A recent NASA press release announces some report based on 30 years of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. You would never guess from the press release that the report is one finding a gigantic failure of one of the top theories of modern physical science, the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory. The failure is also all-but-buried by the corresponding scientific paper, which refers to the observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, and compares them to predictions from the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory, telling us this (using some jargon that I will translate):
"The inclusion of high-redshift SNe Ia yields H0 = 73.30 ± 1.04 km s−1 Mpc−1 and q0 = −0.51 ± 0.024. We find a 5σ difference with the prediction of H0 from Planck CMB observations under ΛCDM, with no indication that the discrepancy arises from measurement uncertainties or analysis variations considered to date."
The "5σ difference" is a big five sigma difference between the Hubble constant (H0, the universe's expansion rate) as determined by the Hubble telescope observations and the Hubble constant as predicted by the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory, cryptically referenced as "ΛCDM." On page 54 we are told that the "5σ difference" is one that we would expect to get by chance only one time in a million.
So the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory has flopped big time. What the theory predicts about the universe's expansion rate does not match the latest and greatest measurements of that rate. But you cannot find a plain English mention of that flop in either the press release or the scientific paper. The scientific paper mentions the failure of the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory, but in a way that could only be understood by a physicist or a cosmologist (or someone like myself who has read cosmology papers for decades). The NASA press release makes no mention of a failure of theory, and fails to even mention the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory. The NASA press release attempts to suggest the discrepancy may suggest "new physics," rather than frankly telling us that the results suggest we have bad old flopping physics theories.
Are science journalists filling in the gap by telling us that the Hubble observations amount to a flop for the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory? No, they're pretty much burying the flop news. But they are using the matter as an opportunity for more clickbait stories, like this one entitled "Ghostly Unseen 'Mirror World' Might Be Cause of Cosmic Controversy With Hubble Constant." An example of the bury-the-flop coverage is a CNN story which refers to a discrepancy between the observed expansion rate of the universe and the "predicted expansion rate," without telling us which theory made such a prediction (the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory).
For decades scientists "bet the farm" on the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory, a move which made little sense. There were never any direct observations of any such thing as cold dark matter, so scientists had to claim it was invisible. And even though cosmologists and astrophysicists believed in it with a fervor, cold dark matter never had any place in the Standard Model of Physics. How ironic that scientists often blast people for having faith in important invisible realities, when they have put such unquestioning faith in things they say are important, invisible and never directly observed: dark matter and dark energy. Maybe their thinking is: "you can believe in important invisibles but only OUR important invisibles."
What is mentioned above is a kind of a "burying the bad news" affair like what would be going on if your doctor were to say something like "probabilistic modeling now yields a decay in the trajectory of your personalized actuarial projection curve" rather than telling you, "Joe, you're going to die pretty soon." Scientists often bury any news they may have that their favorite theories are flopping. Even though scientists waste decades pursuing bad theories, you will never read in a science publication a story with a blunt headline such as "We Are Wasting Our Time."
In the very rare cases in which science journalists present stories discussing the failures of popular theories of today's scientists, they will usually try various ways to sweeten up the bad news. One approach is the "we're getting there" story, in which failure is presented as part of the process of discovery, with various suggestions that important progress is occurring here and there, no matter how off-course scientists may seem. There may be sound bites suggesting we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, even when all signs suggest the authorities are marching in the wrong direction. Another approach is the "promising newcomer" story, in which it is confessed that there are big problems with the existing theory, but with the heartening suggestion this shortfall may be fixed by some new theory. Usually the new theory has just as many problems or inadequacies as the failing theory, but you may not realize that from reading the article.
An example of a theory with a failure we don't hear about is the theory that memories are stored in brains. If the theory were true, scientists should be able to read memories from brain tissue, either tissue surgically removed from a living patient, or tissue studied in the corpse of a person who recently died. But no such memories have ever been found by a microscopic study of brain tissue. Scientists have not been able to find the slightest trace of any stored information in brain tissue, other than the genetic information in all flesh, which is merely low-level chemical information. Even when examined with state-of-the-art microscopic equipment allowing scientists to see things a million times too small to be seen by the naked eye, brain tissue always look like mere flesh rather than some place where episodic memories or learned facts are stored. Scientists studying brain tissue with microscopes don't even claim that there is some complex information they can see in extracted brain tissue but cannot understand, rather like 17th century scientists staring at Egyptian hieroglyphics they did not understand. But you'll never read a science news headline such as "Scientists STILL Can't Find Memories in Brain Tissue."
Symmetry Magazine is a magazine trumpeting the work of theoretical physicists. An article recently appearing in that magazine reveals an example of how scientists keep spending year after year trying to flog dead horses. We read the following:
"In 1996 theorist Jonathan Feng attended a seminar about searches for new particles predicted by the mathematically elegant theory of Supersymmetry. The speaker was optimistic that researchers would find the particles at massive colliders such as the Tevatron, then in operation at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or the Large Hadron Collider, then under construction at CERN....The Tevatron never found the predicted particles, and the LHC has yet to find any evidence of their existence. Yet Supersymmetry is still a popular theory. The search term 'Supersymmetry' generates 15,107 results on scientific paper repository arXiv.org. That’s an average of 1.3 papers per day since 1991, when arXiv.org was launched. (The most recent paper was submitted 2 days ago.) Why does Supersymmetry continue to thrive after decades of null results? According to theorist Flip Tanedo, it’s because, 'it’s a great theory.' 'A great theory doesn't need to be "correct,"' says Tanedo, an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside."
How's that? A great theory doesn't need to be correct? Something went seriously wrong here.
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