Oops: Six-Year Project Flops, But Scientist Calls It "Transformative"

 So-called "science news" sites these days are undergoing a slow, sickening degeneration, with their quality being deteriorated by profiteers. The headlines are dominated by the most shameless clickbait trying to get you to click on enticing headlines that take you to pages filled with ads that make money for the science news profiteers. Some examples of the deterioration include these:

• When you click on a headline at the RealClearScience site, you will typically not go directly to an article page, but to some annoying popup ad that you will have to dismiss before going to the article page. 
• Clicking on the Phys.org science news site now will often be a futile click, as you will often be informed that you have hit some five-article limit. 
• Clicking on articles at the NewScientist site will typically be futile, unless you have subscribed. 
• When I clicked on a science news story at Vox.com, I got some "you can't read because you're not a subscriber" notification. 

You might call this the crapification of science news. Wading through such annoyances, including a popup annoyance trying to read an article at Space.com, I found news about the release of results from a six-year Dark Energy Survey. It's an article at Space.com with this headline:

Scientists just got the clearest picture of the dark universe yet: 'Now the dream has come true'

Wow, sounds like dark energy or dark matter has finally been observed, right? Wrong. All that happened is that the results of a six-year Dark Energy Survey have been released, and no dark energy was ever observed. 

We have the "sheds new light" rhetorical trick so commonly used by scientists when their research has failed to discover anything or failed to discover anything important. The trick works like this: no matter how insignificant your results are, you simply claim that your research "sheds new light" on some longstanding problem. The "shed new light" quote is the one below:

"These results from DES shine new light on our understanding of the universe and its expansion," Regina Rameika, Associate Director for the Office of High Energy Physics in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, said in a statement. "They demonstrate how long-term investment in research and combining multiple types of analysis can provide insight into some of the universe’s biggest mysteries."

But reading further in the article, we fail to learn of any new light that was shed. We fail to read of any actual detection of dark energy. We read that the observations are compatible with the main theory of dark energy and dark matter (called LCDM), but also compatible with a different theory ( wCDM)  in which dark energy is described as evolving over time. We read, "The DES results conformed well to the LCDM, but also fit nicely with the wCDM."

Then we read what sounds like a confession that both of these theories are failing observation tests:

"But there is one parameter that these new results found to be off in comparison to both of these cosmic models: how matter in the modern universe is predicted to cluster based upon measurements of the early universe. These findings not only confirmed that modern galaxies don't cluster as either the LCDM or the wCDM predicts, but the difference between observations and theory became even more pronounced."

But such a confession sounds too troubling to be the article's ending. That confession has a "cosmologists don't understand what's going on, and are fumbling around and failing" ring to it. So the article ends on a happy note, with some scientist saying that this basically-found-nothing six-year Dark Energy Survey was "transformative." It's a claim as bogus as the "now the dream has come true" quote in the article's headline. The Dark Energy Survey would have been a "dream come true" if the scientists had actually observed some dark energy. 

The clustering explanation problem mentioned above involves the hierarchical organization of cosmic structure. Stars are organized into galaxies, which are organized into galaxy clusters, which are organized into gigantic clusters of galaxy clusters called superclusters. So many levels of organization are pretty much impossible to explain under current theories depicting only blind, purposeless things like dark matter and dark energy. And the dark energy used (unsuccessfully) to try to explain such organization is not even the dark energy predicted by quantum field theory, which predicts dark energy a gazillion or googol times stronger (as I discuss here). 

Postscript: Just after correcting a typo in this post, I read an article at Quanta Magazine making this confession:

"The Standard Model doesn’t include particles that could comprise dark matter, for instance. It doesn’t explain why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe, or why the Big Bang happened in the first place. Then there’s the inexplicably enormous disparity between the Higgs boson’s mass (which sets the physical scale of atoms) and the far higher mass-energy scale associated with quantum gravity, known as the Planck scale. The chasm between physical scales — atoms are vastly larger than the Planck scale — seems unstable and unnatural."