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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics


Monday, September 9, 2024

Wasting Billions Looking for Things Never Seen, Universities Ignore So Many Important Things Often Seen

 There was recently in the science news the latest results of the search for dark matter. Once again, scientists failed to find any evidence for it. If there were a magazine devoted to the search for dark matter, it might look like this:

futility of dark matter searches

A quote from the journal Science gives us a hint of the dysfunction and lack of candor that is occurring. We read this:

"Once again, physicists have used an ultrasensitive underground detector to hunt for particles of mysterious dark matter—and come up empty. The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment searched for so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) with five times better sensitivity than any previous experiment, but saw no sign of the hypothetical particles, the LZ team reported at two conferences today—one in Chicago and the other in São Paulo. The result doesn’t rule out the existence of WIMPs—long the favored candidate for dark matter—but it suggests the 4-decade-long saga of the whimsically named particles is entering its final chapters.

'If WIMPs were there, we have the sensitivity to have seen them,'  says Chamkaur Ghag, a particle physicist at University College London and spokesperson for the 250-member LZ team. Still, it’s too early to give up hope of detecting WIMPs, Ghag says. 'This is our first real foray into discovery territory.' ”

Notice the "black is white" kind of language occurring, in which an utter failure to detect anything is described as a "foray into discovery territory."  It's kind of like declaring your bankruptcy announcement by calling it "the latest proof of my prosperity." 

Here is how one university announced the "found nothing" results:

Let's fix that "PR spin" headline to get rid of its lack of candor:

corrected headline

Even more misleading is the bogus boasting headline in this article written by one of the dark matter scientists.


Let's fix that bogus headline:


In a Scientific American article on the observational flop, we very strangely hear one dark matter enthusiast tell us that a lack of signal (in other words, a failure to observe anything) is "a scientific triumph." 

Professor believers in dark matter are a belief community, like some religious sect. Just as the zealots of some sect may fail to be very honest when arguing for their creed, the dark matter believers very often fail to be honest. They routinely misspeak by speaking as if they had dark matter observations when all they have is observations of regular matter which they claim is being influenced by dark matter. According to dark matter theorists, dark matter is invisible. So no observations of ordinary matter should ever be described as observations of dark matter. It's kind of like someone seeing only cloud movements, and calling them "angel tugs."


Members of the dark matter belief community routinely publish "composition of the universe" charts like the one below, and thereby pretend to understand deep, sweeping things they do not at all understand. When they publish such charts, you never see the confessions shown below.

composition of the universe

The cherished hope of the dark matter theorist is to one day have some observation that he can use to claim that his dogma about the universe being 24% dark matter is correct. No observations that we can reasonably envision in our lifetimes would ever prove the dogma that dark matter makes up a large fraction of the universe.  The most that could ever happen is that scientists might discover some invisible never-discovered particle, and then claim that dark matter is that particle.  But that would never prove that dark matter is a substantial fraction of the universe.  All that would have happened is that dark matter dogmatists would have got a little talking point that they could crow about. Consequently, under no conditions in our lifetime will anyone ever justify the huge sums of money spent on looking for dark matter. 

What is very strange is that universities are wasting billions on futile attempts to try to observe things that have never been seen (such as dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry "super-partner particles" and primordial b-modes), while at the same encouraging a suppression of the study of very important observations of things that have abundantly been seen.  The observations I refer to are observations of the paranormal, including the things mentioned in the visual below:

types of paranormal phenomena

You can read about such observations in my post here, which lists 120+ types of paranormal or anomalous experiences.  Such observations and reports are of great importance because they have the greatest relevance to fundamental questions about who we are, unlike dark matter quests which have no relevance to such questions.  


Universities are suppressing serious study of such phenomena, by denying funding to the study of such phenomena, by encouraging the gaslighting of those who report such phenomena, and by excluding fair summaries of such phenomena (and excluding first-hand reports of such phenomena) in the textbooks and papers and lecture classes produced by the scholars of such universities. Our universities are churning out "filter bubble" scientists who stay within a materialist echo chamber, refusing to study abundant observations that contradict their cherished beliefs.  This is utterly contrary to the true spirit of science, which is "follow the observations wherever they lead, no matter how much they defy your expectations." 

scientists responding to paranormal

I will give an example of such suppression. In a post scheduled for publication on this blog a few weeks from now, I will tell the story of the founder of one of America's leading universities, a man who served as that university's first president for many years. In the middle of his very long term of very productive intellectual activity as the president of the university, this university founder reported to a newspaper that he had seen the apparition of his deceased wife at least twenty times, and that in most of these times he had lengthy two-way conversations with this apparition. He reported trying a fascinating test, in which the apparition identified the location of a small object in his house that someone else had hid, a location he did not know. I am rather sure that no one who studies science at this major university is informed in any of their classes about this very important account coming from the founder of their university, a person who reported the observations at length in a mainstream newspaper of that university's city. 

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