Fine-Tuning Denialism Can Lead to Largely Wasted Careers in Science

It seems that throughout his career, cosmologist Ethan Siegel has been the epitome of an "old guard" scientist -- someone dedicated to defending old speculative theories of physicists and cosmologists, mostly theories that have never been well-supported by observations. Year after year, Siegel keeps making the case for theories that somehow got popular among little cliques of physicists or cosmologists, but which never got any good evidence in their favor: theories such as supersymmetry (SUSY), primordial cosmic inflation, and dark matter. Don't be fooled by the hype of the latest "dark matter map" claim, discussed here; we still have the situation that no one has seen dark matter. 

Reading Siegel's posts is rather like reading some old monk argue for the old dogmas of some old organized religion, very much a kind of "you must keep believing as they taught me in college four decades ago" affair. A 2024 post by Siegel tries to explain why scientists have not given up on a theory they spent decades on, but which was never supported by any observations: the theory of supersymmetry (SUSY). For quite a few years around 2010, physicists were publishing about 1500 papers per year on this theory. 

The post by Siegel begins with a silly-sounding statement: "One of the greatest ideas in all of physics, regardless of whether it turns out to be a true idea that reflects reality or not, is that of supersymmetry, or SUSY for short." How unwise to think that a theory is "one of the greatest ideas in all of physics" regardless of whether such an idea is true or false. 

Although having a title of "The one reason that physicists won’t give up on supersymmetry," Siegel's post fails to explain what that reason is, in any way that the average reader will be able to follow.  I can explain more clearly the real reason why some physicists have not given up on the theory of supersymmetry, despite the lack of any evidence for it: it is that such a theory serves as an atheist analgesic pill, helping slightly to relieve the pain that atheist physicists feel when encountering the enormous fine-tuning within the universe's physics and biology. 

The supersymmetry theory arose as a speculative attempt to explain away (or kind of sweep under the rug) a case of cosmic fine-tuning that bothered scientists. The issue of the fine-tuning of the Higgs mass (the mass of the Higgs boson) was skillfully explained by physicist Ben Allanach in an  article at the Aeon site: 

"Behind the question of mass, an even bigger and uglier problem was lurking in the background of the Standard Model: why is the Higgs boson so light? In experiments it weighed in at 125 times the mass of a proton. But calculations using the theory implied that it should be much bigger – roughly ten million billion times bigger, in fact....Quantum fluctuations of ultra-heavy particle pairs should have a profound effect on the Higgs boson, whose mass is very sensitive to them....One logical option is that nature has chosen the initial value of the Higgs boson mass to precisely offset these quantum fluctuations, to an accuracy of one in 10¹⁶. However, that possibility seems remote at best, because the initial value and the quantum fluctuation have nothing to do with each other. It would be akin to dropping a sharp pencil onto a table and having it land exactly upright, balanced on its point. In physics terms, the configuration of the pencil is unnatural or fine-tuned. Just as the movement of air or tiny vibrations should make the pencil fall over, the mass of the Higgs shouldn’t be so perfectly calibrated that it has the ability to cancel out quantum fluctuations. However, instead of an uncanny correspondence, maybe the naturalness problem with the Higgs boson could be explained away by a new, more foundational theory: supersymmetry."

In an article in Symmetry magazine, we have a similar explanation:

"To understand what’s fishy about the observable Higgs mass being so low, first you must know that it is actually the sum of two inputs: the bare Higgs mass (which we don’t know) plus contributions from all the other Standard Model particles, contributions collectively known as 'quantum corrections.' The second number in the equation is an enormous negative, coming in around minus 10¹⁸ GeV. Compared to that, the result of the equation, 125 GeV, is extremely small, close to zero. That means the first number, the bare Higgs mass, must be almost the opposite, to so nearly cancel it out. To some physicists, this is an unacceptably strange coincidence."

How big a coincidence? The Symmetry article later quotes physicist Lawrence Lee Jr. as saying “the conundrum with the Higgs mass, which would require fine-tuning on the order of 1-in-10³⁴,” which is a coincidence like the coincidence of you correctly guessing the full phone numbers of three consecutive strangers. 

Scientists should have just accepted this case of very precise fine-tuning in nature.  But instead, many of them made a long, quixotic, futile attempt to overthrow it (like someone trying to overthrow the observation that the sun is hot, with some elaborate theory trying to explain how the sun isn't really hot).  Why did they do that? Because they had a motivation, an ideological motivation rather than the motivation of simply discovering truth. Their ideological motivation was related to a belief that the universe should not be anything that looked like a product of design. This ideological motivation is clearly stated in a Symmetry article by physicist Lee, who states it as follows: “In general, what we want from our theories—and in some way, our universe—is that nothing seems too contrived.” If you want for the universe to not "seem too contrived," then you may twist yourself into knots trying to explain away cases of apparent fine-tuning in the universe. 

An article makes it rather clear that the supersymmetry theory was mainly motivated by a desire to get rid of a case of fine-tuning, and make the universe look like it was a little less lucky, a little less  providentially blessed. We read this:

"For example, the small mass of the Higgs boson is notoriously difficult to explain—its calculation requires subtracting two very large numbers that just happen to be slightly different from each other. 'But if you add supersymmetry, this takes care of all these cancellations such that you can get a light Higgs mass without needing to have such luck,' says Elodie Resseguie, a postdoc at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory."

The small mass of the Higgs boson is one of only very many cases of fine-tuning in nature.  There are many very precise examples of fine-tuning needed for our universe to be habitable, such as the very precise matching of the absolute value of the proton charge and the electron charge needed for planets and stars to be able to hold together (explained by the astronomer Greenstein here).  There are many times more cases of fine-tuning in biology, such as the endless thousands or millions of different types of very precisely fine-tuned protein molecules, with functional thresholds so high they cannot be credibly explained by Darwinian evolution.  A functional threshold is a particular amount of arrangement of parts that must exist for something to have any functional value.  With protein molecules, the functional threshold is typically so high it involves thousands of very well-arranged atoms. 

The visual below depicts a scientist who clings to some old, failing theory trying to explain some of this fine-tuning:  

The old theory serves as an atheist analgesic, helping slightly to relieve the irritation the scientist feels when encountering the endless examples of fine-tuning in nature:

Below is an interesting graph I got after using the Google Ngram viewer to search for references in Google Books for the terms "supersymmetry" and "fine-tuning."  We see that supersymmetry theory had its peak around 1980, and has been in decline since then. But we have ever-more references to fine-tuning, very many of them references to fine-tuning in physics and biology.  It seems that the efforts of scientists to sweep under the rug fine-tuning are not succeeding. 
 

Siegel's 2024 post that I discussed above is entitled "The one reason that physicists won’t give up on supersymmetry." But a recent article in Quanta Magazine does not tell any such "sticking to their creed" story. That article instead rather has a kind of "hubris has been humbled" ring to it, with kind of a "they're fumbling around and losing their confidence" sound to it. The article is entitled "Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?" We have a quote from one guy saying, "I think that it’s kind of irrelevant what we plan on a 10-year timescale, because if we’re building a collider in 10 years, AI will be building the collider; humans won’t be building it." Anyone familiar with how utterly enormous is the physical work involved in the building of a giant particle collider may realize how inane this statement is. 

Looking Back at My Blogging Activity, Part 2: The Year 2014

This is the second in a series of rarely-appearing posts in which I will look back at my blogging activity during some previous year (the first in this series can be read here). In this post I will look back at my blogging activity in the year 2014, my second year of blogging activity.  

In January 2014 I wrote my post "Nature Seems to Love the Number Three," a post that has repeatedly appeared (on and off) in my widget on this blog showing the posts with the most recent readership. The post now has more than 21,000 views. Below is a visual from it. 

My February 2014 post "The Receptacle Hypothesis: Could Your Mind Have Come From an External Source?" is one of the first posts I published questioning typical accounts that brains produce minds. Later on in my blogging career I would accumulate very much more evidence backing up the suspicions I stated in this post. Below is an interesting visual from the post, one illustrating its reasoning. The visual holds up very well after 12 years.  I now have very many strong reasons (discussed at my site here) for believing that the claim that  brains make minds is as erroneous as the little girl's claim that flowers make bees. Some of those reasons were mentioned in a later post I wrote in February 2014. 

In March 2014 there occurred a very remarkable example of scientist overconfidence and unfounded scientist boasting. On March 17, 2014 a group of cosmologists involved in the BICEP2 project did a press conference claiming that they had discovered evidence for what are called primordial b-modes, and that this proved the long-standing theory of primordial cosmic inflation, a theory that has existed since about 1980.  Not to be confused with the simpler Big Bang theory (that the universe suddenly began about 13 billion years ago), the theory of primordial cosmic inflation is a theory that the universe for an instant underwent a very strange type of expansion unlike any we have ever observed -- a super-fast exponential expansion. 

Credulous science journalists "went crazy" over this unfounded boast about a claimed discovery of primordial b-modes. In March 2014 the science news stories were filled with stories crowing about how an epic accomplishment had been made.  An example of the groundless boast press coverage we got was the error-ridden CalTech press release here. To paraphrase John Kennedy's comment about the advice he got about the Bay of Pigs invasion ("The advice of those who were brought in on the executive branch was unanimous, and the advice was wrong"), in March 2014 the news coverage of the BICEP2 announcement was unanimous, and the news coverage was wrong. No actual discovery of primordial b-modes had occurred, nor had anyone made an observation backing up the theory of primordial cosmic inflation. 

In the midst of all of this unanimous press coverage boasting about a discovery that was not really made, I stuck my neck out and produced my March 18, 2014 post "BICEP2 Study Has Not Confirmed Cosmic Inflation."  I stated in the post "there are several reasons why the BICEP2 study does not confirm cosmic inflation or even provide substantial evidence for it." I followed that post with several additional posts in the next few months encouraging disbelief in the claims of the BICEP2 scientists, such as my March 20, 2014 post "More Doubts About BICEP2: The Dubious Part of Their Main Graph," and my April 5, 2014 post "Double-Fudging Their Way to the BICEP2 'Breakthrough' ” and my May, 2014 posts here and here, both of which encouraged disbelief in the claims of the BICEP2 scientists. 

When I wrote my March 18, 2014 post it seemed no one had publicly expressed skepticism about the boast of the BICEP2 scientists (or at least I had read no one who did). The next day cosmologist Peter Coles expressed skepticism about their boast, in his post here. 

It was basically me (and maybe a handful of others such as Peter Coles) against the scientific consensus, because in the early spring of 2014 the scientific consensus (repeated in innumerable mainstream science articles) was that the BICEP2 scientists had made an epic breakthrough of the utmost importance, and I was  saying it was pretty much all groundless boasts and hot air which did not show anything. Later in the year 2014 the dust settled, and it became clear who was right. 

It was me and the handful of others who were right about this topic, not the cosmologist scientific consensus of March, 2014. 

In the second half of 2014 we started to see more and more scientists producing statements doubting the claims of the BICEP2 scientists, and claiming that their results could be explained by mere dust. Confidence in the boasts of the BICEP2 scientists crumbled gradually in the second half of 2014. In January 31, 2015 a post of mine noted this:

"It's finally official. Today the online version of the journal Nature (an authoritative source for scientists) has an article headlined 'Gravitational Waves Discovery Now Officially Dead.'  "

Gravitational waves of a different type were later discovered, but not the type of primordial gravitational waves claimed by the BICEP2 team. In this context "primordial" means "coming from the very early universe."  It is now pretty much universally admitted by cosmologists that the BICEP2 team did not find evidence to support the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, and did not find evidence of primordial b-modes or primordial gravitational waves. In fact, members of the team that made the triumphant announcement in March 2014 eventually admitted they had goofed. One of them wrote a book with the title "Losing the Nobel Prize," and it was basically an "oops, I got people all excited over nothing" confession. 

The BICEP2 affair and my posts relating to it tended to strengthen my belief in a principle I have stuck to ever since: decide based on the facts, observations and reason;  and if that leads to a heretical conclusion that defies some claimed  mainstream consensus, then do not let such a factor swerve you from following what is dictated by the facts, observations and reason.  I would follow the same principle for the rest of my blogging career, particularly when I in 2018 started a heretical blog entitled "Head Truth" with a contrarian byline of "The huge case for thinking minds do not come from brains," a site which now has more than 370 posts of mine.  

In April 2014 I published an interesting post entitled "The SAGE Hypothesis, or Why Mankind Might Not Be So Inferior."  SAGE is an acronym standing for Simultaneous Appearance of Galactic Extraterrestrials. The hypothesis attempts to account for Fermi's Paradox, the paradox that despite all of the planets in our galaxy, we can observe no signs of extraterrestrials. The SAGE Hypothesis is that there are many extraterrestrial civilizations, which all have appeared at about the same time.  The hypothesis will be rejected by anyone thinking that man arose by unguided processes; but the hypothesis is credible to those thinking that intelligent species such as humans arise by transcendent causation. The visual below illustrates the idea. 

My three 2014 posts below discussed the topics of cosmic fine-tuning that I have frequently written about. 

“Vacuum Catastrophe” Should Be Called the Vacuum Miracle

Early Universe Had “Enormous Amount of Fine-Tuning,” Says New Scientific Paper

One Insanely Eerie Thing About the Neutron

My July 14, 2014 post "Half of the Blueprint for You May Be Stored Outside of Your Cells"  was possibly the first post I published on an issue I later judged to be of the utmost philosophical importance: the issue of whether DNA or its genes have any such thing as a blueprint, recipe or specification for making a human body. In that post I stated this:

"Another difficulty is related to the fact that genes are really very simple things. A gene is just a recipe for making a particular protein in the body. So how is it that genes can explain even half of the most advanced characteristics of human beings? For example, humans have abilities or characteristics such as altruism, philosophical insight, wonder, spirituality, esthetic appreciation, amazing mathematical abilities, and an astonishing 'built-in' language ability. How can such things be entirely explained in terms of us having the right proteins?

The alphabet used by genes is basically a 4-letter alphabet, which is not exactly a very rich alphabet for the deepest expression. The 4 letters in a gene's alphabet are A, C, T, and G. It is hard to imagine some combination of those 4 letters being responsible for each of the more subtle and refined characteristics of human nature.

Given these issues, it may be time to consider a rather drastic possibility – the possibility of dethroning the gene. We could start thinking along these lines:

Genes are a very important determinant of human nature. But as they are merely recipes for making proteins, we cannot at all explain all the exquisite features of human nature by assuming that the secrets of human nature are all stored in merely 23,000 genes. There may well be some completely undiscovered information storehouse that also is crucial in determining human nature – an unknown noncellular 'dark genome.' When a human body and a full human mind comes into existence, it may require information from cellular genes and this mysterious noncellular 'dark genome.' ”

 

Later in the same post I wrote this:

"If such an undiscovered dark genome exists, where might it exist? We don't know. It could exist in cells, in some undiscovered part outside of chromosomes. Or, more likely, it could exist entirely outside of cells. Such a dark genome might be stored in some larger cosmic information system. As I explain here, here, and here, there are strong reasons for believing that there may be some cosmic information system that has helped to facilitate the universe's astonishing evolution, its improbable transition from the ultra-hot density of the Big Bang to its current orderly state. Such an information system would have three basic required elements: programming, a database engine, and a computing engine. A tiny fraction of the data within such a database system may be an undiscovered dark genome storing instructions on how to make a human being and a human mind, instructions too complicated to be written in the simple 4-letter language used by the genes in our cells."

This 2014 post was the beginning of a realization that would deepen, leading me later to write my 2016 post "The Gigantic Missing Link of Biological Life" and my 2023 post "Why We Were Told So Often the Huge Lie That DNA Is a Specification for Building Humans."  In those posts I would explain much more fully why DNA and its genes cannot possibly be a blueprint, recipe or program for making a human body. I would also in those posts include a large list of 40+ scientists or doctors who confessed that DNA and its genes are no such thing as a blueprint, recipe or program for making a human body.  

I now consider this issue to be of the highest philosophical importance.  One reason is that mainstream claims that humans are the result of accidental evolutionary processes are claims that are utterly discredited once we realize that DNA and its genes have no such thing as a blueprint, program or recipe for making a human body or any of its cells. 

Below is a diagram showing what I call the 7 Main Clues About Reality (which I discuss at great length here). Each is a clue of the utmost importance in leading us towards the true nature of reality. The third pillar is the very important clue that there is "No DNA Specification of How to Make Anatomy or Hugely Organized Cells." My July 14, 2014 post "Half of the Blueprint for You May Be Stored Outside of Your Cells" was the first evidence in my writings of starting to realize this very important clue. 

In July 2014 I wrote the science fiction story "Funeral for a Civilized Species," which I regard as one of my best science fiction stories. 

My August 2014 post "Is Kepler-78b a Sign of Astronomical Engineering?" was a speculative post that discussed a very hard-to-explain planet in another solar system. I did not express any great confidence in my speculation about the planet. Oddly enough the post led to a television appearance in which I discussed my speculation about the planet's strange position (extremely close to its star) possibly being a result of deliberate astronomical engineering. 

A post of mine in November 2014 was entitled "Why Machines Will Not Soon Be as Intelligent as Men." I disputed a 2014  news article incorrectly claiming "Computers will soon become more intelligent than us.” The post of mine holds up very well after 11 years. There is no sign of any real intelligence in computers. So-called "artificial intelligence" (AI) is a misnomer.  AI is just computer programming and data processing. Given that AI systems have spent years crawling the internet, and gobbling up a billion questions and answers written by humans, it is no surprise that you can ask an AI system a question and get an intelligent answer. The intelligent answer is just a modification or amalgamation of intelligent answers written by humans, not any evidence of intelligent computers. 

By this time my posts were starting to show my studies of parapsychology, and in December 2014 I wrote two of my better posts on this topic:

When Rhine and Pearce Got “Smoking Gun” Evidence for ESP

They Seemed to Know of Deaths They Should Not Have Known Of

When Apparitions Get Observed by Not Just One

Let us look at cases of apparitions reportedly seen by more than one witness, without repeating any of the examples given in my posts mentioned at the end of this post.

Below is a report of two workers seeing an apparition of a worker who recently died at their work site:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88085947/1910-03-27/ed-1/seq-12/

Below is an account of two people seeing the same apparition, an account found on page 99 of the February 13, 1936 edition of the periodical Light:

You can read the account here:

http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/light/light_v56_n2875_feb_13_1936.pdf

Below is a report of four people seeing the same apparition:

You can read the account here:

http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/light/light_v55_n2852_sep_5_1935.pdf

Below is a report of several workers seeing an apparition of a worker who recently died at their work site:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86075298/1923-09-07/ed-1/seq-7/

Below is another report of several workers seeing an apparition of a worker who recently died at their work site:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn90059523/1903-09-26/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is another account of an apparition seen by more than one. We read that "the ghost has been seen repeatedly by every member of the family." 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86058242/1908-09-10/ed-1/seq-8/

Below is an account of an apparition seen by multiple witnesses:

The account above is found on the front page of October 1934 edition of The International Psychic Gazette, which you can read below:

http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/international_psychic_gazette/international_psychic_gazette_v23_n253_oct_1934.pdf

At the link here we read an account of actor Henry Oscar claiming that he saw an apparition that many other have seen. At the link here we read of an apparition apparently seen by more than one at a school.  At the link here we read of multiple witnesses claiming to see the same apparition of a girl ghost. 

For other cases of apparitions seen by multiple witnesses, see my posts below:

When an Apparition Is Seen by Not Just One

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 Cases

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 More Cases
More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers
Many an Apparition Is Seen by More Than One
Still More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers

More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Witnesses

When Multiple Witnesses See the Same Apparition

Yet More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Witnesses

When Apparitions Get Multiple Witnesses

When Apparitions Are Seen by Multiple Witnesses

Many Said They Saw Nelly Butler's Apparition

If the topic of this post interested you, you may want to check out my free 292-page book "Eeriest Events," now available on www.archive.org using the link here. The book discusses phenomena such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparition sightings, deathbed visions and precognitive visions.  Using the native www.archive.org file viewer in single-page mode,  you can conveniently read the whole book by finger swiping. Scholars who are interested in following the links may prefer to download the book as a PDF file, which will allow opening links by right-clicking on a link. 

Oops: Six-Year Project Flops, But Scientist Calls It "Transformative"

 So-called "science news" sites these days are undergoing a slow, sickening degeneration, with their quality being deteriorated by profiteers. The headlines are dominated by the most shameless clickbait trying to get you to click on enticing headlines that take you to pages filled with ads that make money for the science news profiteers. Some examples of the deterioration include these:

• When you click on a headline at the RealClearScience site, you will typically not go directly to an article page, but to some annoying popup ad that you will have to dismiss before going to the article page. 
• Clicking on the Phys.org science news site now will often be a futile click, as you will often be informed that you have hit some five-article limit. 
• Clicking on articles at the NewScientist site will typically be futile, unless you have subscribed. 
• When I clicked on a science news story at Vox.com, I got some "you can't read because you're not a subscriber" notification. 

You might call this the crapification of science news. Wading through such annoyances, including a popup annoyance trying to read an article at Space.com, I found news about the release of results from a six-year Dark Energy Survey. It's an article at Space.com with this headline:

Scientists just got the clearest picture of the dark universe yet: 'Now the dream has come true'

Wow, sounds like dark energy or dark matter has finally been observed, right? Wrong. All that happened is that the results of a six-year Dark Energy Survey have been released, and no dark energy was ever observed. 

We have the "sheds new light" rhetorical trick so commonly used by scientists when their research has failed to discover anything or failed to discover anything important. The trick works like this: no matter how insignificant your results are, you simply claim that your research "sheds new light" on some longstanding problem. The "shed new light" quote is the one below:

"These results from DES shine new light on our understanding of the universe and its expansion," Regina Rameika, Associate Director for the Office of High Energy Physics in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, said in a statement. "They demonstrate how long-term investment in research and combining multiple types of analysis can provide insight into some of the universe’s biggest mysteries."

But reading further in the article, we fail to learn of any new light that was shed. We fail to read of any actual detection of dark energy. We read that the observations are compatible with the main theory of dark energy and dark matter (called LCDM), but also compatible with a different theory ( wCDM)  in which dark energy is described as evolving over time. We read, "The DES results conformed well to the LCDM, but also fit nicely with the wCDM."

Then we read what sounds like a confession that both of these theories are failing observation tests:

"But there is one parameter that these new results found to be off in comparison to both of these cosmic models: how matter in the modern universe is predicted to cluster based upon measurements of the early universe. These findings not only confirmed that modern galaxies don't cluster as either the LCDM or the wCDM predicts, but the difference between observations and theory became even more pronounced."

But such a confession sounds too troubling to be the article's ending. That confession has a "cosmologists don't understand what's going on, and are fumbling around and failing" ring to it. So the article ends on a happy note, with some scientist saying that this basically-found-nothing six-year Dark Energy Survey was "transformative." It's a claim as bogus as the "now the dream has come true" quote in the article's headline. The Dark Energy Survey would have been a "dream come true" if the scientists had actually observed some dark energy. 

The clustering explanation problem mentioned above involves the hierarchical organization of cosmic structure. Stars are organized into galaxies, which are organized into galaxy clusters, which are organized into gigantic clusters of galaxy clusters called superclusters. So many levels of organization are pretty much impossible to explain under current theories depicting only blind, purposeless things like dark matter and dark energy. And the dark energy used (unsuccessfully) to try to explain such organization is not even the dark energy predicted by quantum field theory, which predicts dark energy a gazillion or googol times stronger (as I discuss here). 

Postscript: Just after correcting a typo in this post, I read a new article at Quanta Magazine making this confession:

"The Standard Model doesn’t include particles that could comprise dark matter, for instance. It doesn’t explain why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe, or why the Big Bang happened in the first place. Then there’s the inexplicably enormous disparity between the Higgs boson’s mass (which sets the physical scale of atoms) and the far higher mass-energy scale associated with quantum gravity, known as the Planck scale. The chasm between physical scales — atoms are vastly larger than the Planck scale — seems unstable and unnatural."

At the same time we have got these groundless triumphal boasts about dark energy, our science news sites are reporting about a paper claiming to have produced a map of dark matter. The claim is groundless, and no dark matter was seen. All that was observed is gravitational lensing, the bending of light.    It's a case of scientists saying "we saw" dark matter, when they should be saying "we inferred" or "we guessed" dark matter. For more on the topic, read my recent post  "A Paraverse Interaction Map Might Be More Empirically Warranted Than a Dark Matter Map," which has some interesting links. 

The dark matter theorists are displaying willingness to imagine any dark matter shapes that they feel may help solve the explanatory shortfalls of dark matter. So we have the recent paper here, "The mass distribution in and around the Local Group," in which the theorists "succeed" by throwing away the "spherical halo of dark matter" idea, and by resorting to a speculation of a super-gigantic sheet of dark matter. Referring to the lambda [dark energy] cold dark matter theory using the term ΛCDM, they say, "The observations are reconcilable within ΛCDM, but only if mass is strongly concentrated in a plane out to 10 Mpc, with the surface density rising away from the Local Group and with deep voids above and below." So they're imagining a giant invisible sheet or plane of spooky dark matter, one many times bigger than any galaxy. There's no "successful predictions" going on here when you are willing to imagine invisible spooky matter shapes of any type or size to try to explain observations you cannot credibly explain. 

In a page entitled "The Pathologies of Cosmology," scientist M. J. Disney has stated the following:

"Cosmology must be the slowest moving branch of science. The number of practitioners per relevant observation is ridiculous. Consequently the same old things have to be said by the same old people (and by new ones) over and over and over again. For instance 'Cold Dark Matter' now sounds to me like a religious liturgy which its adherents chant like a mantra in the mindless hope that it will spring into existence. Much of cosmology is unhealthily self-referencing and it seems to an outsider like myself that cosmological fashions and reputations are made more by acclamation than by genuine scientific debate."