[...] primordial stars (the first stars, formed only 200 million years after the Big Bang) of a few hundred Sun masses may [...]

[...] primordial stars (the first stars, formed only 200 million years after the Big Bang) of a few hundred Sun masses may [...]

[...] [...]

More to the point it is very likely the early cosmos
had an evolutionary cycle where the basic forces
and fundamental particle families themselves
came into being, either evolved or sprang out full
born? Nobody knows. And 'this' is where deep
observational research can shed light and will.
Those are very important issues.

Whether these hard issues will lead to DM or
wherever is anyone's guess, but nobody knows.
Most especially me! (smiling)

Thanks,
Yermiah

Of course, there would be no way to test this, but at least it doesn't introduce other items, such as multiverse's which I believe are the product of circular reasoning.

Multiverses and M theory are all the result of math. There is no way we could ever observe the effcts or the other universes themselves.

Dark matter has been detected, and it is a simpler theory. There's stuff out there that we can't see. With the naked eye, we can't see most of the stars in our own galaxy (M-stars). Does that mean that they didn't exist until the telescope was invented? Of course not.

We cannot directly detect dark matter, but we can see it's effects. We can't actually "see" wind with our own eyes, but we know when tree sway, that wind is blowing.

The universe did not originate from a spot the size of a grapefruit. The entire universe *was* the size of a grapefruit. We know the universe is expanding, and if it is, then is must have been smaller than it is today.

Figure out the rate of the expansion, and go backwards, and you eventually get to the "grapefruit". Besides, cosmic microwave background radiation basically proves that the big bang occured anyway.

Here's how I try to keep it straight:

Everything we've seen, or will see in the universe is matter. Yet all of that accounts for only 4% of the universe. Yes, just 4%.

Dark matter accounts for 23% of all matter in the universe. So, that means there is approximately 6 times the amount of dark matter as there is visible "normal" matter.

Dark Energy is actually the bulk of the universe and is estimated to be 70% of this universe.

Don't ask me about the remaining 3%, damned if I can recall. Maybe its White Holes and White Energy or pink elephants.

Beyond that, I'm waiting on proof.

That isn't to say that it's not a worthwhile direction of research – just that there are a number of pretty big 'if's' in the research at present… But interesting none-the-less.

Well, Alex, when we look into space, we are really looking back in time, because the energy we can detect travels at the speed of light or slower, so when we look at somtehing a million light-years away, we are looking at an image of how it WAS thre million years ago, bec ause that's how long it took for the image to get here.

So, we point a very sensitive telescope at an area not obscured by stars and galaxies in space, and we can actually detect the energy of the explosion of the Big Bang itself. it's everywhere, beyond all the visible matter in the universe. In fact the guys who discovered it got the Nobel Prize for their work, so it's pretty reasonable, from a scientific standpoint, to say that we KNOW there was a big bang, and in fact just exactly how long ago it was.

Alex: "Dont even bother with dark matter, we know nothing about it and have not documented that it even exists yet. How can we speculate that it was in early stars?"

Well, Alex, that's the point, and that's how science works. We observe something. Then we try to describe the simplest explanation for what we see. Then, we do experiments which will wither support or disprove our explanation. Mathematically consistent models derived from what we DO know about the Universe pretty convincingly suggest that all of the stuff in the universe we can account for… stars, planets, gas, dust, light, everything… still doesn't make-up nearly enough matter to explain the gravitational effects we can observe in the universe. So, we suppose that there is matter which exists, but which for some reason, we are not yet able to observe. This is what is being called "dark matter." Predictions based on this supposition have yeilded supporting evidence that "Dark Matter" exists. So, physicists very carefully speculate about what it's nature could be.

Yes, in many cases, it's just speculation–but it's how we determine what to look at next to gain a better understanding. In this case, it's VERY well informed explanation. In my original post, I was simply saying that Dark Matter is one of several possible explanations, and one of the more sexy and elegant explanations can be found in the mathematics of M-Theory.

M-Theory, unfortunately, may be absolutely right, but is currently almost impossible to experiment on because it doesn't make many predictions that can be tested with our current science.

That is why I said the jury is still out. Still, the further we look into space, the more we speculate, and the more we look for evidence about our speculations, the more we discover and add to our knowledge.

Humans are very curious by nature. If we were more inclined to say "why bother," then we would still believe the Earth was flat, and that the whole universe revolved around the Earth. Personally, I'm comfortable with admitting that there is much we still don't know, and I for one would like to find out… if only for the sheer wonder of it all.

Just because something is expanding does not mean that it started in a single point. You cant always just press RW on the remote and figure out everything for billions of years. This ain't a VCR…

Dont even bother with dark matter, we know nothing about it and have not documented that it even exists yet. How can we speculate that it was in early stars?

We know that it is expanding because the furthest galaxies are red-shifted, which means they're moving away from us, in all directions. Moreover, the important thing is that we know the expansion is still accelerating.

As for it coming from one spot, that really is not the way the Big Bang works. According to Einstein, space and time are woven together. In the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe –meaning ALL 3-dimensional space in this continuum– was no bigger than a grapefruit. As the universe expanded, it cooled, and elemental particles clumped together to form matter, which in turn warped sections of space-time creating what we think of as the "force" of gravity. But gravity is not technically an energy, it is a measurement of the curvature of Space-Time. the bigger the mass, the more the curvature, the greater the gravity.

But the universe expanding refers not just to matter moving out in all directions, but the conceivable boundaries of Space-Time expanding as well. In other words, space and time are being stretched outward as well.

M-theory and it's correlaries (which at this point are purely in the realm of theorhetical cosmology and mathematics, as a combination of multiple string theories and Supergravity) suggest that the Universe is like a bubble in a sea of other bubbles, representing nearly infinite parallel universes, and that it is possible for events on the surface of one bubble to affect events in all the surrounding bubbles.

That's a oversimplified explanation, but since I dropped out of that calculus class in college, I really can't do the math myself.

But M-theory is some astonishingly elegant math, and –more importantly– it succeeds in describing events prior to the Big Bang, where all other theories fall apart.