If you are a science professor these days, you may want above all fame and attention. Fame and attention (whether deserved or not) leads to more paper citations, and professors are judged largely on how many citations their papers have got. Fame and attention can also lead to a professor to get the yearned-for Book Deal, leading to higher income for a professor. It's also true that a professor with weak but attention-attracting claims can start producing Youtube.com videos which can make lots of money because of the ads that appear in them.
When we go to some Science News page, we may see some grand announcement that we should not take very seriously. Often it is just a glory-hounding professor seeking fame and attention by making some grand boast of doing something that he probably did not do.
There are six things that can be signs of a glory hound professor seeking fame and attention.
Sign #1: Some Grand Claim Is Made of Doing Something Many Scientists Have Been Unsuccessfully Trying to Do for Decades
When a scientist claims to have done something that scientists have been trying to do for decades, without any success, we should take such a claim with a grain of salt. We can reasonably ask: why would such a scientist have been successful at such a task, when so many have tried and failed?
So, for example, we read in the news recently the headline below:
"Scientists have searched for dark matter for decades. One thinks he may have caught a glimpse."
In this case the claim involves dark matter. Very large teams of scientists have been involved in very large and very expensive projects trying to find dark matter, projects that were unsuccessful. So we may reasonably be suspicious that some single individual succeeded when such large teams failed.
Sign #2: The Paper Making the Grand Boast Has a Single Author
It is not at all true that most groundless boasts made by scientific papers or their press releases involve papers written by single authors. Often groundless boasts made by scientific papers or their press releases involve papers written by teams of authors. But when you see some "grand new boast" scientific paper written by a single author, you can be more suspicious that it's mainly a case of a glory-hounding professor seeking fame and citations. When you have ten authors of a paper you can say, "Well, at least ten people believed this story." But when an author has a single paper you may wonder: is this claim so far-fetched that only one guy believed it?
We seem to see this Sign #2 in the matter just discussed. The dark matter story is based on a paper entitled "20 GeV halo-like excess of the Galactic diffuse emission and implications for dark matter annihilation," and it has a single author: Tomonori Totani.
Sign #3: Someone Does Not Claim to Have Seen Something, But Merely Claims to Have "Seen" Something
Sometimes when people put things in quotation marks, it can be a giveaway that something dubious is going on. So, for example, imagine if someone sends you an email saying, "I have a 'car' that I would like to sell you." That's kind of a clue that something fishy is going on. Or suppose someone text messages you, saying, "After you do that work in my yard, I will 'pay' you for your labor." That's kind of a clue that you may be treated unfairly.
In a LiveScience.com article we get a quote from Totani, who says this: "If this is correct, to the extent of my knowledge, it would mark the first time humanity has 'seen' dark matter." Get the picture? He's not claiming to have seen dark matter; he's claiming to have "seen" dark matter.
There is no actual observation of dark matter going on. All that's going on is that someone is analyzing gamma ray readings, and speculating that they come from dark matter. Gamma rays are not any type of matter, but the most high-intensity type of energy.
Sign #4:It's Just Someone Re-Analyzing an Old Signal or Old Data, Maybe Not Even in a New Way
After you read the year 2021 article here, you may chuckle at Totani's year 2025 claim to have made an exciting new breakthrough. The year 2021 story is entitled "Dark matter 'annihilation' may be causing the Milky Way's center to glow." The year 2021 article discusses the same thing that is the basis of Totani's boast in 2025: a puzzling observation of gamma rays from the center of the galaxy. The anomaly is called the galactic center excess, and Totani is not the first one to suggest it may be caused by dark matter.
In fact, a year 2020 paper by Simona Murgia was entitled "The Fermi–LAT Galactic Center Excess: Evidence of Annihilating Dark Matter?" And that paper is cited by Totani's paper. So why is Totani insinuating that he is the first one to "see" dark matter, when he seems to be merely making a speculation very similar to what another scientist made five years earlier?
Sign #5: Someone Claims To Have Seen Something Believed to Be Invisible
We have been told very many times that dark matter is invisible. So when we read the claim quoted above that someone may have "caught a glimpse" of it, that sure sounds fishy.
Sign #6: There's Some Dubious Claim of Merely "Matching the Predicted Shape"
You often read claims that some thing was demonstrated because a prediction of a theory was matched. Such claims generally are not convincing evidence unless there are many cases of an exact numerical match. The reason why we have faith in a theory such as the theory of gravitation is that it makes very exact numerical predictions that are over and over again very exactly matched by observations. For example, using the theory of gravitation, you may get the prediction that an asteroid will smash into Jupiter at 9:30 PM EST on November 11, 2031; and it may then be observed that was the very exact time and date that the event occurred. It would be very unlikely that the event would occur on that exact time and day unless the theory was true. Such very exact numerical matches to the predicted number occur again and again and again with successful theories such as the theory of gravitation and the the theory of electromagnetism.
However, it is much less convincing if one merely has a single claimed case of matching a prediction. And if the case is not a case of exactly matching an exact number, but a mere claimed case of "matching a shape," then the evidence is typically weak.
In the boastful press release we hear Totani saying, "The gamma-ray emission component closely matches the shape expected from the dark matter halo.” That does not sound like impressive evidence. It is not very unlikely that you might have a coincidental match between two shapes, particularly when the shapes are not-very-uncommon shapes such as halo shapes or spherical shapes or hill-shapes. Also, we must factor in all of the parameter fiddling that is going on in a paper such as Totani's. In a paper such as this, there are innumerable ways a scientist can fiddle with the data to change the output that appears on some "observed result" line graph. And there are also innumerable ways a scientist can fiddle with the inputs to some theoretical model, to help get a more impressive-looking match between a "predicted result" line and an "observed result" line.
So we should yawn a big yawn when we come to the Figure 16 of Totani's paper, and see the results shown below, showing a rough fit of some observed results and predicted results:
There are several reasons why the results are not very impressive, including these:
(1) There are many different versions of dark matter theory, which make differing predictions. So it is not very surprising that one of them might give a "predicted result" line like the observation result line.
(2) Every version of dark matter theory can actually make predictions of great variety and diversity, because by varying input parameters to such models, you can get a great variety of prediction results as outputs.
(3) The positions of the displayed observation points can be modified, based on arbitrary analysis choices made by a scientist hoping to get a match between an observation line and a prediction line.
(4) It is therefore not very improbable that a scientist could get a degree of line matching about as good as you see in the Figure 16 of the paper, even if dark matter does not even exist.
None of this fiddling around trying to get matching curves amounts to an observation of dark matter, which is why Totani referred in the press release to "seeing" dark matter, using quotation marks. But the University of Tokyo has given us a press release with an unfounded headline of "After nearly 100 years, scientists may have detected dark matter."
The "Spurious Correlations" website here shows how easily two unrelated graph lines can match. It gives more than 2000 examples of line graphs plotting two causally unrelated things, with the general shape of the line coincidentally matching in each case. Here is an example from the site, showing that in a particular series of years the per capita consumption of margarine correlated with the divorce rate in Maine.
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