A recent article by scientist Alexandra Amon is an example of very bad hubris by a scientist. It is an article with the doubly misleading title "The Dark Universe: Why we're about to solve the biggest mystery in science." The mystery referred to is the so-called mystery of dark matter. Contrary to the groundless boasting of the title, no progress is being made in solving this so-called mystery, which we should always call a so-called mystery because of the lack of a clear evidential basis for believing that dark matter exists. And this so-called mystery of dark matter is almost trifling and insignificant compared to other mysteries of science that are a million times bigger.
Right from the start, we have an indication that Amon has gone astray. She begins her article saying this:
"Tiny, fuzzy blobs. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years looking at images of tiny, fuzzy blobs. They’re only ever a few pixels wide, like smudges on a photo, but they could be the key that unlocks the mystery of dark matter."
It's a waste of time to ever spend much time on any image that is only a few pixels wide. For many years I've got photographs stranger than that of 99% of all photographers. One of my rules is: never publish any image smaller than about 70 pixels by 70 pixels. Below that size, it is is just too easy to get false alarms. So it is pretty nonsensical to think that images "only ever a few pixels wide" could every unlock some deep cosmic mystery.
Amon states, "Our theory of the Universe hinges on the existence of dark matter, and we have no idea what dark matter is." But a great rule is: in almost every case, with few exceptions, if you have no idea of what something is, then you do not actually know such a thing exists. And that rule holds true in this case. We do not know that any such thing as dark matter exists.
Amon is a member of a belief community, the tiny community of scientists that calls themselves cosmologists. The total number of cosmologists around the world is only a few thousand. In tiny groups this small, it is extremely common for groupthink to occur. Groupthink is typically when some belief tradition arises in a small community, and it becomes taboo for people in that little clique to challenge that belief tradition. People in the little clique may get wildly excited about ideas that are not warranted by observations.
The cosmologist belief community clings without warrant to several unproven and dubious belief traditions, all of which involve never-observed things. Those belief traditions include:
- A belief in the existence of dark matter.
- A belief in the existence of dark energy.
- A belief in the existence of primordial cosmic inflation, not to be confused with the more general belief in the Big Bang.
Cosmologists are very often guilty of egregious misstatements in which they claim to know grand and glorious things that they do not actually know.
We have this goofy reasoning from Amon:
"Maybe dark matter is simply something we’ve invented out of a misinterpretation of the theory. Maybe it’s not really out there at all.
Sadly, not. Because one thing we do know is that something is out there. We can’t see it and we don’t know what it is, but since Dr Vera Rubin first observed the effects it was having on stars in the late 1970s, there’s no denying it’s there. Rubin set out to study the motions of stars in spiral galaxies, but her measurements suggested that the stars weren’t moving as expected."
Amon refers to the fact that textbook versions of gravitational theory do not correctly predict the orbital motion of stars around the centers of galaxies. But such a failure does not amount to an argument for the likely existence of dark matter. There are many possible theories that might explain such an anomaly, theories different from the dark matter theory. The "there's no denying it's there" claim is false. There is a substantial group of MOND theorists who very much deny that the "it" she refers to (massive amounts of invisible dark matter) is there.
After describing that outer stars (farther away from the center of the galaxy) orbit the galaxy as quickly as inner stars (closer to the center of the galaxy), Amon claims that "the only thing that could explain this finding would be if there is a tremendous amount of invisible matter in the outer regions of galaxies beyond the inner clump of visible stars." No, that is not true. There are quite a few different theories that have been created to explain this observational anomaly. One of them is called MOND, which stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics.
Amon speaks above just as if the MOND theory does not exist. This is a common tactic of scientists: just pretend competing theories do not exist, and hope they go away. Amon incorrectly says this about dark matter: "So we know it’s there and that there’s a lot of it." No, we do not know that dark matter exists, and no one has ever observed it.
Very strangely, referring to the so-called Standard Model of Cosmology, Amon states, "This ‘baby picture’ of the Universe supports the evidence that the cosmos is composed predominantly of dark matter." No, according to such a model the universe is composed predominately of something different from dark matter: dark energy.
Misspeaking very badly about something never observed, Amon states this "Our observations tell us that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding of the cosmos: it forms a cosmic web of clusters and filaments, with enormous voids in-between, that guide the location of galaxies." To the contrary, there have been no such observations. Dark matter has never been observed.
Neither dark matter nor dark energy has any place in the Standard Model of Physics, something that is on vastly sounder ground than the so-called Standard Model of Cosmology. Few claims are more laughable than Amon's groundless boast that " we're about to solve the biggest mystery in science." Despite decades of heavy funding, no progress has been made in either observing dark matter or substantiating a physics basis underlying the existence of dark matter. Nothing currently being done offers much hope for progress on this topic.
The alleged mystery of dark matter corresponds to what particle or particles make up dark matter, if dark matter exists. That is not a known mystery of the universe, but may well be merely a socially constructed artificial mystery that is the creation of speculating scientists. Ideas about dark matter arose from observations of why stars do not revolve around the center of a galaxy at the expected speed. Such a mystery is not even one of the hundred biggest mysteries of science.
All of the mysteries below are mysteries a thousand times bigger than any mystery of dark matter:
(1) How are humans instantly able to retrieve lots of information after seeing a single sight or hearing a single name?
(2) How are the most complex cells able to reproduce?
(3) How did the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body ever originate?
(4) How do protein molecules fold correctly to form into the 3D shapes needed for their function, and why do they form into just the right organized protein complexes so often needed for them to perform useful functions in the human body?
(5) How are humans ever able to learn new things, and form new memories that can last a lifetime?
(6) How is a speck-sized zygote ever able to progress to become the vast organization of an adult human body?
(7) How is a human able to think and understand?
(8) How were the cells and anatomy of any complex visible organism ever able to originate?
(9) How was human language ever able to originate?
(10) Why does there occur the many well-established things that so many scientists senselessly refuse to believe in?
For a discussion of why each of these questions is very much unanswered, read my post
here.
It's not that Amon is mostly wasting her time. She works on a project called the Dark Energy Survey which
describes itself as "an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe." Such a project is actually doing some solid mapping work. It is simply that such a project has done nothing to prove the existence of either dark matter or dark energy, which was its grand ambition. Scientists working on not-meeting-their-grand-goals projects should not be boasting so loudly, as Amon has done.
If there were a monthly magazine on the search for dark matter, it might look like this:
No comments:
Post a Comment