Have you heard the recent news report claiming that scientists launched a big telescope to study dark matter and dark energy? With a single voice, the science news sites passed on the claim of the European Space Agency, that their big new Euclid telescope will serve to study dark matter and dark energy. The only problem is the story is false. The European Space Agency did launch their Euclid telescope, but it is not a telescope that will study or scan either dark matter or dark energy.
The Euclid telescope is not some type of new telescope that will search the sky in a way that has never been done before, some way that might detect previously unseen dark matter or dark energy. The Euclid telescope is just a regular-style telescope that will study regular visible matter and energy, not invisible dark matter or dark energy.
But you would never know that from reading the science news reports, which had headlines such as this:
- "The space telescope surveying the entire universe to understand dark matter and dark energy" (Euclid will actually only survey 35% of the universe, and has no power to observe dark matter or dark energy).
- "What to Know About Euclid, Europe’s Space Telescope Launched to Study the ‘Dark Universe’"
- "Euclid launch: dark-energy mapper poised to probe cosmic mysteries" (Euclid has no power to either observe or map dark energy or dark matter.)
Euclid is an ordinary space telescope that will be able to only observe regular visible matter and regular visible energy. Scientists tell us that the dark matter and dark energy they claim to exist are both invisible, and incapable of being detected by regular telescopes. The Euclid site says something trying to get us to believe that scientists will be able to "infer" something about dark matter or dark energy from the observations Euclid makes. But such claims are very dubious. It's rather like someone who believes that Chinese satellites make heat waves claiming that he will be able to infer something about Chinese satellites by studying heat waves.
A dark matter detection device is a type of instrument totally different from Euclid. A 2020 press story describes a device that will attempt to detect dark matter:
"This spring, ten tons of liquid xenon will be pumped into a tank nestled nearly a mile underground at the heart of a former gold mine in South Dakota. With this giant vat of chemicals, scientists hope to detect the historically undetectable, a mysterious substance that makes up more than 85 percent of all mass in our universe: dark matter. 'One of the annoying features of dark matter is we have really no idea [what it is],” says Murdock Gilchriese, project director of this experiment, known as LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ). 'We know it exists, but as a particle and what its mass is, there’s a huge range.' "
Gilchriese was not speaking correctly. We do not at all know that dark matter exists. Alas, scientists keep making incorrect statements claiming that they know certain things exist that they have never observed. They do not know that such things exist. Be very suspicious when you hear a scientist saying, "We know it exists." The theory of dark matter is only one of two competing theories trying to explain observation anomalies in deep space. The dark matter theory is opposed by a modified gravity theory called MOND, and quite a few scientists argue that the belief in dark matter is groundless. When someone confesses that he has no idea what something that he believes in is, that's big a red flag that should cause you to doubt that such a thing exists.
It's a similar story for dark energy. No one has observed either dark matter or dark energy. We do not know that either dark matter or dark energy exist. The LZ project mentioned above has now run for years, finding no evidence yet of dark matter. Theoretically, the situation in regard to dark matter is much different than for dark energy. There are theoretical reasons why dark energy should exist, but in quantities so great that empty space should be so filled with dark energy that all space should be denser than steel. We know we don't live in any such universe. This unsolved problem is called the vacuum catastrophe problem, and it's impossible to imagine any way that Euclid could solve it.
When scientists tell you that they have reasons for thinking that dark energy exists, they fail to tell that the reasons actually lead to thinking that dark energy should be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more dense that it is, so dense that none of us should ever have existed, because all of outer space would be denser than steel. They don't tell you that part.
The web site describing the Euclid project gives us an uncritical presentation of the belief tenets of the LCDM ideology (the theory of cold dark matter and dark energy). Nowhere are we told of the very important fact that there is a very well-established framework called the Standard Model of Physics, and that neither dark energy nor dark matter have any place in that Standard Model. Nowhere are we told that claims about dark matter are vigorously disputed by quite a few scientists saying that things are more economically explained by a theory of modified Newtonian gravity (MOND). The site conflates "finding more about the universe's expansion" with "finding more about dark energy" and "finding more about galaxies" with "finding more about dark matter." That's how it goes when someone has an ideology intractably entangling two things that should be distinguished. For example, if you believe that the warm weather is caused by invisible fire spirits, then you may believe that every time you check the temperature outside, you are measuring today's work performance of the invisible fire spirits.
The ESA scientists trying to get funding for their Euclid telescope were probably rather like some movie executives trying to sell their latest superhero movie:
Executive John: Okay, let's milk our favorite cash cow once again. But how do we sell yet another superhero movie? People are getting sick of superhero movies.
Executive Jane: I got it! We can market it as a multiverse movie. The multiverse idea hasn't been around so long, so it isn't as stale.
Something similar may have happened with the Euclid telescope. The scientists may have figured that there would not be much support for a regular sky mapping telescope, because that's been done several times. So they marketed the project as a telescope specialized for studying dark matter and dark energy. It isn't any such thing. Euclid is just a regular old sky-mapper.
A press release last year on the previously mentioned LZ project was a prime example of the clickbait lies of university press headlines. The press release had the phony clickbait headline "Dark matter mysteries unraveled by researchers in underground South Dakota mine." In the same press release a professor confessed, "We did not see any dark matter." Now it's a year later, and still no dark matter detection from the big "dark matter detector."
The Euclid telescope consists of a regular telescope for observing visible matter, and a telescope for detecting hot ordinary matter by observing near-infrared radiation emitted by such matter. It is believed that neither dark matter nor dark energy emit near-infrared radiation. A Scientific American article puts it this way:
"Dark matter does not reveal its presence by emitting any type of electromagnetic radiation. It emits no infrared radiation, nor does it give off radio waves, ultraviolet radiation, X-rays or gamma rays. It is truly 'dark.' "
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