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.
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