Senior hipsters have
announced that they believe it likely that the universe is filled with massive
quantities of ‘ironic matter’ on the analogy of the ‘dark matter’ hypothesized
by physicists.
Dark matter has not yet been
directly observed, because it neither emits nor absorbs light. That’s why it’s called ‘dark’ matter. The
behavior and distribution of objects that can be observed points to large and unexplained
gravitational forces acting on what we can see. As that gurning science pin-up
Brain Cocks puts it:
“If
we only refer to the matter that we can see,
then we just have no idea why that matter is carrying on the way it is. It’s
fucking weird is what it is. So, we have a choice. We can accept that the
universe is very weird, or we can propose that it only seems weird because there is some very weird and difficult to
detect stuff in it, and that we physicists could find this stuff if we got
handed trillions and trillions of dollars to build insane toys. And it’s not
just the expensive toys. We need money to fly around getting hammered at
conferences, and money for a tiny number of female post-docs who we cluster
around like vultures near the bloated rotting remains of a bull hippo that’s
been dead for five-days. Obviously we thought about it really carefully. Can we
have our money now?”
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| Figure 1: Physicists say that the large-scale distribution of observable matter makes no fucking sense at all, unless there is a whole lot of dark matter distributed in blobs like those in this image nicked from Wikipedia. They also say ‘we need more money’. |
In a little more detail, the
speculation favored by the physicists is that there are very large quantities
of this dark matter in the universe, engaging only in gravitational
interaction, and perhaps the ‘weak’ force, but not electromagnetically. A
leading hypothesis in the field is that dark matter consists largely of ‘Weakly
Interacting Massive Particles’, or WIMPs. If this hypothesis is correct, then
substantial numbers of WIMPS must pass through every part of the earth almost
every second. A number of (very expensive) experiments to test this hypothesis
are underway, but WIMPS of the required sort have yet to be observed.
It is also well known that
hipsters neither emit nor absorb anything genuinely useful. Indeed do not spontaneously interact with anything recognized as interesting or entertaining by the vast majority of people. Even so, the observed behavior of hipsters demands an explanation, just like the observed behavior of galaxies. Why the fatuous obsessions with retro hats, poorly functioning energy inefficient and sometimes unsafe, albeit visibly non-contemporary vehicles, unsuccessful bands and movies without plots? Why devote so much effort to sourcing and wearing T-shirts with badly rendered logos of defunct products and quotations from movies nobody ever watched? Why,
when the world is so exciting and scary, pay so little coherent attention to
things that matter to everyone else, and work so hard to cultivate a disposition of bored
indifference?
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| Figure 2: This also makes no fucking sense. None. At all. Holy living fuck.Picture taken from here. |
‘Ironic matter’, the hipster
scientists argue, would answer all of these questions. The brainwave came while
a hipster affected complete indifference to a room-mate’s explanation of his
‘horrifyingly mainstream’ physics PhD. As the resolutely unsmiling hipster put
it, “the physics problem was that the ‘dark matter’ theory said there should be
loads of WIMPs, but the WIMPs had not been observed. And then it hit me. If you
look at hipsters, it’s clear that there are loads and loads of observable
wimps. But the mainstream just can’t ‘get’ our interests and priorities.’ Later,
while listening to a bootleg cassette of some staggeringly obscure Amish ‘shun
core’, his thinking went a little further:
“The
physics guys could explain what visible matter does if they could detect the WIMPs.
And the mainstream can detect the hipster
wimps, it just can’t explain them. But what if there is a whole lot of invisible
ironic matter, which only hipsters respond
to and interact with?”
The analogy with physics and
hipsters breaks down about here. Mainstream, and dorky, physicists work very
hard to figure out how to detect dark matter if it does exist, and spend a lot
of time trying to secure massive funding for massive experimental tools to
conduct the tests. (And getting hammered at conferences, etc.) Hipsters say
that even if ironic matter could be
observed, the mainstream just wouldn’t understand it. Some Hipsters speculate
that that the act very of observing ironic matter would bring it into the
mainstream and thereby eliminate its ironic properties. And nothing would more
clearly establish that ironic matter was no longer performing its function than
a massive research grant. As one hipster “all that funding shows that physics is
the opposite of hip. They should call what they’re looking for ‘dork
matter’.”
