Erring Experts #10

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making. 

Spookiest Years, Part 12: The Year 1874

In previous posts in this intermittently appearing "Spookiest Years" series here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here I had looked at some very spooky events reported between 1848 and 1873. Let me pick up the thread and discuss some spooky events reported in the year 1874. My post will be a long one, because this year 1874 was perhaps the most notable one in the history of the paranormal. 

At the beginning of 1874, there occurred in the January, 1874 edition of the Quarterly Journal of Science the publication of the paper "NOTES OF AN ENQUIRY INTO THE PHENOMENA CALLED SPIRITUAL, DURING THE YEARS 1870-73" by William Crookes, one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, the main discover of the element thallium and the inventor of the Crookes tube that was an early ancestor of every television set. The paper can be read here. Crookes states this:

"My principal object will be to place on record a series of actual occurrences which have taken place in my own house, in the presence of trustworthy witnesses, and under as strict test conditions as I could devise. Every fact which I have observed is, moreover, corroborated by the records of independent observers at other times and places. It will be seen that the facts are of the most astounding character, and seem utterly irreconcilable with all known theories of modern science. ...Except where darkness has been a necessary condition, as with some of the phenomena of luminous appearances, and in a few other instances, everything recorded has taken place in the light. ”

Crookes then lists some classes of phenomena he was witnessed in good light in his own home:

Class I: "The Movement of Heavy Bodies with Contact, but without Mechanical Exertion."  Crookes makes this remarkable statement about such a class of events: "These movements (and indeed I may say the same of every kind of phenomenon) are generally preceded by a peculiar cold air, sometimes amounting to a decided wind." 

Class II: "The Phenomena of Percussive and other Allied Sounds." Crookes notes the extremely varied nature of such spooky sounds, and that they are much more than just "raps." Crookes notes that such spooky sounds occurred with great volume and variety, coming from a great variety of objects and directions, particularly whenever the medium Kate Fox was around. See the quote here and the next several pages for identical testimony by a former US congressman, who testified to hearing such inexplicable noises in a huge variety of places, particularly whenever Kate Fox was around. See the quote here by another author who describes very loud sounds coming from all different directions in the presence of Kate Fox, and who describes the mysterious sounds giving information known only to the author. See the end of my post here for a discussion of how Canadian author Susanna Moodie reported a series of the most inexplicable and startling successes occurring when she tested the medium Kate Fox.  Crookes says, "With a full knowledge of the numerous theories which have been started, chiefly in America, to explain these sounds, I have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery or mechanical means." He notes that these mysterious sounds often seem to be able to answer questions: "By a pre-arranged code of signals, questions are answered, and messages given with more or less accuracy." Most commonly this involved someone reciting the alphabet over and over, writing down which letters were followed by one of the mysterious noises. 

Class III: "The Alteration of Weight of Bodies." Crookes refers to previously published work he did documenting this phenomenon. You can read about his very careful experiments documenting a paranormal alteration of weights in his 1871 work "Experimental Investigations of Psychic Force," which can be read here. 

Class IV: "Movements of Heavy Substances when at a Distance from the Medium." Debunking the groundless legend that the physicist Michael Faraday showed that mysterious movements of tables could be explained by a theory of unconscious muscular "ideomotor force" produced by people touching the table, Crookes tells us this:

"The instances in which heavy bodies, such as tables, chairs, sofas, &c. have been moved, when the medium has not been touching them, are very numerous. I will briefly mention a few of the most striking. My own chair has been twisted partly round, whilst my feet were off the floor. A chair was seen by all present to move slowly up to the table from a far corner, when all were watching it; on another occasion an arm chair moved to where we were sitting, and then moved slowly back again (a distance of about three feet) at my request. On three successive evenings a small table moved slowly across the room, under conditions which I had specially pre-arranged, so as to answer any objection which might be raised to the evidence. I have had several repetitions of the experiment considered by the Committee of the Dialectical Society to be conclusive, viz., the movement of a heavy table in full light, the chairs turned with their backs to the table, about a foot off, and each person kneeling on his chair, with hands resting over the backs of the chair, but not touching the table."

Class V: "The Rising of Tables and Chairs off the Ground, without Contact with any Person." Further debunking the groundless legend that Faraday explained phenomena involving mysterious table movements, Crookes states this:

"On five separate occasions, a heavy dining-table rose between a few inches and 1.5 feet off the floor, under special circumstances, which rendered trickery impossible. On another occasion, a heavy table rose from the floor in full light, while I was holding the medium’s hands and feet. On another occasion the table rose from the floor, not only when no person was touching it, but under conditions which I had pre-arranged so as to assure unquestionable proof of the fact."

Class VI: "The Levitation of Human Beings." Crookes tells us this astonishing narrative:

"On one occasion I witnessed a chair, with a lady sitting on it, rise several inches from the ground. On another occasion, to avoid the suspicion of this being in some way performed by herself, the lady knelt on the chair in such manner that its four feet were visible to us. It then rose about three inches, remained suspended for about ten seconds, and then slowly descended. At another time two children, on separate occasions, rose from the floor with their chairs, in full daylight, under (to me) most satisfactory conditions ; for I was kneeling and keeping close watch upon the feet of the chair, and observing that no one might touch them. The most striking cases of levitation which I have witnessed have been with Mr. Home. On three separate occasions have I seen him raised completely from the floor of the room. Once sitting in an easy chair, once kneeling on his chair, and once standing up. On each occasion I had full opportunity of watching the occurrence as it was taking place."

You might dismiss such reports were it not that very many other witnesses reported seeing the same person (Daniel Dunglas Home) levitating. I have quoted the original versions of some of the earlier accounts of Home levitating in previous installments of this "Spookiest Years" series (here, here and here).  Crookes states this:

"There are at least a hundred recorded instances of Mr. Home’s rising from the ground, in the presence of as many separate persons, and I have heard from the lips of the three witnesses to the most striking occurrence of this kind—the Earl of Dunraven, Lord Lindsay, and Captain C. Wynne— their own most minute accounts of what took place. To reject the recorded evidence on this subject is to reject all human testimony whatever; for no fact in sacred or profane history is supported by a stronger array of proofs."

The extent to which such very important observations have been censored from mainstream textbooks and articles is something that sheds light on the enormous power of a prevailing ideological regime to control narratives, repressing reports that defy its claims.  

Class VII: "Movement of Various Small Articles without Contact with any Person." Crookes suggests that he saw an accordion floating in the air while playing a tune, along with other wonders. 

Class VIII: "Luminous Appearances." Among other things, Crookes states, "In the light, I have seen a luminous cloud hover over a heliotrope on a side table, break a sprig off, and carry the sprig to a lady; and on some occasions I have seen a similar luminous cloud visibly condense to the form of a hand and carry small objects about." See Speer's account below for a similar account of a spooky light floating about. 

Class IX: "The Appearance of Hands, either Self-Luminous or Visible by Ordinary Light." Crookes discusses seeing spooky hands in regular light, saying this:

"A hand has repeatedly been seen by myself and others playing the keys of an accordion, both of the medium’s hands being visible at the same time, and sometimes being held by those near him. The hands and fingers do not always appear to me to be solid and life-like. Sometimes, indeed, they present more the appearance of a nebulous cloud partly condensed into the form of a hand....I have retained one of these hands in my own, firmly resolved not to let it escape. There was no struggle or effort made to get loose, but it gradually seemed to resolve itself into vapour, and faded in that manner from my grasp."

Class X: "Direct Writing." Crookes cites cases of inexplicable writing he saw. He says, "A luminous hand came down from the upper part of the room, and after hovering near me for a few seconds, took the pencil from my hand, rapidly wrote on a sheet of paper, threw the pencil down, and then rose up over our heads, gradually fading into darkness."

Class XI: "Phantom Forms and Faces." Crookes states this:

"In the dusk of the evening, during a séance with Mr. Home at my house, the curtains of a window about eight feet from Mr. Home were seen to move. A dark, shadowy, semitransparent form, like that of a man, was then seen by all present standing near the window, waving the curtain with his hand. As we looked, the form faded away and the curtains ceased to move. The following is a still more striking instance. As in the former case, Mr. Home was the medium. A phantom form came from a corner of the room, took an accordion in its hand, and then glided about the room playing the instrument. The form was visible to all present for many minutes, Mr. Home also being seen at the same time. Coming rather close to a lady who was sitting apart from the rest of the company, she gave a slight cry, upon which it vanished."

A long scholarly article in an 1875 edition of the Quarterly Journal of Science has a review of reported cases of levitation, and on one page it lists the following reports:

In a January 16, 1874 edition of The Spiritualist. page 33, Stanhope T. Speer, M.D. tells us the following account of events he recently observed (giving his address):

"I wish now to say, that on the 3rd of this month, at a seance held here, under very favourable atmospheric conditions ; a bright light, resembling a cylindrical luminous cake, about three-and-a-half by two inches in size, and surrounded by an oval-shaped luminous envelope, made its appearance, and remained visible, without fading, for upwards of forty minutes. It moved freely about the room in various directions, returning invariably and remaining upon the edge of the table, without (as in former instances) disappearing under the table, for the purpose of acquiring fresh brilliancy. It sometimes advanced, as though walking, to the centre of the table ; rose in the air, placed itself, drapery and all, in the palm of my hand, held up to receive it. It then, at my request, soared upwards and struck the ceiling three times, at the same time striking the chandelier in its passage."

In the April 3, 1874 edition of The Spiritualist we have an article entitled "Spirit Forms" written by the leading 19th century scientist William Crookes. In the first few months of 1874 Crookes had been busy testing the famed medium Florence Cook, doing extensive tests in Crookes' home. The appearance of the "Katie King" phenomenon at that home was the third residence in which that phenomenon had been observed, and presumably ruled out any kind of "trap door" explanation (as Crookes could not have been unaware of such a thing in his own home).  Crookes states some observations tending to rule out any possibility that the mysterious Katie King was the same person as Florence Cook:

"On March 12th, during a seance here, after Katie had been walking amongst us and talking for some time, she retreated behind the curtain which separated my laboratory, where the company was sitting, from my library, which did temporary duty as a cabinet. In a minute she came to the curtain and called me to her, saying, ' Come into the room and lift my medium’s head up, she has slipped down.'  Katie was then standing before me, clothed in her usual white robes and turban head-dress. I immediately walked into the library up to Miss Cook, Katie stepping aside to allow me pass. I found Miss Cook had slipped partially off the sofa, and her head was hanging in a very awkward position. I lifted her on to the sofa, and in so doing had satisfactory evidence, in spite of the darkness, that Miss Cook was not attired in the ' Katie’  costume, but had on her ordinary black velvet dress, and was in a deep trance. Not more than three seconds elapsed between my seeing the white-robed Katie standing before me, and my raising Miss Cook on to the sofa from the position into which she had fallen.....I went cautiously into the room, it being dark, and felt about for Miss Cook. I found her crouching on the floor. Kneeling down, I let air enter the lamp, and by its light I saw the young lady, dressed in black velvet, as she had been in the early part of the evening, and to all appearance perfectly senseless. She did not move when I took her hand and held the light close to her face, but continued quietly breathing. Raising the lamp, I looked around and saw Katie standing close behind Miss Cook. She was robed in flowing white drapery, as we had seen her previously during the seance. Holding one of Miss Cook’s hands in mine, and still kneeling, I passed the lamp up and down, so as to illuminate Katie’s whole figure, and satisfy myself thoroughly that I was really looking at the veritable Katie whom I had clasped in my arms a few minutes before, and not at the phantasm of a disordered brain. She did not speak, but moved her head and smiled in recognition. Three separate times did I carefully examine Miss Cook crouching before me, to be sure that the hand I held was that of a living woman, and three separate times did I turn the lamp to Katie and examine her with steadfast scrutiny, until I had no doubt whatever of her objective reality....Katie’s height varies; in my house I have seen her six inches taller than Miss Cook. Last night, with bare feet and not ' tip-toeing,'  she was four and a half inches taller than Miss Cook. Katie’s neck was bare last night; the skin was perfectly smooth, both to touch and sight, whilst on Miss Cook’s neck is a large blister, which under similar circumstances is distinctly visible, and rough to the touch. Katie’s ears are unpierced, whilst Miss Cook habitually wears earrings. Katie’s complexion is very fair, while that of Miss Cook is very dark. Katie’s fingers are much longer than Miss Cook’s, and her face is also larger."

The reported observations seem to definitively rule out the idea that the mysteriously appearing Katie King was the same person as Florence Cook. A skeptic's only resort here is to claim that Crookes was lying, but other witnesses made reports similar to the one above, as described here.   In a June 5, 1874 publication we read a Crookes article entitled "The Last of 'Katie King.' " We read this statement by Crookes:

"During the last six months Miss Cook has been a frequent visitor at my house, remaining sometimes a week at a time. She brings nothing with her but a little hand-bag, not locked; during the day she is constantly in the presence of Mrs. Crookes, myself, or some other member of my family, and, not sleeping by herself, there is absolutely no opportunity for any preparation even of a less elaborate character than would be required for enacting ' Katie King.'...The almost daily seances with which Miss Cook has lately favoured me have proved a severe tax upon her strength, and I wish to make the most public acknowledgment of the obligations I am under to her for her readiness to assist me in my experiments. Every test that I have proposed she has at once agreed to submit to with the utmost willingness ; she is open and straightforward in speech, and I have never seen anything approaching the slightest symptom of a wish to deceive. Indeed I do not believe she could carry on a deception if she were to try, and if she did she would certainly be found out very quickly, for such a line of action is altogether foreign to her nature. And to imagine that an innocent school girl of fifteen should be able to conceive and then successfully carry out for three years so gigantic an imposture as this, and in that time should submit to any test which might be imposed on her, should bear the strictest scrutiny, should be willing to be searched at any time, either before or after a seance, and should meet with even better success in my own house than at that of her parents, knowing that she visited me with the express object of submitting to strict scientific tests,—to imagine, I say, the 'Katie King ' of the last three years to be the result of imposture,—does more violence to one’s reason and common sense than to believe her to be what she herself affirms."

It should be remembered that the investigation by William Crookes of Florence Cook only started in very late 1873, and that we have a steady stream of very detailed published accounts of the "Katie King" materialization phenomenon dating from throughout 1872 and 1873 before his involvement, as documented in my earlier posts "Spookiest Years, Part 10: The Year 1872" and "Spookiest Years, Part 11: The Year 1873," including many accounts found in the 1872 and 1873 editions of the newspaper The Spiritualist. In a June 19, 1874 publication (page 298) we read this statement of S. C. Hall F.S.A:

"I state that I did distinctly see the form said to be a ' materialised spirit' and the form of Florence Cook at the same time. The ' spirit ' was standing in the door-way, and Florence Cook was on the ground at a distance of about four feet from the ' spirit.'.

In the same edition we read that "we read that Florence Cook (daughter of the lawyer Henry Cook) was married to the lawyer Mr. Hackney." 

In the April 18, 1874 edition of the Boston publication Banner of Light we read of mysterious phenomena in the house of the Eddy family in Vermont. We read first hand claims by a Mrs. A. N. Tupper to have seen materializations of various forms a few months earlier, one of which came out from behind a curtain, and then reportedly kind of sunk into the floor, in what seemed like an act of dematerialization. 

One of the most famous mediums was Kate Fox, present at the Hydesville event of 1848 that seemed like the start of a huge wave of paranormal phenomena.  On  December 14, 1872 Kate was married to Henry D. Jencken, a lawyer. The May 8, 1874 edition of The Medium and Daybreak reports a remarkable claim regarding the child of this couple. The paper reports that on March 6, 1874 a pencil was mysteriously placed in the hand of the couple's five- month-old child, and that the child wrote the message shown below:

The handwriting reads this: "I love this little child God bless him advise his father to go to London on Monday by all means -- Susan."

The newspaper article contains an attestation that the words above were written by the five-month-old child, signed by Kate Fox Jencken, a J. Wason and a nurse, dated March 6, 1874, the date of the reported wonder. When evaluating evidence for the paranormal, it is always a strong point when you have written testimony of named witnesses, dated with a date as soon as possible after the described event.  A report like this might have no weight coming from the average witness, but so many people reported so many inexplicable things  occurring around Kate Fox that the report of this wonder cannot be summarily dismissed. 

There follows in the May 8, 1874 edition of The Medium and Daybreak a tale that most may think is too astonishing to believe. We are told that a halo of light was seen around the baby's head, and that streams of light were observed coming from the baby's eyes. 

The writer N. B. Wolfe in an 1874 book reports observing some astonishing events at a seance:

"As soon as the room was darkened, 'the birds began to sing!' I never heard such singing — the many voices blending in perfect harmony, clear, loud, musical, and bewitching. It was a love-feast of celestial melody, which we, one and all, enjoyed to the full capacity of our appreciation. This charming concert continued about twenty minutes, unassisted by a human voice, until it suddenly ceased, and Mrs. Hollis seemed to be surrounded by a multitude of spirit-voices, speaking quick, confusedly, and in an undertone.... What next transpired, I will copy from my note-book : ' A spirit-voice began to chant a part of the Episcopal service, and then improvised a rhapsody that was indescribably sweet and beautiful. This musical manifestation continued about ten minutes, during which time we commented freely upon the quality of the voice. The singing had but scarcely ceased, when an indescribable sound, resembling that which is made by a startled flock of birds, was beard, and coinstantial Mrs. Hollis, affrighted, was heard over our heads floating along the ceiling of the room!...This aerial flight continued only for a minute, during which time I ordered her to clap her hands against the ceiling, and mark the wall with the pencil she had in her hand ; all of which she did.' "

Nowadays no one would be too impressed by the auditory part, and might assume that it was trickery involving sounds played back on speakers. But the account was published in 1874, three years before the phonograph was invented, and more than a decade before the tape recorder was invented, when there was no such thing as audio playback.  

In a letter published in the July 11, 1874 edition of the Boston newspaper Banner of Light, the author Robert Dale Owen (formerly a US congressman) gave this account:

"After the strictest scrutiny, with every facility promptly afforded me by the mediums, to detect imposition had it been attempted, I here avow my conviction that the phenomena are genuine; that I have again and again, on more than twenty occasions, seen, heard, touched forms to appearance human and material, and to sense tangible; that these forms have stepped up close to me; that I have held conversation with them, occasionally receiving advice, sometimes having my thoughts read and adverted to ; that I have received, written under my very eyes, by a luminous, detached hand, a communication of some length, purporting to come from an eminent English clergyman who died twenty years ago, the style and the signature serving further to attest its genuine character; finally, that I have seen the form which had spoken to me a minute or two before, fade away till it became a dim shadow, to re-appear, a few minutes later, in all its brightness. ................ I have seen, during a single sitting of an hour and a half, three separate forms completely materialized, walk out from the cabinet to within a foot or two of where I sat, have touched all three, have conversed with all three, and this has occurred in the light, without any one in the cabinet, both mediums sitting beside me. Again, I have witnessed on six different occasions the levitation (that is, floating in the air) of a materialized form."

Dale was the author of the long and very readable 1868 book "Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World,"  which can be read here. In the July 17, 1874 edition of The Spiritualist, we read reports by named witnesses of recently observed seances in the United States, reports from Memphis and Indiana claiming materialization phenomena like those reported in the seances of Florence Cook.  A ritual is followed of a medium placed in a small wooden box called a cabinet, and then tied up with elaborate knots. The witnesses report various mysterious figures coming out of such cabinets, of various ages, genders and sizes. 

In the August 28, 1874 edition of The Spiritualist, we have a letter dated August 1, 1874 by former US congressman Robert Dale Owen, one making some very remarkable claims that may seem utterly unbelievable were it not for all the testimony quoted earlier in this post.  Owen describes seeing in Philadelphia beginning about July 5, 1874 a phenomenon of a mysterious figure arising not from a small wooden cabinet containing a medium, but such a cabinet starting out with no one at all. He states this:

"Substantially, indeed, it was but a reproduction and confirmation of the marvellous phenomena, so patiently sought out and so accurately described by Mr. Crookes. But we obtained these results without any human being in the cabinet, and without any entrancement of the mediums....Under the circumstances, we had, I think, every phenomenon which Mr. Crookes has recorded, saving this, that ' Katie' did not remain with us in the parlour, in full form, more than five minutes at any one time without re-entering the cabinet: but she was in the habit of coming out as often as five or six times in one evening, if we had a small, select circle, and two or three times when twenty or more persons were present. I have conversed with ' Katie' at the aperture more than seventy or eighty times, frequently in regard to the manner of conducting the sittings. On several of these occasions she read and replied to my thoughts...I have seen ' Katie'  issue from the cabinet more than a hundred times in full form...I was in the habit, after each sitting, of carefully examining the cabinet; but neither cross, nor ring, nor bracelet, nor locket, nor chain was ever to be found ; minute search, with a light, did not even reveal a roseleaf. With such or similar phenomena you arc doubtless familiar; but I have seen ' Katie,' on seven or eight different occasions, suspended, in full form, about two feet from the ground for ten or fifteen seconds. It was within the cabinet, but in full view; and she moved her arms and feet gently, as a swimmer, upright in the water, might do. I have seen her, on five several evenings, disappear and reappear before my eyes, and not more than eight or nine feet distant. On one occasion, when I had given her a Calla lily, she gradually vanished, holding it in her hand, and fading out from the head down; and the lily remained visible after the hand which held it was gone; the flower, however,  finally disappearing also. When she reappeared, the lily came back also, at first as a bright spot only, which gradually expanded into the flower. Then ' Katie' stepped out from the cabinet, waving to us, with all her wonted grace, her adieu ere she finally retired for the evening. Thus I have seen a material object, as well as a spirit, vanish and reappear."

Robert Dale Owen then tells us he saw two other figures inexplicably emerge from this empty cabinet:  an "Indian girl, taller than 'Katie,' with dark face and rich Indian costume, who advanced to us, allowed us to touch her hands and her dress, and gave her name as 'Sauntee'  and afterwards a sailor boy." A similar account is given by a different named witness (Thomas Brown) is given on page 228 of the November 6, 1874 edition of The Spiritualist, describing events on October 26, 1874, and naming several other witnesses. 

On page 10 of the January 1, 1875 edition of The Spiritualist, we have a report by seven named witnesses of a meeting on December 23, 1874. The report states the witnesses saw this gradual materialization of a human form, also witnessing its gradual dematerialization:

"Presently in full view of all the sitters, at the entrance to the doorway of the screen, a something white appeared on the floor, though no mortal hand was seen to place it there; slowly and very gradually this white object grew in size and height till it reached about the height of three feet from the floor, from which it developed more rapidly till  the full form of a man, clad in white, about five feet eight inches high appeared before us. We asked if it was 'Benny,'  (one of the medium’s guides) ; he nodded in the affirmative, and waved his arms above his head. After two or three minor manifestations, he was requested to take a pencil and mark on the wall as high as he could reach, which having done, he retired to the door of the screen, and standing there in full view of all, gradually diminished in size and height till what remained appeared like a white pocket-handkerchief on the carpet, which itself shortly faded away."

The best of these accounts (and the best of other accounts in this series) are accounts in which a particular named witness tells what he saw on some particular day at some exact place, and who else witnessed the occurrence; and we know exactly how long the gap is between the written report and the day of observation (usually only a small gap), with the publication of the report occurring very soon after the reported observation date.  When we have all such things, it helps to build confidence in the reliability of the observation. 

We may compare the best of these accounts to the reports published in modern scientific papers. Today's scientific papers typically have quite a few different authors, and are written in a passive voice. We are typically not told that a particular person saw a particular thing on a particular day. Instead almost invariably a passive voice is used, so we have no idea of which person witnessed the event. We don't even know whether any of the listed authors witnessed the described event, or whether the reports of the event come from unnamed lab assistants or student helpers. We get "passive voice" statements such as this: "Mice were given an injection of the agent, and were tested using the Morris Water Maze test." Also, we are almost never given dates telling when the observations occurred, and are almost never told exactly where the observations occurred. We typically don't know how long a gap occurred between the observation day and the day the account was written.  For all of these reasons, a typical experimental scientific paper published today is less reliable as evidence than the best reports I have cited in this "Spookiest Years" series. It is strange that people regard these scientific papers written today as much better evidence, even though they fall short on most of the characteristics we hope to find in good evidence. 

Erring Experts #8

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making. 

Erring Experts #6

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am creating.

"Dumpster Fires" of Bad Design on Mars and in Earthly Labs

Recently they announced the 2024 nominations for the Golden Raspberry Awards, informally called the Razzies. These are awards for the worst movies of the year. A web page tells us this:

"The most-nominated film is 'Expend4bles,' the fourth entry in the action-packed, but critically underwhelming, 'The Expendables' franchise. It received seven nominations. Tied for second place with five noms are 'The Exorcist: Believer,' the revival of the classic horror series, and 'Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,' a blood-soaked take on everyone’s favorite honey-loving bear. Two big-budget superhero movies, DC’s 'Shazam! Fury of the Gods' and Marvel’s 'Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,' both got four nominations."

Maybe the world of science should have its own Golden Raspberry Awards or Razzies, awarded to scientist undertakings with the worst design. One top contender would be the ridiculous OSIRIS-REx mission, which has been all about the boondoggle task of returning a soil sample from an asteroid, a mission that is a waste of money for reasons explained in my post here. The mission was so badly designed that it has taken scientists months to remove the top of the cannister filled with soil.  Another top contender would be NASA's Perseverance mission to Mars. 

In my February 2021 post "The Poor Design of the Latest Mars Mission," written just after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, I said that because of the poor design of the Perseverance mission, "you will not be hearing any 'NASA discovered life on Mars' announcement anytime in the next few years."  So far that prediction has held up. A NASA page said that the "Perseverance Rover will search for signs of ancient microbial life." But no such signs have been found. 

A February 2023 article on Science News has the title "What has Perseverance found in two years on Mars?" The long answer basically amounts to: nothing of interest to the general public. Some scientist named Horgan claims, "We’ve had some really interesting results that we’re pretty excited to share with the community." But in the long article we read of no interesting results.  The article tries to get us interested by statements like a statement that the Perseverance rover  "has found carbon-based matter in every rock" it analyzed. So what? Carbon is an extremely common element in the universe, and is found in many lifeless places. 

The Perseverance rover mission to Mars rover always had an extremely strange design. The main business of the Perseverance rover has been to dig up soil and put it into soil sample tubes that would simply be dumped on Mars, in hopes that a later mission would retrieve the tubes.  The mission design has always seemed utterly bizarre. Why send a rover to Mars to put soil samples into tubes for later retrieval by another spacecraft, when any newly arriving spacecraft could simply dig up Mars soil at the spot it landed, rather than try to find and retrieve such tubes filled up with soil years earlier?

The estimated cost of the mission to retrieve these filled tubes has been skyrocketing, rising to more than ten billion dollars.  A July article headline read "NASA's Mars Sample Return in jeopardy after US Senate questions budget."  Below that headline we read, "If NASA doesn't come up with a tighter budget for the mission, Mars Sample Return may not happen."  The other day the headline below appeared in a LiveScience article,  saying some are calling the NASA sample return plan "a dumpster fire."

The LiveScience article gives us a clue about how NASA got into its current mess about the sample return mission, making it sound like maybe big lying is going on at the agency, in regard to low-balling cost estimates in order to get funding (a type of lie that defense contractors frequently commit). We read this about the MSR (Mars Sample Return mission):

" According to Scott Hubbard, former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, who served as the agency’s inaugural Mars exploration program director from 2000 to 2001, there’s an easy explanation for MSR’s programmatic miscalculations. Historically, he says, NASA has shown a strong tendency to err on the low side of mission costs to get a project approved; the aha! moment comes later. 'NASA counts on this a great deal, whether consciously or unconsciously,' he says — especially for ambitious initiatives such as MSR."

Why would someone design a tube-filling mission such as Perseverance that might be pretty much a waste of billions, because of a lack of a follow-up mission to retrieve the tubes? It sure isn't because there would be a decent chance of detecting life from the retrieval of such tubes. Finding evidence of life in soil retrieved from Mars would be extremely improbable. No one has ever even found amino acids on Mars,  which means Mars lacks even the building blocks of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life. The building blocks of one-celled life are organelles; the building blocks of such organelles are proteins;  and the building blocks of such building blocks are amino acids. On Sunday at www.space.com we had an article with this interesting headline "If life exists on Mars, don't count on sample-return missions to find it, scientists say."

The term "dumpster fire" would be appropriate to use not just in referring to some Mars sample return plan, but also in referring to the design of the Perseverance mission itself. An exchange like the one below would candidly reveal how bad the mission design was, but you'll never hear so candid an exchange in a NASA congressional hearing:

Senator: So being very concise, in a nutshell, what did we get out of the billions we spent on the Perseverance mission?

NASA Official: Dumped dirty tubes.

In looking for nominations for a version of the Golden Raspberry Awards for scientific projects, it would not be hard to find other versions of very badly designed projects. Endless examples could be found in the world of experimental neuroscience, which these days is a cesspool of bad design and what is commonly called Questionable Research Practices (but which might be more candidly referred to as Horribly Bad Research Practices).  Nowadays in experimental neuroscience you routinely find projects that are guilty of quite a few of the design flaws below:

1. Selectively deleting data to help reach some desired conclusion or a positive result, perhaps while using "outlier removal" or "qualification criteria" to try to justify such arbitrary exclusions, particularly when no such exclusions were agreed on before gathering data, or no such exclusions are justifiable. 
2. Selectively reclassifying data to help reach some desired conclusion or a positive result.
3. Concealing results that contradict your previous research results or your beliefs or assumptions.
4. Failing to describe in a paper the "trial and error" nature of some exploratory inquiry, and making it sound as if you had from the beginning some late-arising research plan misleadingly described in the paper as if it had existed before data was gathered. 
5. Creating some hypothesis after data has been collected, and making it sound as if data was collected to confirm such a hypothesis (Hypothesizing After Results are Known, or HARKing).
6. "Slicing and dicing" data by various analytical permutations, until some some "statistical significance" can be found (defined as p < .05), a practice sometimes called p-hacking. 
7. Requesting from a statistician some analysis that produces "statistical significance," so that a positive result can be reported.  
8. Deliberately stopping the collection of data at some interval not previously selected for the end of data collection, because the data collected thus far met the criteria for a positive finding or a desired finding, and a desire not to have the positive result "spoiled" by collecting more data. 
9. Failing to perform a sample size calculation to figure out how many subjects were needed for a good statistical power in a study claiming some association or correlation.
10. Using study group sizes that are too small to produce robust results in a study attempting to produce evidence of correlation or causation rather than mere evidence of occasional occurrence. 
11. Use of unreliable and subjective techniques for measuring or recording data rather than more reliable and objective techniques (for example, attempting to measure animal fear by using subjective and unreliable judgments of "freezing behavior" rather than objective and reliable measurements of heart rate spikes). 
12. Failing to publicly publish a hypothesis to be tested and a detailed research plan for gathering and interpreting data prior to the gathering of data, or the use of "make up the process as you go along" techniques that are never described as such. 
13. Failure to follow a detailed blinding protocol designed to minimize the subjective recording and interpretation of data.
14. Failing to use control subjects in an experimental study attempting to show correlation or causal relation, or failure to have subjects perform control tasks.  In some cases separate control subjects are needed. For example, if I am testing whether some drug improves health, my experiment should include both subjects given the drug, and subjects not given the drug. In other cases mere "control tasks" may be sufficient. For example, if I am using brain scanning to test whether recalling a memory causes a particular region of the brain to have greater activation, I should test both tasks in which recalling memory is performed, and also "control tasks" in which subjects are asked to think of nothing without recalling anything. 
15. Using misleading region colorization in a visual that suggests a much greater difference than the actual difference (such as showing in bright red some region of a brain where there was only a 1 part in 200 difference in a BOLD signal, thereby suggesting a "lighting up" effect much stronger than the data indicate).
16. Failing to accurately list conflicts of interests of researchers such as compensation by corporations standing to benefit from particular research findings or owning shares or options of the stock of such corporations. 
17. Failing to mention (in the text of a paper or a chart) that a subset of subjects were used for some particular part of an experiment or observation, giving the impression that some larger group of subjects was used. 
18. Mixing real data produced from observations with one or more artificially created datasets, in a way that may lead readers to assume that your artificially created data was something other than a purely fictional creation. 
19. The error discussed in the scientific paper here ("Erroneous analyses of interactions in neuroscience: a problem of significance"), described as "an incorrect procedure involving two separate tests in which researchers conclude that effects differ when one effect is significant (P < 0.05) but the other is not (P > 0.05)."  The authors found this "incorrect procedure" occurring in 79 neuroscience papers they analyzed, with the correct procedure occurring in only 78 papers. 
20. Exposing human research participants to significant risks (such as exposure to lengthy medically unnecessary brain scans) without honestly and fully discussing the possible risks, and getting informed consent from the subjects that they agree to being exposed to such risks. 
21. Failing to treat human subjects in need of medical treatment for the sake of some double-blind trial in which half of the sick subjects are given placebos.  
22. Assuming without verification that some human group instructed to do something (such as taking some pill every day) performed the instructions exactly. 
23. Speaking as if changes in some cells or body chemicals or biological units such as synapses are evidence of a change produced by some experimentally induced experience, while ignoring that such cells or biological units or chemicals undergo types of constant change or remodeling that can plausibly explain the observed changes without assuming any causal relation to the experimentally induced experience. 
24. Selecting some untypical tiny subset of a much larger set, and overgeneralizing what is found in that tiny subset, suggesting that the larger set has whatever characteristics were found in the tiny subset (a paper refers to "the fact that overgeneralizations from, for example, small or WEIRD [ Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic] samples are pervasive in many top science journals").
25. Inaccurately calculating or overestimating statistical significance (a paper tells us "a systematic replication project in psychology found that while 97% of the original studies assessed had statistically significant effects, only 36% of the replications yielded significant findings," suggesting that statistical significance is being massively overestimated). 
26. Inaccurately calculating or overestimating effect size.

In some fields such as cognitive neuroscience, most papers are guilty of several of these Questionable Research Practices, often more than five or ten of them.

As I discuss in my post here, the bad designs so common in neuroscience studies often cause some unnecessary health risks to human subjects (typically low-income people lured by tiny "chump change" money rewards), and often also cause unnecessary suffering to animals who suffer for the sake of junk science papers. But the amount of physical risk caused by neuroscientist experimenters using bad designs is relatively small. However, an enormous amount of physical risk is caused by microbiology labs with bad designs.

Nowadays all over the world there occurs very risky gene-splicing experiments done in microbiology labs with poor physical designs.  I discuss such risks in my post " 'God Complex' Gene Splicers Say, 'Full Speed Ahead!' (Like the Titanic Captain)" you can read here.

There is a system for classifying the security of pathogen labs, with Level 4 being the highest level currently implemented. It is often claimed that Level 4 labs have the highest possible security. That is far from true. At Level 4 labs, workers arrive for shift work, going home every day, just like regular workers. It is easy to imagine a much safer system in which workers would work at a lab for an assigned number of days, living right next to the lab. We can imagine a system like this:

Under such a scheme, there would be a door system preventing anyone inside the quarantine area unless the person had just finished working for a Research Period in the green and red areas. Throughout the Research Period (which might be 2, 3 or 4 weeks), workers would work in the red area and live in the green area. Once the Research Period had ended, workers would move to the blue quarantine area for two weeks. Workers with any symptoms of an infectious disease would not be allowed to leave the blue quarantine area until the symptoms resolved.  

There are no labs that implement such a design, which would be much safer than a Level 4 lab (the highest safety now used).  I would imagine the main reason such easy-to-implement safeguards have not been implemented is that gene-splicing virologists do not wish to be inconvenienced, and would prefer to go home from work each night like regular office workers.  We are all at peril while they enjoy such convenience. Given the power of gene-splicing technologies such as CRISPR, and the failure to implement tight-as-possible safeguards, it seems that some of today's pathogen gene-splicing labs are recklessly playing "megadeath Russian Roulette."   

Failing to fully protect against pathogen release accidents, partially because of their not-safe-enough physical designs, today's pathogen labs engaging in "gain of function" research are a "dumpster fire" of bad design. We all may "burn up" by some pandemic coming from such labs. 

Don't worry a bit -- their offices have security cameras

Erring Experts #4

 Here is the latest in a series of short videos I am making. 

Erring Experts #3

 Here is the latest in a series of short videos I am making.

Physicists Plea to Get Billions for Boondoggles

In December 2023 many a child wrote out a Christmas wish list, and gave it to their parents or mailed it to Santa Claus, in hopes of having their fondest material desires fulfilled. In the same month a panel of physicists published a wish list of particle physicists, asking for funding for projects that will cost many billions. The items on this wish list were mainly boondoggles unworthy of being funded by the US government. 

Let's look at some of the items on the wish list of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5). 

"Dirty Dune"

DUNE is an acronym standing for Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.  The folly of this 3-billion-dollar project is discussed in my earlier post "Dirty DUNE: The 3 Billion Dollar Boondoggle Has Started." Neutrinos are "bit players" in the physics of the universe. Produced by the sun, they have no important role in the structure or habitability of the universe. Right now billions of these neutrino "ghost particles" produced by the sun are passing through your body. Nothing very important will come from studying such particles further. 

The DUNE project is an environmentally reckless project. The DUNE project will be very expensive in terms of its global warming cost. One of its detectors will be constructed more than a kilometer underground, and will require digging up as much as a billion cubic meters of dirt.  That kind of deep digging has a high cost in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, and tends to create pollution in a variety of ways. The government visual below (referring to arsenic contamination) reminds us of one of the countless reasons why massive hard-rock removal projects and massive soil removal projects can have very big environmental impacts.  At the end of the yellow line shown below is where DUNE will be massively involved. 

Claims have been made that the DUNE project may do something to help solve the long-standing baryon asymmetry problem, the problem of why the universe has vastly more matter than antimatter. Such claims have no good foundation, and are being made to try and make a piece of not very important scientific research sound like it might produce an important result.  At an expert answers site, we read the following:

"The problem with neutrinos is that they are very light. There is no conceivable mechanism that would produce enough of them to make up a significant percentage of the total mass of the universe."

So research on the cosmic "bit players" that are neutrino particles will never solve the  problem of why the universe has vastly more matter than antimatter. DUNE is an environmentally reckless "white elephant" project that will produce results that will be of no interest to the general public, and will do nothing to benefit the general public. Spending billions on the project is unwise.   Senselessly, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel recommends that the boondoggle of "Dirty DUNE" be expanded, and that even more billions be spent on this boondoggle project.  

CMB-S4

Around about 1978, cosmologists (the scientists who study the universe as a whole) were puzzled by a problem of fine-tuning. They had figured out that the expansion rate of the very early universe (at the time of the Big Bang) seems to have been incredibly fine-tuned, apparently to about one part in ten to the fiftieth power. This dilemma was known as the flatness problem.

Around 1980 Alan Guth (an MIT professor) proposed a way to solve the flatness problem. Guth proposed that for a tiny fraction of its first second (for less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second), the universe expanded at an exponential rate. The universe is not expanding at any such rate, but Guth proposed that after a very brief instant of exponential expansion, the universe switched back to the normal, linear expansion that it now has. The theory was devised to get rid of some fine-tuning, but it turned out that the theory required fine-tuning of its own in multiple places. So we had a kind of "rob Peter to pay Paul" situation in which it was unclear that the need for fine-tuning had been reduced. A recent paper says this: "It actually requires much more fine-tuning for the Universe to have inflated than for it to have been placed in some low-entropy initial state (Carroll & Chen 2004)." The paper also refers to "the highly fine-tuned initial conditions required for inflation to work."

 For many decades cosmologists have been lost in a strange little world of fantasy whenever they dealt with this cosmic inflation theory. As different versions of the theory have kept failing, cosmologists have kept producing new versions of the theory; and by now there are hundreds of versions of it, making predictions all over the map.  All attempts to provide some empirical support for cosmic inflation theory have failed.  

The main prediction of cosmic inflation theories have been that there would be observed something called primordial gravitational waves, gravitational waves coming from the very early history of the universe. Although non-primordial gravitational waves have been detected (arising from times when the universe was already billions of years old), nothing has come from searches for primordial gravitational waves, which have gone on for years with ever-more-fancy and ever-more-expensive equipment.  A 2019 article states, "Models such as natural and quadratic inflation that were popular several years ago no longer seem tenable, says theorist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University."  A late 2021 article (based on this paper) is entitled "Primordial Gravitational Waves Continue to Elude Astronomers." But rather than discarding a theoretical approach that isn't working, our  cosmologists keep tying themselves into knots by spinning out more and more speculative ornate versions of the cosmic inflation theory (which already has many hundreds of different versions).  This has all been a giant waste of time and money, without any real success. 

The CMB-S4 project is a proposal that will be the latest piece in the huge fruitless money-wasting rathole that is cosmic inflation theory.  Having failed in numerous previous attempts to detect primordial gravitational waves, using ever-more-expensive equipment, our physicists now propose that we spend huge amounts on a new project to detect these primordial gravitational waves.  An analogy might be some billionaire who had this conversation:

Project Leader: I'm sorry, your 500 million dollar project to look for the Loch Ness monster has failed. 

Billionaire: Well, there's only one thing to do. Let's spend a billion dollars on an even fancier project to look for the Loch Ness monster. 

The Executive Summary of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel falsely describes the CMB-S4 project as one that "looks back at the earliest moments of the universe." An important fact of nature that will never change is that it forever will be physically impossible for any technology to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe." In its  first 100,000 years the universe was so dense that every type of radiation coming from such a time must have hopelessly scattered, with all of its information as mangled as a top secret document passed through 1000 different paper shredders, and all of the resulting paper scraps being passed through 1000 paper scrap shredders.  It will therefore be forever impossible to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe." Such an impossibility is one reason why cosmic inflation theory seems like pseudo-science. Cosmic inflation theory makes claims about what went on in the first instants of the universe, but it will forever be physically impossible to verify such claims. 

What the CMB-S4 will actually look at is something called the cosmic background radiation, which dates from a time when the universe was about 300,000 years old.  That was when the density of the universe dropped to a low enough level to let radiation freely pass around without every ray or particle being scattered by all that density.  This cosmic background radiation has already been exhaustively analyzed by previous scientific instruments such as COBE. No evidence was found for the primordial gravitational waves predicted by cosmic inflation theory. 

We have extremely strong reasons for thinking that scientists will never be able to find primordial gravitational waves that provide any evidence for the theory of primordial cosmic inflation. One reason is the failure of all previous searches to find such a thing. Another reason is that there are two very strong "signal confounders" which will always preclude scientists from being able to reliably say some faint trace of gravitational waves comes from primordial cosmic inflation. Those "signal confounders" are dust and gravitational waves produced by black holes, both stellar black holes and primordial black holes. 

The failure to find the primordial gravitational waves predicted by cosmic inflation theory is like someone searching all of Loch Ness underwater, and failing to see the Loch Ness monster. The CMB-S4 project can be compared to someone saying, "Well, if we can't photograph the Loch Ness monster underwater, let's look for footprints on the lake bottom that the monster may have left long ago." The problem with that is you could never get convincing evidence from such a method. You might be able to claim some funny little thing seen on a lake bottom was a foot print of the Loch Ness monster, but it would never be convincing evidence. And so it is for the current search for primordial gravitational waves. If they are found, the signal would be so weak (and so capable of being explained by alternate explanations) that you would never have convincing evidence of primordial cosmic inflation. 

Therefore, the  CMB-S4 project is a boondoggle. It cannot ever produce a compelling scientific result establishing a likelihood that primordial cosmic inflation occurred. All it can ever produce with the best of luck is some hazy, ambiguous,  very debatable, hard-to-interpret result that will be no clear evidence of anything.  It's like feeding the fuzzy Zapruder film into some artificial intelligence program.  You won't learn anything new about the assassination of John Kennedy by doing that.  At best you'll get some weak talking point that you might enjoy using in some debate. 

A recent paper on the topic of the detection of primordial gravitational waves has the very misleading title "Using gravitational waves to see the first second of the universe." Because of reasons discussed above, it will forever be physically impossible to view the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, under the assumptions of Big Bang cosmology, because of photon scattering caused by the extreme density.  The paper (for example on page 28 and page 60) discusses countless possible theoretical causes of primordial gravitational waves, reminding us of the impossibility of ever detecting the source of such waves if they were ever found.  On page 94 we are told that there can be "many other sources" of such waves.  

Any project to look for such primordial gravitational waves that have not been found after so much money has already been spent looking for such waves is like some project scanning the mud at the bottom of Loch Ness, looking for the faintest traces of monster footprints left long ago. No important and reliable science will come from such activities, which almost certainly will be a waste of time.  The most that will ever come is some hopelessly murky results and some talking point for some eager theorist, or some busy work for scientists who can't figure out more productive things to do. 

Page 7 of the P5 wish list document contains these statements of dogma and error:

"Light from the early universe, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), carries the imprint of quantum fluctuations left behind by cosmic inflation. Precision measurements of the polarization of the CMB have already shaped our understanding of inflation and constrained certain neutrino properties."

No, the search for evidence for primordial cosmic inflation by studying polarization of the cosmic microwave background has not produced any evidence that primordial cosmic inflation ever occurred. The statement above is as misleading as someone referring to a failed attempt to photograph unicorns, and claiming that this attempt "shaped our understanding of unicorns" by setting limits on the population of unicorns. We do not know that "light from the early universe, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), carries the imprint of quantum fluctuations left behind by cosmic inflation," such an idea being a groundless speculation. 

Another Dark Matter Boondoggle

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." 

One of the biggest reasons for rejecting this theory of dark matter is that the location of our galaxy's satellite galaxies does not match the location predicted by dark matter theory. Our Milky Way galaxy is surrounded by more than a dozen much smaller "dwarf galaxies." The Dark Matter theory predicts that such satellite galaxies should be randomly distributed in a spherical volume surrounding our galaxy. But instead our galaxy's satellite galaxies are found in a disk-like distribution, near the plane of our disk-like galaxy. A Big Think article confesses, "There has been one observation that is extremely difficult for the dark matter camp to explain: the distribution of small galaxies surrounding bigger ones."  

The article makes this confession:

"The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, which means it looks a little like a spinning disk, about 100,000 light-years across and 12,000 light-years thick — essentially a cosmic pizza pan. This is the shape of the visible stars and galaxies. However, dark matter theory says that dark matter is essentially a big, spherical cloud, maybe 700,000 light-years across, with the Milky Way located at the center. Because dark matter is important in galaxy formation, dark matter theory suggests that the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way should also be spherically distributed around it. On the other hand, if dark matter isn’t real, and the correct explanation for speedily rotating galaxies is that the laws of physics must be modified, scientists predict that the satellite galaxies should orbit the Milky Way in roughly the same plane as the Milky Way — essentially extensions of the Milky Way itself. When astronomers measure the location of the 11 known satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, they find that they are located in the plane of the Milky Way. Furthermore, the observed configuration is very improbable from a dark matter point of view."    

Instead of favoring the dark matter theory, the positions of our galaxy's satellite galaxies favors a different theory, the theory of MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics), an alternate theory of gravity. Some items in the press in recent years have been profoundly discouraging to believers in the dogma of dark matter. Specifically: 

ITEM 1: A news story entitled "No trace of dark matter halos" quotes a scientist saying that "the number of publications showing incompatibilities between observations and the dark matter paradigm just keeps increasing every year."

ITEM 2:  There not long ago appeared another science article with a headline of "Dark Matter Doesn't Exist."  That article (by an astrophysics professor) says there are multiple observations showing that dark matter cannot exist. The article says, "We need to scientifically understand why the dark-matter based model, being the most falsified physical theory in the history of humankind, continues to be religiously believed to be true by the vast majority of the modern, highly-educated scientists." This suggests all those dark matter stories we have read for so many years were just ivory tower tall tales.

ITEM 3: A recent paper discussing observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) notes that "early observations with JWST have led to the discovery of an unexpected large density...of massive galaxies... at extremely high redshifts z ≈ 10, " and finds in its Section 7 that the most-popular model of cosmology (called lambda cold dark matter or LCDM) is "excluded" (in other words, ruled out) at a moderately strong two-sigma level by the latest observations.

ITEM 4: A story in the science news a few days ago had the headline " 'We do not understand how it can exist': Astronomers baffled by 'almost invisible' dwarf galaxy that upends a dark matter theory." 

ITEM 5: A recent story in Quanta magazine gives us  a portrait that has a "cosmology in disarray" sound to it. We read this:

"Other inconsistencies abound. 'There are many more smaller problems elsewhere,' said Eleonora Di Valentino, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Sheffield. 'This is why it’s puzzling. Because it’s not just these big problems.'....'The situation right now seems like a big mess,' Hill said. 'I don’t know what to make of it.' ”

But you would never know about such problems by reading the new wish list document of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5).  In Section 1.2.2 the document makes this statement in which we have a matter-of-fact claim assuming the truth of three of the most dubious dogmas of modern cosmology: the dogma of primordial cosmic inflation, the dogma of dark matter, and the dogma of dark energy: "The universe has evolved from early moments of rapid expansion (cosmic inflation), which left behind the seeds of its future structure, to intermediate periods dominated by radiation (potentially including unknown light particle species) and dark matter, to our current epoch of accelerated expansion, driven by an unknown component we call dark energy." No, there is no evidence that any such primordial cosmic inflation occurred; there is no direct evidence for dark matter, and many reasons for doubting it exists; and no one has ever directly observed dark energy.  The quote above is a kind of "just so" story to the third power.  The same section tells this lie: "Our observations of the universe tell us that dark matter exists, but we have yet to determine its nature." No, our observations of the universe have never told us that dark matter exists.  And when someone confesses that he doesn't understand the nature of something, we should always doubt him when he claims he knows that thing exists. That's as fishy as a prosecutor saying, "I know the defendant killed his wife -- I just don't know how or when he did it." 

The statement I just quoted shows how the small sect of cosmologists and particle physicists has become a dogma-driven belief community.  one in which the true believers no longer feel a need to explain why they believe the unproven things they believe, but merely use "this is what we believe" as their rationale.  

According to the page here, billions have already been spent in fruitless searches for direct evidence of dark matter.  What do you do when you are part of a small priesthood with dark matter as one of its chief tenets, but no sign of a dark matter can be found? You keep asking for more and more money in hopes that your failed search might one day succeed. And that's what the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel has done, by pleading for even more to look for the never-found dark matter.  It's recommending the funding of something called the "Ultimate Generation 3 (G3) dark matter direct detection experiment." Very strangely, in section 4.1.4 of the document we hear a rationale for this G3 experiment mentioning the supersymmetry theory (SUSY), one of the most notorious failures of modern physics, a rathole which countless physicists wasted most of their careers on, without getting any success.  It's kind of like some quixotic visionary trying to justify his request for funds for his Loch Ness Monster research program by telling you how it relates to his failed search for the Lost City of Gold. 

Some Solid Principles of Research Funding

The proposals of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) are in violation of sensible principles of research funding. Some sensible principles of research funding include these:

(1) Allocate funding in proportion to projects that have a high chance of benefitting the public or projects producing results of high interest to the public. 

(2) Allocate funding in proportion to how often something has already been observed, with little money going to trying to prove the existence of things that have never been observed. 

Principle #1 needs little explanation. It is rather evident that billions are not well spent looking for things that only the tiniest fraction of the population has any interest in, such as whether a fraction-of-a-second burst of primordial cosmic inflation occurred at the dawn of time.  It is rather evident that research funds would be better spent on things with a chance of helping the population, such as perhaps some physics technology for reversing or limiting global warming or some physics technology capable of blocking incoming nuclear missiles or some physics technology capable of diverting asteroids that might make man extinct.  

Principle #2 is less obvious, but easily explained.  The more something has already been observed, the more likely that further research on the subject will produce important results. For example, electricity has already been abundantly observed, so it is likely that further research on electricity will be justified, and will not be a waste of funds. Conversely, no one has ever observed primordial cosmic inflation or dark matter, and there exists a very strong chance (indeed a likelihood based on previous efforts) that further research looking for such things will be a waste of money. 

If scientists were to sensibly allocate research dollars, there would be very abundant funding for researching things such as ESP and clairvoyance and near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences and apparition sightings. These things have been very abundantly observed over the past two hundred years. Further research on them would have an excellent chance of shedding light on the most fundamental questions on who we are and how human minds arise, questions of the highest interest to everyone.  But research on such topics gets almost no funding. Instead, our scientists allocate billions of dollars to boondoggle "white elephant" projects looking for things that have never been observed, such as dark matter, dark energy and primordial cosmic inflation. It's as if trying to confirm the cherished  dogmas of their belief community was their #1 priority, rather than doing something of use or interest to the general public. 

I may note that the actual cost of many or most of the physics projects mentioned above will probably be vastly greater than the cost estimates given by the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel.  What happens is that scientists or defense contractors or NASA officials wanting funding for some project tend to give very "low ball" estimates of the cost of the projects, to help get initial funding. Then once the projects are quarter-funded or half-funded,  it often becomes clear that the cost of completing the project will be very much higher than originally estimated.  The people who make such estimates often are counting on "sunk cost" snaring, the idea that once a government spends many millions on some project it will never cancel the project because of 50% or 100% cost overruns.