err above towards the truth.