The Dark Sucker Theory Page

Dark Sucker Theory, or "D.S.T." as we like to call it around here, has a long and sordid past.  Throughout most of recorded history, the myth that "light" is some kind of magical substance (and that darkness is the absence of light) has permeated human thinking.

Why has this myth been perpetuated, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary?  It may have something to do with various Biblical passages that go like this:

"O Lord, shine thy light upon us."

Experimentally, we know that "shining" a "light source" onto any surface will cause that surface to get warmer.  This is called radiative heat transfer.  D.S.T. must be able to explain these observations, as well as the theories of the Photon Conspiracy explain them, in order to be a useful theory.

Space around us is naturally dark.  Free darkness exists everywhere. Only through the actions of Dark Suckers (such as light bulbs, stars, fireflies, etc.) can this natural state be changed, and Dark Suckers have to expend energy continuously in order to operate.

The reason for all this darkness is: All objects have darkness embedded within them.  Every time a dark sucker operates, it pulls this intrinsic darkness out of all surfaces that are in an unobstructed path to the dark sucker.  This removal of intrinsic darkness is an action-at-a-distance; the forces that cause this are not well understood, but we do know that this action propagates at the speed of light (or should I say, the speed of dark) from the dark sucker to the incident surface.

This intrinsic darkness is bound into the electrons of the surface material.  We might even call a surface a "host material" for darkness. The more dulled ("darker" looking) the host material is, the more readily it gives up darkness in response to a dark sucker.  (A perfectly reflective material, if such a thing existed, would give off no darkness at all.)  The reason host materials get warmer as they release their intrinsic darkness is that there is a binding energy between darkness and its host material.  Sucking out darkness releases that binding energy in the form of heat.  The stronger the dark sucker and the duller the surface, the more darkness gets divested from the host surface and the hotter the surface becomes.  (Incidentally, the retinas of your eyes contain special pigments that send signals to your optic nerves when dark is sucked out of them — sucking out yellow-frequency darkness is experienced as seeing yellow light.)

Eventually, the surface can become so hot that it glows with incandescence, and becomes a dark sucker itself.  It should be noted that objects which glow due to their own heat, called "blackbody radiation", always cool off as a result of this radiation.  This cooling off is merely the darkness being sucked into the blackbody radiator (hot dark sucker) and making the dark sucker itself into the darkness's new host material. The darkness-to-new-host binding process consumes heat to form its new bonds, each of which has its own binding energy, and the blackbody gets colder as a result.

It is a known fact that very strong light sources (dark suckers) will exert a very small, but measurable, force on objects they are shining on. Photon Conspirators maintain that light itself has momentum, and it is the transfer of this momentum to the object being "shined" on that causes this force.  Mathematically, the magnitude of the so-called "light pressure" force on a perfectly black object is:

(h / wavelength) * surface_area * light_intensity

In fact, the movement away from the dark sucker is exactly what one would expect, assuming that dark has momentum.  If dark is being drawn away from the host material, it will act like a small rocket engine — the hot exhaust gasses (or darkness) moving in one direction will drive the rocket vehicle (or host material) in the other.  This would be experienced as a kind of "dark sucker pressure".

Note that, although the darkness has momentum in its direction of travel, it does not increase the mass of the dark sucker when the darkness reaches it.  As shown above, the process of binding darnkess to a new host material is endothermic; dark suckers actually lose a little bit of their total energy (and, hence, lose a little bit of their total mass) when in operation.

In a word, yes.

For the uneducated, the so-called "photo"-electric effect (we prefer to call it the darkoelectric effect around here) was the tool Einstein used to verify Planck's prediction that light occurred in tiny, indivisible chunks (or "quanta").  If you shine a source of light above a certain threshold frequency at a metal plate, you'll get a measurable electric current.  The stronger the light source, the stronger the current.  However, if your light source is below the threshold frequency, no current will be produced no matter how strong your light source is.  Classical theory, in which light was just one big happy continuous wave, offered no explanation for why this should be so.  Einstein pointed out that if light were quantized, these "quanta" (or "photons" as he relabelled them) might knock electrons loose within the metal if the energy bundled in one photon were greater than the binding energy between an electron and its metal-atom.  He won a Nobel prize for this conjecture, too, the lucky bastard.

D.S.T. also has to explain this darkoelectric effect.  Why should a low-frequency monochromatic dark sucker (such as a red laser beam) not induce an electric current, when a higher frequency monochromatic dark sucker (such as a blue laser beam) will induce a current? The answer we are inevitably led to is the same one the Photon Conspirators dreamed up at the end of the last century: Dark must, indeed, come in little indivisible chunks, which we call "darkons" by analogy with photons.  A darkon sucked free from an electron will push that electron away in proportion to that darkon's frequency.  The higher the frequency of the darkon — i.e. the "bluer" the background light that this individual darkon masks out — the more energy it will impart to the electron it just abandoned, and if this energy is greater than the amount required for the electron to escape its atomic orbit entirely, then the electron will zing around freely and contribute to an electric current.

Incidentally, this leads us to the notion that there is no such thing as "black" darkness, any more than the Photon Conspirators would claim that there is such as thing as "white" light.  Each darkon is capable of masking out only one color of background light, corresponding to that darkon's frequency.  "Blackness" means being surrounded in a sea of darkons, all at different frequencies which cover a continuous spectrum of all the frequencies one can see.

A reflective surface is one which does not give up its embedded darkons to a dark sucker very readily.  A perfect mirror would give up no darkons at all.  Yet, even though a reflector (such as the full moon) is not actively sucking dark itself, darkons seem to get sucked out of your retinas when you look at it.  What gives?

Simple.  The dark suction force is a force that Just Cain't Say No.  If it can't suck the darkons it needs out of a reflective surface, then by golly, the dark suction force will just bounce right off the surface and keep going in a new direction until it hits something that WILL give up its darkons!

Some malcontents out there don't seem to be satisfied with mainstream Dark Sucker Theory.  They point out that Mainstream D.S.T. predicts that a blackbody (such as a hot horseshoe) will not cool off until its Dark Suction Force reaches a nonreflective surface and the darkons propagate back to the blackbody; in otherwords, there should be a round-trip delay time of 2*distance/c.  Experimentally, this delay does not show up — a blackbody seems to cool off immediately, before its Dark Suction Force even reaches another object.  Some people will nitpick at the smallest details, won't they?  Anyway, the Dark Ether hypothesis is an attempt to "explain" such perceived holes in D.S.T..

The Dark Ether hypothesis claims that space is chock full of darkness at every point.  When a Dark Sucker sucks dark, so claims the hypothesis, it doesn't suck it from a distant surface, it sucks it from this plenum of dark in its immediate surroundings.  This creates a "low pressure zone" of dark next to the dark sucker, which has to suck in some dark from its immediate surroundings.  Essentially, space itself becomes a dark sucker. This "low pressure darkness wave" propagates out until it hits something which is nonreflective, and this something will yield some intrinsic dark (see question 2) to plug the gap and restore the "Dark Balance" to the universe.  Reflected "light", according to the Dark Ether hypothesis, is nothing more than this rarefied darkness wave bouncing off an unyielding surface.

The problems with the Dark Ether hyopthesis are too numerous to go into here.  Just for starters, it doesn't explain the darkoelectric effect very well, and it totally fails to take special relativity into account.  Suffice it to say that only lunatics and morons still believe in the Dark Ether hypothesis, and you'd better just drop this silly notion of a Dark Plenum filling all space if you don't want your friends to think you're strange.  Mainstream Dark Sucker Theory is really the only logical choice.

Interference patterns are those funny patterns of bright and dark spots you get when you shine a dark sucker through two or more adjacent slits.  (The same thing can even happen if you use one very narrow slit, in which case it's called "diffraction".)  The size and shape of the pattern depend on the distance between the slits (or the width of the single slit) and the wavelength of dark being sucked.

This implies that not only must darkons behave like waves, so must the Dark Suction Force.  And, my guess is that if you were to put a "photo"-electric detector on the wall receiving the interference patterns, they would only respond to dark suction above a threshold frequency — meaning that the dark suction force, as well as the darkness itself, must also be quantized.

Therefore, we must broaden our particle zoo (or, technically, our wavicle zoo) to include not only darkons but also suckons.  The suckons leave the dark sucker, pass through the two slits, hit the wall in an interference pattern, liberate some darkons, and then those darkons travel back to the dark sucker along exactly the same path as the suckons took.  Perhaps there is an underlying mechanism similar to the way lightning strikes work, where the downstroke lays the ion trail and the return stroke follows the path in reverse.  (It is the return stroke that contains most of the energy in a lightning bolt.  No, really.)

No different from interference or diffraction.  The Dark Suction Force behaves like a wave, and bends so that darkons are sucked out of a spot in the center of an object's shadow.

Just substitute "darkons" with "photons" in the conventional theory and reverse the directions.

Just substitute "darkons" with "photons" in the conventional theory and reverse the directions.

Haven't you figured it out yet?!  Just substitute "darkons" with "photons" in the conventional theory and reverse the directions!

Uh ...