"Translate" Interface Bug Corrected

I was sad to discover that with the Blogger settings I had been using, it was not even possible for the users of some languages to switch to their preferred language. The problem has been fixed, and using the Translate button at the top right, you should be able to translate this blog to any desired language. 

Harvard Misrepresents Information-Empty Bubbles As Being Relevant to Life's Origin

 For 70 years the mainstream science literature has presented enormously misleading coverage about origin-of-life research.  There has been a huge amount of bunk and baloney in the press coverage of origin-of-life research, and the statements made on this topic by scientists themselves have often been inaccurate. Many examples of such misstatements can be found here and here and here and here and here and here and here. 

The latest example of baloney about the origin of life is a recent article in the Harvard Gazette trying to persuade us that some research of no real biological relevance is some great advance in understanding the origin of life.  We have a headline "A Step Towards Solving Central Mystery of Life on Earth." We have a subtitle of "Experiment with synthetic self-assembling materials suggests how it all might have begun."

BS. Baloney. Hogwash. The experiments are of no biological relevance because they involve mere bubbles containing no information at all. That means they are of no relevance to understanding the origin of life, because even the simplest living thing is a huge repository of functional information. 

How much functional information is in the simplest living cell? The paper "Fundamental behaviors emerge from simulations of a living minimal cell"  describes "a genetically minimal bacterial cell, consisting of only ... 493 genes on a single 543-kbp circular chromosome with 452 genes coding for proteins (Breuer et al., 2019 ), some of which are subunits of multi-domain complexes." Each of those genes is a complex invention with hundreds of fine-tuned parts that almost all have to be just right. The total number of amino acids that have to be arranged just right in the proteins partially specified by these genes is roughly 150,000. Far from supporting any "life is simple, we can make it from scratch" narrative, such a paper supports the idea that even the simplest self-reproducing cell has a degree of organization and functional complexity greater than the organization and functional complexity of an 80-page technical manual. And even all that information does not give you a self-reproducing cell; it's only a prerequisite for such a cell. 

This is an extremely important fundamental fact about life: that even the simplest self-reproducing cell is a huge repository of functional information.  Each of the genes in such a cell gives the assembly instructions needed to arrange some amino acids in the right way to assemble a particular type of protein.  Just as there are 26 characters in the English alphabet, there are 20 possible amino acids that can be represented in some portion of a gene. A gene typically has to specify a special sequence of hundreds of specially arranged amino acids in order for the gene to specify a functional protein. The amount of functional information in a gene is therefore roughly similar to the amount of functional information in a paragraph of a technical manual. Because a self-reproducing cell requires hundreds of different types of genes, the amount of functional information in even the simplest self-reproducing cell is roughly the same as the amount of functional information in a 100-page technical manual consisting of hundreds of paragraphs. 

How often would we expect chance combinations of matter to produce all the information needed for a self-reproducing cell? We would never expect such a thing to occur in the history of the universe. It would be an event so improbable it would be as unlikely as ink splashes producing a 100-page useful technical manual. Life can only be common in the universe if there is some causal agency counteracting these prohibitive odds against the accidental origin of life. 

Does the Harvard article discuss any research that produced any such information through natural processes? No, it does not.  What we have is a discussion of research involving  information-empty bubbles.  The trick of trying to pass off bubble behavior as being relevant to the origin of life is a long-running ruse in origin of life research.  A researcher may create some warm fluid filled with fatty acids.  He may see some bubbles in such a fluid. Speaking very misleadingly, the researcher may describe such bubbles as "protocells."  If he observes some big bubble splitting into two smaller bubbles, he may describe this as "reproduction," and may claim that it has some relevance to the the reproduction that it occurs in living things.  

The main reason such research on bubbles has no relevance to the origin-of-life is that the bubbles have no information at all in them. Even the simplest cell is a huge repository of functional information. But there is no information at all in bubbles produced in these type of misleading experiments.  Such bubbles have no genes at all. 

The Harvard article gives us this quote:

" 'This is the first time, as far as I know, that anybody has done anything like this — generate a structure that has the properties of life from something, which is completely homogeneous at the chemical level and devoid of any similarity to natural life,' said Juan Pérez-Mercader, a senior research fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Origins of Life Initiative, the senior author of the study. 'I am super, super excited about this.' ”

Beware of super-excited scientists, because many super-excited scientists deceive us about things. Pérez-Mercader's statement is untrue. His crummy little bubbles do not have "the properties of life" because they do not have any information. They do not have any protein molecules and do not have any genes. And instead of it being true that no one "has done anything like this," the type of work Pérez-Mercader has done has been going on for decades.  Many a researcher has fruitlessly tried this silly path of fooling around with information-empty bubbles, and trying to pretend that the results have relevance to the origin of life. 

The Harvard Gazette article has a link to a paper by Pérez-Mercader, one with a title misleadingly referring to cells (the "cells" referred to are not actually cells). The paper describes nothing of any  relevance to explaining the origin of life. The supplementary information of the paper gives us the visual below for the contraption Pérez-Mercader used, one consisting of a beaker of ethanol glycol and more exotic chemicals surrounded by 32 light-emitting diodes.  No conditions anything like such a device would have existed in the early Earth. 

We read of some ridiculously artificial concoction placed in the beaker shown above. The supplementary information tells us this:

"9.8 mg of polyethyleneglycol-4-cyano-4- [(dodecylsulfanylthiocarbonyl)sulfanyl] pentanoic acid (photo-iniferter, Mn = 1400) was mixed with 147 µL 2-hydroxypropyl methacrylate (monomer, Mn = 144.17) in 1.5 mL of water in a 1-dram vial. The vial is vortexed for 5 min and closed with a rubber stopper. Using two syringe needles (for inlet and outlet of gas) through the rubber stopper, the mixture in the vial was bubbled with N2 gas for 10 min to minimize dissolved oxygen."

Then some weird chemical was added to help grow bigger bubbles : "To accelerate the growth in vesicle size during polymerization, we added to the initial blend Zinc tetraphenylporphyrin (ZnTPP) as a photocatalyst that has previously been reported to work in PISA photopolymerization reactions."  This is a ridiculously artificial procedure bearing no resemblance to an experiment attempting to simulate early Earth conditions. 

The paper's sole use of the word "information" is this: "The simple (conformational) information that gets transferred by these spores is in the structure and length of their partially (and internally modified) reacted amphiphiles whose properties depend on the history of the mother." -- "Conformational" refers to shape. The shape of a bubble is no real functional information. In biology when someone talks about functional information, they mean some use of a symbolic system of representation (for example, the genetic code) by which useful instructions are stored.  A bubble's shape is not functional information. 

In the paper Pérez-Mercader repeatedly refers to "vesicles," and each time he uses that term he is merely referring to some bubble. Pérez-Mercader's beloved bubbles are information-empty things of no relevance to the problem of the origin of life, which is a largely a problem of explaining how there could have originated a gigantic  repository of functional information. Some simple searches of his paper show its irrelevance to explaining the origin of life:

Mentions of DNA: 0

Mentions of proteins: 0

Mentions of genes: 0

Mentions of RNA: 0

Mentions of amino acids: 0

Mentions of the genetic code: 0

Mentions of nucleobases: 0

All of the references to "reproduction" and "self-organization" in the paper are about as relevant to the origin of life as someone tracking the behavior of water drops on the hood of his car during rainy weather, while claiming that three small drops forming into a larger drop was an example of "self-organization" and claiming that one big drop splitting into two smaller drops was an example of "reproduction." 

Appendix: The definition of "information" I use above is the second definition of "information" I get when doing a Google search for "definition of information." That definition is: "what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things." Using that definition of information, there really is very much information in even the simplest one-celled life, because such life has many genes that do indeed represent something by a particular arrangement or sequence of things. Particular trios of the nucleotide base pairs in genes do actually represent particular amino acids, according to the scheme of representation called the genetic code,  illustrated in the table below. Under this system, particular triple combinations of nucleotide base pairs represent particular amino acids. Bubbles and vesicles and water drops and pebbles and rocks have neither representation nor information. 

The genetic code, a scheme of representation used by all earthly life

Postscript: In a recent Big Think article, cosmologist Ethan Siegel gives us what sounds like a very lazy effort. The article is entitled "Five Big Unanswered Questions About the Origin of Life." But three of his questions are not actually questions about the origin of life. Siegel keeps suggesting that life could have arose from "ingredients," failing to grasp the essential point that life can only arise from very organized components such as hundreds of different types of protein molecules, each a complex invention requiring a different special arrangement of hundreds of amino acids. When scientists talk about life arising from "ingredients," they plant in our minds the false idea that a living thing could arise from simple unorganized matter.  

An article in Universe Today discusses a new scientific paper "The unreasonable likelihood of being":

"The study focuses on the difficulty of assembling structured biological information under what could be reasonably expected prebiotic conditions, showing just how hard it would be for the first living cell to form naturally on early Earth. Think of it like trying to write an article about the origins of life for a well renowned space based website by randomly throwing letters at a page. The chances of success become astronomically small as the required complexity increases."

The paper estimates that a protocell would require a billion bits of information. A page of text uses about 200,000 bits. A billion bits of information is about the same information as in a book of 2000 pages. The estimate is consistent with a statement I have made several times on this blog, that the amount of functional information required for the origin of life is comparable to the amount of information in a long technical manual of very many pages. 

Mediums Who Reported Out-of-Body Experiences

 Following the beginning of the mysterious rap phenomena that began in 1848, there arose different types of persons calling themselves mediums.  There were mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home, who were classified as physical mediums, because the mysterious effects reported around them were mainly physical effects such as musical instruments playing by themselves, and levitations of tables (or perhaps even a levitation of the medium himself). There were also mediums classified as mental mediums, who were involved with mysterious mental effects. A mental medium might claim to be able to contact the deceased by means of mental techniques long practiced by the medium, or by means of entering into a trance. Many of the mental mediums have used methods similar to methods that have been called "channeling" in recent decades. 

Some mental mediums held up very well to prolonged examination by scientists. Perhaps the most successful mental medium was the American medium Leonora Piper. A long account of her case is given in my post here. Leonora Piper held up very well to many years of very close and careful examination by members of the Society for Psychical Research. The main person examining her case was a person (Richard Hodgson) who was very skeptical at first, but later became convinced that Piper was actually communicating with the deceased.  

Innumerable times Leonora Piper seemed to display detailed knowledge of things that were known to her visitors, but should have been unknown to her, with the most impressive cases coming when Leonora did not even know the identity of her visitor.  Such knowledge often seemed to include knowing about obscure events or little-known persons known to her visitors, which she should have known nothing about.  This occurred around years such as 1897, where it was impossible to easily gather obscure information by techniques such as using the Internet. 

A British medium of the early twentieth century (Gladys Osborne Leonard) seemed to produce equally impressive results, results so impressive she was often called "the British Leonora Piper." The most impressive existing record of the results of Gladys Osborne Leonard is the 1916 book Raymond, or Life After Death by Sir Oliver Lodge, which can be read online for free here. The book is a meticulous account of interactions Lodge had with mediums after the death of his son Raymond, which occurred on September 14, 1915. The book has transcripts of quite a few sessions Lodge had with mediums such as Leonard.  

Summarizing these cases would be quite a chore, so instead I'll try to tackle the much easier task of describing out-of-body experiences reported by mediums such as Leonard. An account of such an experience appeared on page 149 of the July 1926 edition of The International Psychic Gazette, and is entitled "Travelling in the Astral: Remarkable Experiences." At the time the report was published, the term "out-of-body experience" was not in common use, and almost no one had heard of such experiences. There had developed the idea, however, that each human has a soul-like or immaterial "astral body" that might leave the physical body. It was sometimes said that such an astral body was made of "finer matter" or energy or matter that moved at a higher rate of vibration than ordinary matter. 

Gladys stated this:

"Then I felt a tingling sort of thrill as if a slight current of electricity were passing through my body, and I again had a sensation of not resting on the bed. I could think quite clearly, but taking a lesson from my previous disappointment I held my mind under quiet control, saying to myself that I would notice anything that happened but would not anticipate or wonder. What happened I shall never forget; it was wonderful ! I did not move consciously in any way, either limb or muscle, and my eyes were closed. I wondered how far my body might be above the bed, and by a little mental effort I opened my eyes and looked down and saw my physical body resting on the bed, while I in my astral body seemed to be resting above my physical body. To show you how clear my thoughts were, I noticed that the head of my physical body was lying on a particular nightdress case with an embroidered corner. I was surprised at seeing it there, because I was not aware of its having been changed that morning for the one I had been using. I thought, too, how funny it was that my head was resting on it, because I don’t usually do that. I was pleased at myself for noticing these things." 

"The next thing I felt was that my astral body was getting farther away from my physical body, and I seemed to be hovering over the edge of the bed for a few seconds. Then I began to feel just a little nervous, and the thought flashed across my mind—' Shall I be able to get back easily ? ' That question and slight fear drew me back about a foot towards my physical body. But my interest got the better of my fear, and I thought—' Whatever happens, let me go through with it !' "

"The moment I so determined I became aware of my husband opening our flat door, which makes a slight noise on being opened, and speaking to someone in the hall outside. He was speaking in a low voice, so as not to disturb me. I thought—' I should like to go and see to whom he is speaking,' and I don’t know how it happened, but I found myself at once standing at my husband’s elbow at the flat door. I was not aware of passing through the bedroom door, which is kept closed, but here I was. I looked through the open door, and saw that the man he was speaking to was from the Gas Company. What they were speaking about I did not notice, because just after I joined them (in my astral body) a maid from one of the upstairs flats passed them, and I saw my husband, without speaking to her, take a coin from his pocket and hand it to her. I thought—' That’s funny!  Why did he give that servant a coin ? ' I thought also— ' I will remember that and ask him.'  I arranged all this methodically thus—Two things to remember: (i) the gasman, and (2) the upstairs servant." 

"Then I found myself again back in the bedroom without knowing how. I noticed my clarity of thinking was leaving me, making me less conscious, and I thought that was possibly because I was about to return into my physical body. So I gave myself up to it, and ceased thinking, so as to make the return easier. In a moment or two I was surprised to find my mind begin to work again, but on looking around I saw at once that I was not on my bed, nor even in my bedroom, but in some other room I had never seen before. What interested me most was, I saw that the lady and gentleman I was expecting that afternoon were in this room, talking to a gentleman I had never seen before. I heard my own name mentioned by the lady. There was quite a conversation which I could not wholly catch, but I gathered that my sitters were inviting the stranger to share their sitting that afternoon. I pulled myself up at this and thought—' I must be dreaming, because these two people would never allow anyone to join them in what they regard as a very private and sacred matter.'  I looked at the stranger and saw he was a man of striking personality, not of an ordinary type at all. I got the impression of his appearance well in my mind, to carry it back with me into my physical body. I thought— ' I will hurry back and tell my husband at once, for it will be a good test if this gentleman should after all come with them.' " 

The out-of-body experience continues, and Gladys reports hearing of a Gertrude she had not met. Later Gladys told her husband about the experience. He confirmed that he had been talking to a man from the Gas Company, and that he had then paid a woman a coin for some favor done a few days before, doing this while not seeing Gladys nearby. Later the other part of the "astral body observation" was also apparently confirmed. Gladys says, "When I went into the room and saw the stranger he was so identically the same man as I had seen when in my astral body that I scarcely knew how to pull myself together and speak in an ordinary way to my sitters." Gladys also reports getting a confirmation about the reality of the Gertrude seen in her out-of-body experience. The account is too long and complicated for me to directly quote the whole account. 

We seem to have here a "veridical out-of-body experience" like the "veridical near-death experiences" described in my widely-read post here, both involving people seemingly having trips out of their body, and observing things they never should have seen while in their body, with the details later being confirmed by regular in-the-body observations. 

Another case of a female medium reporting an out-of-body experience can be read in the 1936 book 'Twixt Earth and Heaven by Annie Britain, which you can read here. On page 50 she states this:

"When I leave my body my mental volition is not entirely suspended, although my consciousness is directed towards certain things, and away from others. I am sometimes aware of my 'spirit body' and sometimes not. On one occasion I had sufficient volition to try an experiment. I tried to grasp and move some cups and saucers in the room, but my fingers passed through them as if they were shadows. On the same occasion I tried to slap and pinch the faces of the people in the room but could make no impression on them, and they did not take the least notice of me. I walked through a table as though it were an optical illusion. I remember feeling amused to think that I was so superior to flesh and blood, which usually comes off second best in encounter with wood, stone or steel. Tables, chairs, walls, the bodies of humans, seem as unsubstantial as shadows when one is out of the body. Yet whenever my attention is directed to my own spirit body, it seems solid and real, and as far as I have been able to observe, an exact replica of my earthly body."

Although the account above may seem too fantastic to believe,  there are actually quite a few other people who claim to have had similar experiences during out-of-body experiences: experiences recorded as being able to pass through solid matter. I list five other  such experiences in the third section of my long post here, which is one of the most extensive discussions ever published of the phenomenology of out-of-body experiences, and all of the strange types of things that people report when having such experiences. 

Annie states this about how her out-of-body experiences begin and end:

"I should mention in passing that I am seldom conscious of leaving the body. I simply find myself standing beside my sleeping form. The sensation on returning is always distinct; it is a sort of shock-the kind of physical shock one experiences when one wakes from sleep with a  start. How I really enter I cannot explain; we seem to fuse into each other with a sort of snap."

Annie then states on page 52 this very interesting passage in which she seems to describe out-of-body experiences that take her beyond this earthly realm of existence:

"In my spirit travels I am not always moving among earthly scenes, but sometimes I have the sensation of being propelled upwards through a bright atmosphere into a more ethereal world. It is a world in which I see trees and flowers, houses and people. And yet I am aware that I see other things that no earthly eye will ever see; but they do not seem strange to me, it is as if I had always known them, or had known them long ago, and had forgotten them. When I wake I can recall the trees, the flowers, the houses, but these other things elude me. It is, I think, the effects of light and colour that linger with me longest when I return. How shall I ever forget that radiant, light-drenched atmosphere! The sky is blue, but it is like blue fire. In some landscapes the colours are bright, in some they are of the softest shades, the most attenuated hues, but they blend and fade into others as they do in no earthly landscape. I have seen green forests rise up tier above tier, and fade away into blue night. I have seen the most vivid colours; meadows of a richer deeper green than those in which our lakeland cattle wade; valleys so verdant as to assuage all sorrow; blues that are soul searching; reds that are deeper than sunset or blood. In those happy regions an indescribable spell lies upon every flower and hedgerow and tree; it is like a sixth sense, and I seem to recapture the first fresh glory of earliest childhood."

The language reminds me of language that often appears in accounts of near-death experiences, in which people will often report seeing some strange ethereal realm that is very unworldly but also something that causes a person to have a feeling that he is "coming back home," as if he once lived in such a place. I discuss such accounts in my post here. 

On page 54 Annie makes these claims regarding a missing person. The reference to "the mesmeric sleep" is a reference to being hypnotized:

"My husband put me into mesmeric sleep, and suggested that I should trace the young woman if alive, or find her body if dead. I left the body, and found myself walking by a canal or river. It was dark and I could not see beyond the path and the water. I walked along till I came to a spot where the water was wider and there were rushes. I felt immediately that this was the spot, and saw in the distance an inky-blue coppice of trees and the shadowy outlines of a colliery. I did not see the body; I knew the experience would be gruesome and shrank from it. Soon afterwards I awoke and described my adventure. A few days later the body came to the surface in the very spot amongst the rushes that I had seen in my vision."

On page 56 we hear an astonishing tale which begins like this:

"I woke to find myself standing outside my body, gazing at the sleeping form in the chair. My cousin was by my side, a young man who had died some years before, and to whom I had been deeply attached. I was not greatly surprised to see him, as he had often escorted me on my spirit travels. Now he offered to take me out for the afternoon and see some of the spirit people. We passed out through the walls of the room, seeming to glide rather than to walk, with no more sense of motion than if we had been in a balloon."

Annie's accounts of her travels out of the body go and on, with many a fantastic adventure reported. I'm sure many of her 1936 readers must have thought that mere runaway imagination was involved. But about 1975 and thereafter many reports started to be published of near-death experiences, with people often reporting floating out of their bodies, and finding themselves traveling to unearthly mystical realms sounding like the one described by Annie. And such reports often involved claims of encountering the deceased,  claims similar to those Annie made. In the light of such near-death experience reports occurring so frequently, the accounts in Annie's books may not seem as hard-to-believe as they might have seemed to readers in 1936. 

A wide variety of mysterious psychic phenomena were reported in connection with Frederica Hauffe, a visionary (dubbed the Seeress of Provost) born in 1801. In an 1845 work by the physician Justinus Kerner, we read about such phenomena. Hauffe reportedly did quite a lot of spirit seeing, so we can classify her as a medium. On the page here and the next one we read that she had out-of-body experiences (like many others):

"She was frequently in that state in which persons, who, like her, have had the faculty of ghost-seeing, perceive their own spirit out of their body, which only enfolds it as a thin gauze. She often saw herself out of her body, and sometimes double. She said, ' It often appears to me that I am out of my body, and then I hover over it, and think of it ; but this is not a pleasant feeling, because I recognize my body.' "

In the same post in which I describe many stunning phenomena involving Frederica Hauffe,  I also describe many equally stunning phenomena involving the nineteenth century medium Adele Magnot, who seemed to be one of history's most successful mediums, although her name is all but forgotten today. As I report in that post, Adele Magnot seemed to be remarkably successful in describing deceased figures she could not have known about by normal means, when only given the names of such persons. 

If the topic of this post interested you, check out my free 292-page book "Eeriest Events," now available on www.archive.org using the link here. The book discusses phenomena such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparition sightings, deathbed visions and precognitive visions.  Using the native www.archive.org file viewer in single-page mode,  you can conveniently read the whole book by finger swiping. Scholars who are interested in following the links may prefer to download the book as a PDF file, which will allow opening links by right-clicking on a link. Those interested in whether modern scientists are able to explain accounts such as those discussed above may enjoy my recently uploaded 160-page  free online book "Near-Death Experiences and Out-of-Body Experiences," which can be read at www.archive.org using the link here. 

Busted Boondoggle: Weep No Tears Over the Recently Axed CMB-S4 Project

Many scientific undertakings are highly fruitful, producing important scientific results. A good example is the James Webb Space Telescope launched not long ago.  Besides taking photos of many things in our galaxy at unprecedented resolution, the James Webb Space Telescope has made important observations showing that galaxies formed relatively quickly after the Big Bang, at a rate much faster than predicted by cosmologists.  The James Webb Space Telescope has observed a galaxy with carbon existing only 350 million years after the Big Bang. According to existing theories, no such galaxy should have been possible before about 1 billion years after the Big Bang. 

We seem to see a mysterious organization principle at work in the early Universe, something beyond the understanding of scientists. Similarly, in the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the birth of a baby nine months later, we see a miracle of organization utterly beyond the understanding of mechanistic science. 

While projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope are highly productive, there are other big expensive scientific projects that are what we may call examples of "hamster-wheel science."  Hamster-wheel science is science that keeps churning and churning year after year, but never gets anywhere, and never makes any progress.  Perhaps the worst example of hamster-wheel science is the search for what are called primordial b-modes. 

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. This was the cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the more general Big Bang theory), a theory which has since taken on hundreds of different forms.  

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 scientific 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, possibly something that would have a feature called "b-modes." Although non-primordial gravitational waves have been detected (arising from times when the universe was already billions of years old), nothing has come from decades of 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 was a long-standing proposal to spend almost  a billion dollars more on 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 proposed that we spend 800 million dollars 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 would have actually looked 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  proposed CMB-S4 project was 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 paper last year 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. 

The main reason why cosmologists supported projects such as the CMB-S4 project is that so many cosmologists have wasted most of their careers on futile speculations such as the endless varieties of the cosmic inflation theory. Such scientists will eagerly vote to fund any "grasping at straws" project with the slightest hope of lending a little prestige to these speculative efforts, to minimize the chance that such scientists will one day have to stare themselves in the mirror and say, "I wasted most of my career on extravagant speculations that never were backed up by solid evidence." 

The CMB-S4 project is a futile hamster-wheel project. The search for primordial b-modes is the epitome of futile hamster-wheel science that gets nowhere. 

I recently read that the boondoggle CMB-S4 project has been axed.   The CMB-S4 project was to be run in Antarctica. It seems that the National Science Foundation thinks that upgrading facilities in Antarctica is a higher priority than the CMB-S4.    Meanwhile cosmologists will continue to waste billions on other futile boondoggle projects, such as the environmentally reckless "Dirty Dune" project looking for dark matter that scientists have already spent billions looking for without success. The cosmic inflation theorists may well try to make it look like they did not get to look for their hoped-for primordial gravitational waves, ignoring the fact that very many millions of dollars have already been spent over many years on failed searches for such things, in projects such as BICEP1, BICEP2, POLARBEAR, Keck and BICEP3, and work at the Simons Observatory. 

Within the study of cosmology, cosmic inflation theory has been a money-draining "white elephant," a scheme allowing cosmologists to keep draining many millions of research dollars without ever producing any compelling observational results. The advocates of cosmic inflation theory have tried to justify their money-wasting and time-wasting activities by appealing to a bandwagon effect.  Such people keep telling us that pretty much all the cosmologists agree about the truth of cosmic inflation theory.  This is not true at all. In fact, according to a poll of cosmologists taken last year, not even half of cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory. 

In the scientific paper, on page 9 we have the result of a 2024 poll of cosmologists attending a scientific conference. Here is the result of a question that does the equivalent of asking cosmologists: what percent of you believe in the cosmic inflation theory? The result is that only 44% of cosmologists endorse the theory. 

Page 8 of the paper (discussing the result above) says that the cosmic inflation theory "does not command majority support." We have no claim in the paper that this was a secret ballot survey. A secret ballot poll might have shown even smaller support. 

For 40 years cosmic inflation theorists have been making groundless boasts that almost all cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory. An example is page 3 of the paper here, in which a zealous proponent of the theory assures us that a "vast majority" of cosmologists endorse such a theory, without offering any evidence to back up such a claim. The poll above indicates that not even a majority of cosmologists endorse such a theory. Never trust any proponent of a theory who claims that the theory is supported by the great majority of specialists in some scientific field, unless such a claim is backed up by a well-designed secret ballot poll of scientists, a poll substantiating such a claim.  Scientists routinely make groundless or unfounded assertions claiming or insinuating that some theory cherished by them is supported by an overwhelming majority of people in their field.  

The lesson of the cosmic inflation theory misadventure is exactly the same as the lesson of the supersymmetry misadventure.  A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "inflation" in the title produces 7239 results, almost all papers on the cosmic inflation theory.  A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "supersymmetry" in the title produces 4546 results.  Both the cosmic inflation theory and the supersymmetry theory involved elaborate speculative attempts to "sweep under the rug" dramatic cases of very precise fine-tuning that had been discovered in nature. All of these papers were wastes of time and exercises in futility. Neither of these theories was ever supported by observational evidence, although endless millions were spent trying to get evidence for both of them. The cosmic inflation theory misadventure and the supersymmetry misadventure both teach the same lesson: when nature presents some very dramatic case of fine-tuning, do not waste huge amounts of time trying to devise elaborate theories designed to explain away such fine-tuning, and trying to sweep such fine-tuning under the rug; but instead accept such examples of cosmic fine-tuning, look for other examples of fine-tuning both in the universe and in biology, and ponder the implications of such fine-tuning that can be found so very abundantly throughout nature. The point I discuss here is discussed more fully in my post here, which explains the type of fine-tuning that supersymmetry attempted to sweep under the rug and explain away. 

                        This "sweeping under the rug" never works

Scientist Flubs and Flops #9

 

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• "There is a crisis in pre-clinical biomedical research involving laboratory animals. Too many papers publish results which turn out to be irreproducible. One estimate puts the cost at $28 billion being wasted per annum in the United States alone. The causes of this irreproducibility crisis have not been fully identified. But it has been known for many years that experiments are often poorly designed, inadequately analysed, and misreported. A survey of 271 papers chosen at random involving rats, mice and non-human primates showed that 87% did not report random allocation of experimental subjects to the treatments and 86% did not report 'blinding' when measuring the results. None of the papers gave any justification for their choice of sample size, and a substantial number of papers failed even to state the sex, age or weight of the animal."  -- Scientist Michael FW Festing (link). 
• ""For a common effect size of Hedge’s g= 0.5 (Welch’s independent samples t-test, α=0.05), ten animals per group would correspond to a statistical power of 18%, 30 animals per group to 48% power and 65 animals per group to 81% power...Through a systematic search (Supplementary Notes 1 and 2), we identified a large sample of animal studies in the areas of ‘neuroscience’ and ‘metabolism’ (n...=1,935) that were previously included in meta-analyses (n...=69). These animal studies had an overall median statistical power of 18% (Fig. 1a), which was roughly equal in the two fields (neuroscience, 15%; metabolism, 22%)....We estimated that, at best, 12.5% of a large sample of rodent studies were sufficiently powered (that is, prospective power was larger than 80%). This estimate is a best-case scenario, as it is not yet adjusted for any subsequent multiple testing, experimental bias, P hacking and/or fishing, selective reporting, etc.."  --  -- V. Bonapersona and other scientists, "Increasing the statistical power of animal experiments with historical control data" (link). 
• "The production of systematic reviews and meta‐analyses has reached epidemic proportions. Possibly, the large majority of produced systematic reviews and meta‐analyses are unnecessary, misleading, and/or conflicted." -- John P.A. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and data scientist (link).
• "When we last visited the lively, ever-evolving world of shady scientific publishing, we saw publication brokers offering journal editors kickbacks to push their papers into print, and here's plenty more about it in a new article here at Science....You too can be a co-author if you just pony up, and if you're an editor, well, you can earn extra cash by slotting these papers into the journal....It's to the point where every journal publisher and every editor will tell you, if they're being honest, that they have been and are continually being offered bribes. I would be very suspicious if someone tried to act shocked at the question, as if they'd never heard of such a thing. This is the state of scientific publishing in the 2020s, and we have to realize it."  -- Organic chemist Derek Lowe (link).  
• "Cosmologists often make assertions that have little scientific justification. Their language frequently reflects that of a belief system rather than that of a science, and the response of institutional cosmology to reputable scientists who have different interpretations of data or who advance alternative conjectures is too often reminiscent of a Church dealing with dissenters." John Hands MD, "Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution From the Origin of the Universe," page 156.
• "One cannot ignore the deep, unanswered question concerning the origin of the baryonic component because baryons and antibaryons should have annihilated almost completely, leaving only a negligible abundance today. Yet we observe a far greater concentration than the standard model of particle physics  and the first and second laws of thermodynamics should have permitted. So where did baryons come from?....The standard model currently has no explanation for why the Universe was initially in a very low entropy state (as required by the second law [of thermodynamics]), and for how the CMB acquired such high entropy so soon after the Big Bang.....One cannot avoid the conclusion that the standard model needs a complete overhaul in order to survive....The argument against standard cosmology in its present form continues to grow as several major inconsistencies and inexplicable features resist concerted attempts at resolution...At face value, the standard model of cosmology thus appears to be inconsistent with the first and second laws of thermodynamics, constituting yet another conflict with our fundamental physical theories....This collection of seemingly insurmountable inconsistencies and paradoxes ought to convince even its most diehard supporters that a major overhaul of the standard model is called for." Astronomer Fulvio Melia, "A Candid Assessment of Standard Cosmology," 2022.
• "The fact that most cosmologists do not pay them any attention and only dedicate their research time to the standard model is to a great extent due to a sociological phenomenon (the 'snowball effect' or 'groupthink'). We might well wonder whether cosmology, our knowledge of the Universe as a whole, is a science like other fields of physics or a predominant ideology." --Martın Lopez-Corredoira, "Non-standard Models and the Sociology of Cosmology."
• "Contemporary foundational theoretical physics is largely broken. It offers nothing in which experimentalists can invest any real confidence. Theorists have instead retreated into their own fantasy, increasingly unconcerned with the business of developing theories that connect meaningfully with empirical reality.  About forty years ago particle theorists embarked on a promising journey in search of a fundamental description of matter based on the notion of ‘strings’. Lacking any kind of guidance from empirical facts, forty years later string theory and the M-theory conjecture are hopelessly mired in metaphysics, a direct consequence of over-interpreting a mathematics that looks increasingly likely to have nothing whatsoever to do with physical reality. The theory has given us supersymmetric particles that can’t been found. It has given us hidden dimensions that may be compactified at least 10 [to the 500th power] different ways to yield a universe a bit like our own. And at least for some theoretical physicists who I believe really should know better, it has given us a multiverse – a landscape (or swampland?) of possibilities from which we self-select our universe by virtue of our existence...I’m pretty sure there was a time in which this kind of metaphysical nonsense would have been rejected out-of-hand, with theorists acknowledging the large neon sign flashing WRONG WAY....Alas, instead we get a strong sense of the extent to which foundational theoretical physics is broken."  Physicist Jim Baggott, in the paper "The sounds of science—a symphony for many instruments and voices: part II."
• "It is now evident that genes play only a minor role in evolution....We now know that the gene-centered Modern Synthesis was quite wrong (see especially Shapiro 2011, 2022; Noble 2012, 2013; Noble and Noble 2023; Corning 2018, 2020). Over the past few decades there has been a growing body of contradictory evidence." Scientist Peter A. Corning (link). 

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