Astronomers May Sometimes Fail to Speak With Accuracy and Candor

We tend to think of astronomers as people who speak and write very accurately, maybe because astronomy is a business requiring great precision. But it seems that astronomers sometimes fail to speak with accuracy and candor. 

A recent CBS News story has the incorrect title "Mysterious dark matter seen in new high-resolution map of distant galaxies." No actual dark matter was seen. All that was observed was gravitational lensing, a "bend light" phenomenon that can be produced by any type of matter, either regular matter or so-called dark matter. The scientific paper makes clear that the boasts are all based on observations of "weak gravitational lensing," which involves seeing a bending of light, not seeing dark matter. 

In the article  we read this:

"Wherever we see a big cluster of thousands of galaxies, we also see an equally massive amount of dark matter in the same place. And when we see a thin string of regular matter connecting two of those clusters, we see a string of dark matter as well," said astrophysicist Richard Massey, a coauthor of the study."  

No actual dark matter was observed. Massey is simply inferring dark matter based on some theory of dark matter, and observations that failed to show any dark matter, which (according to scientists such as Massey) is invisible. Using the term "we see" in the statement above rather than "we infer," Massey has failed to speak with accuracy and candor. The same misstatement is made by  Diana Scognamiglio on a NASA page. Scognamiglio boasts about "seeing the invisible scaffolding of the universe in stunning detail," a statement that is obviously untrue, because you cannot see things that are invisible.  What Scognamiglio should have said is that she inferred something that she failed to see. 

The scientific paper of these claimants is entitled "An ultra-high-resolution map of  (dark) matter."  The title is inaccurate. The paper has figures, and none of them is labeled as a map of dark matter. The term "dark matter" is not even used in any of the captions of the paper's figures. We have here another case of what is so common these days in science literature: citation-hungry scientists giving their papers titles that do not match what is in the paper. 

During much of my life the most well-known US astronomer was Carl Sagan, a man who was guilty of many very misleading statements about very important topics, as I document in my post here. Here is a quote from that post:

"Sagan frequently spoke and wrote on the topic of the origin of life, but seemed to never deal with it candidly or honestly by discussing the fantastically intricate fine-tuned arrangements of matter needed to get life started.  His 'just add energy' idea that so gigantically improbable an arrangement of matter was 'spurred by ultraviolet light from the sun and lightning' was goofy talk, like saying that a lightning storm or wind storm could cause the scattered pebbles on a beach to assemble into a long meaningful message....On page 253 of his book Billions and Billions, Sagan told us this gigantically grotesque lying boast about DNA:  'The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in terms of physics and chemistry.' To the contrary, scientists lack any credible explanation of so simple a thing as how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human or any organ, cell or organelle, scientists lack any credible explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human."

Astronomer Adam Frank seems to be a more careful speaker than Sagan was, although at times his posts seem to display shortfalls of candor and accuracy. An example is a post Frank wrote in November, 2024 discussing some US Congress hearing on strange unidentified things in the sky (UFOs and UAP).  Frank describes science as "organized skepticism." That is not a candid and accurate description of today's science academia. An accurate description would be to say that nowadays science academia consists of organized skepticism about anything that scientists do not want to believe in, combined with organized credulity about anything that scientists wish to believe in. So whenever they are dealing with their cherished beliefs such as the belief that life and humans arose accidentally and their belief that minds are made by brains, scientists leave their skepticism at the door, and display the most childlike trusting credulity. 

Another misstatement in Frank's post comes at the end. Inaccurately insinuating that the investigation of UFOs and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) is not "real action," Frank states this: "Meanwhile, the public will miss the real action — the action starting right now as astronomers begin searching distant alien worlds for hard evidence, evidence that all can see, of distant alien life."  Frank makes the untrue claim that the search for distant alien life is "starting right now." To the contrary, it has been going for on more than 60 years, without any success. 

I could see how Frank would want to make this huge misstatement. It is very embarrassing for astronomers such as him that the 60-year search by astronomers for extraterrestrial life has produced no successes. So it is very convenient for an astronomer to tell the whopper that such a search is just beginning.  Similarly, if you are a husband who has spent 40 years of married life in a fruitless attempt to create a perpetual motion machine, then if your wife complains about the waste of time and money, it would be convenient to tell the lie that you are "just beginning" your efforts. 

Somehow Adam Frank won a $25,000 prize for his essay "The Second Copernican Revolution," an essay which features lots of crowing Sagan-speak, along with lots of mentions of a not very well-established Gaia theory. The essay makes numerous appeals to an inaccurate concept of "planetary intelligence." Planet Earth is not intelligent, and the billions of intelligent people on this planet do not make up any such thing as a "planetary intelligence." The essay makes inaccurate claims such as this: "Thus, a mature technosphere would be autopoietic. In becoming so, it must manifest what the supporting biosphere established billions of years earlier: planetary intelligence." There is no "planetary intelligence" today, and it is even more obvious there was not "planetary intelligence" billions of years ago.

Talking about biology, the essay has frequent appeals to "self-organization."  When scientists have no decent explanation for how wonders of biological organization arose, their last resort is to make conceptually empty appeals to "self-organization."  Theorists have been speculating about  theories of self-organization for quite a while, but no one has come up with any substantial theory of self-organization explaining impressive degrees of functional order (although the term "self-organization" is sometimes applied to minor things we already knew about such as crystallization). 

Frank gives us this not-at-all candid statement:

"Complex adaptive systems are built from nested hierarchies of smaller subsystems. Think of an animal built from organs that are built of cells that are built from proteins and so on down to the 'fundamental' units of their atoms and constituents. Through these hierarchies of organization, complex systems manifest their most important feature: They self-organize. They create the processes and products necessary for their own ongoing existence."

Rather than making so vacuous an appeal to "self-organization," what Frank should have said is something like this: "Living organisms such as humans have the most enormous fine-tuned hierarchical organization featuring complex systems built of complex systems built of complex systems built of complex systems, with an abundance of interdependent components everywhere; and we don't understand how so many layers of interdependent organization arose." 

Frank fails to clarify things when he says this about the membranes of cells:

"But these processes and products are the very means by which they produce themselves. A concrete example is the cellular membrane. It is the membrane that allows the cell to endure. Needed chemicals are let in while harmful compounds are kept out. This is what allows the membrane itself to be assembled and maintained. Thus, it is the membrane that allows for the existence of a membrane." 

How vacuous and circular such an account is. It's as vacuous as trying to explain the manufacture of cars by saying, "Well, parts are let into the cars, and this is what allows the cars to be assembled." The membranes of human cells are enormously complex systems. According to this page of the Human Protein Atlas, there are more than 2000 different types of proteins used in the membranes of human cells. Each of these proteins is its own complex invention requiring hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts. Some of the complexity is shown in the diagram below, but the actual complexity is enormously greater than what we see in the diagram. 

Frank might instead have pointed us in the right direction here by saying something like "the vast complexity of cell membranes gives us an inkling of how vast is the organization of human cells."

Astronomer Carl Sagan made many misstatements suggesting structural components of life are common in outer space, something that is not at all true.  Sagan-style baloney and BS on this topic continues. Quanta Magazine had a story with the groundless headline "The Cosmos Teems With Complex Organic Molecules," with the false subtitle of "Wherever astronomers look, they see life’s raw materials."  

The article gives the asteroid Ryugu as an example of such claimed abundance. The truth is that amino acids (the smallest components of living things) have only been detected in space in the tiniest trace amounts.  The only biologically relevant amino acids reportedly found in Ryugu were three of the simplest amino acids (glycine, alanine and valine), which were reportedly found at a level of only about 1 part per billion; and whenever levels that small are reported, the reported detection is very questionable (partly because of the very high chance of earthly contamination of retrieved samples). Senselessly the Quanta article describes molecules containing only 20 atoms as "very complex." That isn't a complex molecule from the perspective of biology.  A typical protein molecule has about 8000 very well-arranged atoms in it.  No protein molecule has ever been found in space. 

Those wishing to push unbelievable ideas of accidental biological origins engage in different types of misspeaking.  Most commonly they engage in a kind of misspeaking in which great marvels of vast organization are described as if they are things not complex. So, for example,  they may falsely describe a human body (something with sky-high levels of organization) as a mere "bundle of atoms." But when it comes time to sell the groundless notion that life can accidentally originate, then their language is entirely different. Suddenly they are trying to persuade us that molecules of merely 20 atoms are "very complex."  

In the article we have a quote by an astronomer speaking in a misleading way. Referring to an interstellar cloud, Harvard astronomer Alice Booth says, "You can build complexity without much going on in just a cold, dark cloud."  But why not speak honestly and candidly? Why not tell people that the "complexity" you are talking about is something like an almost-never-arising molecule with only about 20 atoms, which is much less than a hundredth as complex as the complexity of the protein molecules needed for life?  And why not tell people the truth, that such protein molecules require such a special arrangement of amino acids that we would never expect to get even one functional protein molecule from all the random interactions of molecular clouds occurring throughout all of the universe's galaxies over the entire course of the universe's history? 

Perseus molecular cloud (credit: NASA/JPL)

Appendix: Below are some of the SETI searches that have occurred over the past 65 years (some of the observation time figures are taken from the source here):

• The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."

• The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.

• The SERENDIP II project from 1986 to 1988, involving some 17,000 hours of observations. 

• The All-Sky Search at Ohio State University from 1989 to 1996 (Childers, Dixon and Bolinger), involving 60,000 hours of observations, 

• The Astropulse and Fly's Eye SETI projects surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 

• The SETI@Home project, which according to the source here covered 20% of the full celestial sphere, and 67% of the sky area observable from the Arecibo observatory. 

• The Harvard BETA all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years (1995-1999), scanning the whole part of the sky observable from Massachusetts, USA, and doing 35,000 hours of observations. 

• Years of SETI searches using the Allen Telescope Array, involving 12 hours a day of SETI searches, 7 days a week, for years (such as 2007 to 2010), resulting in 95,000 hours of observations (discussed here). 

• An optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching 577 nearby stars that might have habitable planets, looking for laser signals.

• All of the optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence listed on the three pages you can view here, including three searches each involving more than 7000 hours of telescope time, and one search involving 200,000 objects and other searches involving thousands of stars. 

• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  

• The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials. 

• A META II SETI project between 1990 and 2010, involving 9000 hours of observations of the southern sky.

• All of the radio telescopes searches listed on the seven pages of search results you can review at the link here, including a Dixon, Ehman and Raub search from 1973 to 1986 involving 100,000 hours of telescope time, 

• A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.

• A SERENDIP III project from 1992 to 1997, involving 40,000 hours of observations, and surveying 30% of the sky. 

• Extensive SETI searches carried out by the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China. 

• The ASTROPULSE project discussed here, involving 21,000 hours of observations from 2006 to 2010. 

• The SETI-Italia project discussed here, involving 30,000 hours of observation from 2006 to 2010.

• The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding, involving thousands of hours each year of dedicated SETI searching, on two of the world's largest radio telescopes.

• A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the  Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).