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 a new 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."

At the same time we have got these groundless triumphal boasts about dark energy, our science news sites are reporting about a paper claiming to have produced a map of dark matter. The claim is groundless, and no dark matter was seen. All that was observed is gravitational lensing, the bending of light.    It's a case of scientists saying "we saw" dark matter, when they should be saying "we inferred" or "we guessed" dark matter. For more on the topic, read my recent post  "A Paraverse Interaction Map Might Be More Empirically Warranted Than a Dark Matter Map," which has some interesting links. 

The dark matter theorists are displaying willingness to imagine any dark matter shapes that they feel may help solve the explanatory shortfalls of dark matter. So we have the recent paper here, "The mass distribution in and around the Local Group," in which the theorists "succeed" by throwing away the "spherical halo of dark matter" idea, and by resorting to a speculation of a super-gigantic sheet of dark matter. Referring to the lambda [dark energy] cold dark matter theory using the term ΛCDM, they say, "The observations are reconcilable within ΛCDM, but only if mass is strongly concentrated in a plane out to 10 Mpc, with the surface density rising away from the Local Group and with deep voids above and below." So they're imagining a giant invisible sheet or plane of spooky dark matter, one many times bigger than any galaxy. There's no "successful predictions" going on here when you are willing to imagine invisible spooky matter shapes of any type or size to try to explain observations you cannot credibly explain. 

In a page entitled "The Pathologies of Cosmology," scientist M. J. Disney has stated the following:

"Cosmology must be the slowest moving branch of science. The number of practitioners per relevant observation is ridiculous. Consequently the same old things have to be said by the same old people (and by new ones) over and over and over again. For instance 'Cold Dark Matter' now sounds to me like a religious liturgy which its adherents chant like a mantra in the mindless hope that it will spring into existence. Much of cosmology is unhealthily self-referencing and it seems to an outsider like myself that cosmological fashions and reputations are made more by acclamation than by genuine scientific debate."

6 Things That May Make You Say "It's Just Another Glory Hound Professor"

 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. 

Postscript:  A recent scientific paper states this about the excess gamma rays coming from the galactic center: "An equally compelling explanation of the excess gamma-ray flux refers to a population of old millisecond pulsars that also accounts for the observed boxy morphology." That's an explanation different from a dark matter explanation. 

Science journalist Will Dunham of Reuters bungled when we wrote the recent untrue headline "Huge rotating structure of galaxies and dark matter is detected." No one actually detected any dark matter, but merely visible matter and energy. And the paper being discussed never claimed to have detected dark matter, and does not mention dark matter in its abstract. People should not be claiming some important thing was detected when it was not detected.  

An article published after this post is entitled "Did we just see dark matter? Scientists express skepticism." We read this:

"We spoke to Case Western Reserve University astrophysicist Stacy McGaugh, an expert in galaxy dynamics and dark matter, who noted that we’ve been here before.

That is, the Fermi data used in the study has already been extensively studied, and a similar excess of gamma rays was identified as early as 2009. Over the past 16 years, numerous studies have failed to find strong evidence that this signal connects to dark matter. As McGaugh succinctly put it: 'It turned out to be wrong then, [and] I expect it is wrong now.' "

Referring to another scientist commenting on Totani's paper, we read this: "And for McGaugh, the methodology in this case doesn’t stand up to scrutiny."

When Frustrated Scientists Make the Most Grandiose Boasts

 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. 

Below is a post from one of the main sites of such a MOND theory, the site www.darkmattercrisis.wordpress.com:

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:

Dark Matter Guys Avoid Plain English When Announcing Their Latest Failures

Behold the great spectacle of scientists who waste gigantic sums of money constructing  very fancy devices that find utterly nothing. Two of the worst examples are the observation failures of the dark matter cosmologists and the cosmic inflation cosmologists (believers in the unprovable idea that the universe underwent a momentary burst of exponential expansion during a fraction of its first second). Their efforts are schematically depicted in the visual below:

The cosmic inflation cosmologists have been using fancy equipment to try to find something called primordial b-modes. They have found no such thing. The dark matter cosmologists are trying to find the first proof that dark matter exists. They have found no such thing. 

But you might not realize that from reading the latest press account of the failure of those searching for dark matter. We do not get an honest headline saying something like this:

"The Latest Result of the Dark Matter Search: Still Nothing Found"

Instead we get this headline used by the press release announcing the failure to observe any dark matter:

"The LZ experiment's first science run sets new constraints on dark matter interactions"

Such is the rule for scientists running grand projects that find nothing. They seem to never candidly confess that they found nothing, and act like the guy imagined below:

A search on the Cornell Physics paper pre-print server for titles containing the phrase "new constraints" gives 442 results, indicating that physicists are very massively using the term "new constraints" to describe their failures to observe something. A search for the phrase "finds nothing" on the same server gives zero matches, even though a large fraction of the papers returned by the first query should have used the phrase "finds nothing" rather then "new constraints." A search for the phrase "found nothing" on the same server returns only three papers.

When I search using Google Scholar for the latest results of the fruitless search for the primordial b-modes sought by the cosmic inflation theorists, I don't get any candid "nothing found" paper titles. Instead at the top of my results are two papers talking about finding nothing, but using the word "constraint":

Diving into the press release announcing the failed LZ experiment, we get almost no mention of the "nothing found" result. We get euphemistic text like this:

"The LUX ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter experiment is a large research effort involving over 200 scientists and engineers at 40 institutions worldwide...The LZ Collaboration recently released the results of the first experimental run of the LZ dark matter experiment. These results, published in Physical Review Letters, set new constraints on the interactions between dark matter and other particles, which could inform future searches for weakly-interacting dark matter candidates."

In the midst of all of the long jargon-heavy gobbledygook and euphemisms, there is a confession that only extremely careful readers will be able to notice. Below I underline and boldface that confession:

" 'Though our first search resulted in no dark matter signals, it has constrained properties of dark matter, which in turn allows for dark matter theories to be refined,'  said Williams. 'Many of the signals we searched for in this work had not been searched for before.' "

No trace of any plain speaking can be found in the abstract or title of the scientific paper announcing these results. We hear no mention of the observational failure that occurred, at least no mention using any language that even 1% of the population could understand.  The closest the paper comes to confessing the total failure that occurred is when it says, "No significant evidence of an excess is found in either the isoscalar or isovector bases," a statement that virtually no one but a dark matter scientist will recognize as a statement of observation failure.

In the January press release Williams referred to the failure of "our first search." But an August article referred to gathering "280 days of data" using the same LZ detector.  That article's headline was "LZ Experiment Sets New Record in Search for Dark Matter," which sounds like some kind of success, even though it actually was a failure to observe any dark matter. The article never told us what this record  was. We merely had the claim that a "record-setting experiment" had occurred. 

Peering into the article, I get this quote: "The results analyze 280 days’ worth of data: a new set of 220 days (collected between March 2023 and April 2024) combined with 60 earlier days from LZ’s first run." Referring to the failure of "our first search," Williams has given us a quote with a "we've only just begun" sound to it, but the truth is that the LZ experiment has been running for 280 days without success. Each of those days can be considered a search. Instead of referring to the failure of "our first search," Williams should have referred to the failure of the first 280 searches. 

Recently there was published the paper "Search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run." I have never seen a paper that listed so many authors. Below is a screen shot of the first page, and there are three other author pages listing  as many authors as the first of these pages.

The paper has something like 1000 different listed authors. What is announced is an observational failure, and the Universe Today site summarizes the results with a headline of "LIGO Fails to Find Continuous Gravitational Waves From Pulsars." But why didn't the title of the paper tell you about the failure? Was it maybe that the 1000 different authors didn't want you to easily find out about their involvement in so massive an unsuccessful search?

You just have to shake your head here, and ask: does it really take that many people to find nothing?

Another boondoggle scientist project is what I call Dirty DUNE. It is the DUNE project, DUNE standing for Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Involving gigantic amounts of digging with a large chance of groundwater contamination, the project may well turn out to be an environmental nightmare, for reasons I describe in my post here. The project advocates have made unfounded and misleading attempts to try to insinuate that the project has some relevance to the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. Studying neutrinos will shed no light on that problem. 

In the latest attempt to gin up some rationale for this misguided and environmentally reckless project, some scientists have resorted to generating fake data and appealing to never-observed extra dimensions. We read this:

" 'We simulated several years of neutrino data from the DUNE experiment using computational models,'  Masud said. 'By analyzing both the low-energy and high-energy effects of large extra dimensions on neutrino oscillation probabilities, we statistically assessed DUNE's ability to constrain the potential size of these extra dimensions, assuming they exist in nature.' "

Get the idea? They didn't use real data gathered by the DUNE experiment, but instead used fake data that was merely "simulated." It was kind of like some football coach that justifies his expensive million-dollar player salaries by using a computer program that generates fake football statistics for the years 2026 and 2027.  And how about that appeal to "these extra dimensions, assuming they exist in nature"?  That part is like having your fake football statistics for future years include lots of touchdowns scored by the cheerleaders, and lots of 100-yard field goals kicked by the referees.  

I discussed how the physicists and cosmologists use language the average person won't understand when they write up papers describing their observation failures. But at least they write up some kind of paper. It's different when neuroscientists find nothing after long eager searching. Neuroscientists have been using more and more powerful microscopes, examining endless samples of brain tissue, looking for any trace of human learned knowledge stored in brain tissue. They have found nothing of the sort. They found not a single word stored in brain tissue, and not even a single letter of the alphabet.  They found not a single image of something someone saw in the past, and not even a single pixel of such an image. They found not a single remembered sentence, and not a single syllable of such a sentence.

Do our neuroscientists write up papers describing such failures, so relevant to the topic of whether brains store memories? No, neuroscientists just avoid doing that, and hope very much you won't ever notice the observation failure. If memories were actually stored in human brains, they would have been discovered by microscopic examination around the year 1960, shortly after the genetic code was discovered. For a full post about this topic, read my January 16th post at https://headtruth.blogspot.com/ .

Floundering Physicists and Getting-Nowhere Cosmologists Plead "Jump on Our Bandwagon!"

A while back we had an interview with physicist Leonard Susskind, appearing in the CERN Courier, a publication of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a large international group in charge of some of the world's biggest particle accelerators. Susskind spouted the same old multiverse baloney he's been pushing for decades. Susskind calls his version of the multiverse "the landscape," a term he introduced in a book with a title that made it very clear his multiverse was all about trying to escape evidence the universe was well-designed.  Susskind makes this groundless claim: "I would say the best explanation for the patterns we see in cosmology and particle physics is a very diverse landscape of possibilities and an extremely large universe – a multiverse." His "multiverse" is actually a groundless speculation about some near-infinity of different universes, each with different physics. 

Among many other cases of cosmic fine-tuning, physicists had discovered what looked like very precise fine-tuning regarding the Higgs Boson or Higgs mass, which I discuss in my post here. Physicists tried to evade this fine-tuning with a wildly speculative theory called supersymmetry, which was the "foundation of sand" for an even more wildly speculative family of theories called string theory. All of the predictions of supersymmetry failed, and the particles it predicted were never found. To try to sweep under the rug this failure, the string theorist Susskind gives us this bit of hair-splitting:

" I call that string theory with a capital 'S', and I can tell you with 100% confidence that we don’t live in that world. And then there’s string theory with a small 's' – you might call it string-inspired theory....The string landscape is one such guess. It’s not based on absolutely precise capital-S string theory, but on some conjectures about what this expanded small-s string theory might be."

You get the idea? Susskind was trying to preserve his string theory landscape multiverse fantasy by telling us that it is only string theory with a capital "S" that has been ruled out, not string theory with a small "s." This hair-splitting is like when a wife finds her husband naked in bed with his naked mistress, and the husband says, "Don't worry, darling: this merely shows that I have been unfaithful with a small 'u,' not unfaithful with a capital 'U.' " 

In a more recent interview, Susskind resorts to the dubious business of consensus-claiming, a form of bandwagon-boasting.  Nowadays, the term "consensus" is being used massively by scientists and science journalists, often in a very misleading way. 

The first thing that should be discussed is: what is meant by the term "consensus"? To get a proper sense of the denotation and connotation of that word, we should look at how "consensus" is defined by various dictionaries. Below is how "consensus" is defined by various dictionaries and authorities:

• A Google search for "consensus definition" gives "a general agreement" as the first result.
• The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us two definitions of "consensus" that disagree with each other. The first definition is "general agreement; unanimity." The second definition is "the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned." The first definition specifies 100%, and the second definition merely means 51% or more. 
• Dictionary.com also gives us two defintions of "consensus" that disagree with each other. The first is "majority of opinion." The second is "general agreement or concord; harmony." The second definition implies near-unanimity; the first does not. 
• The Collins dictionary defines "consensus" as "general agreement among a group of people."
• The Britannica dictionary defines "consensus" as "a general agreement about something : an idea or opinion that is shared by all the people in a group."
• Vocabulary.com defines "consensus" as "agreement in the judgment or opinion reached by a group as a whole," and at the very beginning of the page with this definition, we are told that  "when there's a consensus, everyone agrees on something."
• The Cambridge Dictionary defines "consensus" in two ways: (1) "a generally accepted opinion among a group of people"; (2) "agreement among a group of people."
• The Macmillan dictionary defines "consensus" as "agreement among all the people involved."

From the definitions above, you can make the following conclusions:

(1) "Consensus" is a word that is often defined as if it meant a unanimous opinion on some topic, but also often defined as if it meant a mere majority opinion on some topic.

(2) Because it is often defined as if it meant a unanimous opinion on some topic, "consensus" is undeniably a word with at least a strong connotation of meaning a unanimous opinion on some topic, with everyone agreeing about it.  The connotation of a word is the kind of impression or feeling that the word creates, regardless of how the word is literally defined. 

Because it is defined in ways that conflict with each other, "consensus" is a slippery and ambiguous word to be using. You might call it a very treacherous term, a term very prone to mislead or confuse. Since it has two very different definitions, using the word "consensus" is as potentially misleading as using the word "gay" soon after people first started to use that term to mean "homosexual," at a time when it was hard to tell whether "gay" meant "homosexual" or simply "merry."  

One of many deceptive speech habits occurring in science literature is that misleading claims are being made of a "scientific consensus" about opinions which do not at all involve any unanimity of opinion among scientists. Because of how often "consensus" is defined to mean "unanimity of opinion," such claims are designed to create an impression that scientists agree about something. But typically there is no evidence that anything close to 100% of scientists agree on such an opinion, and in very many cases there is not even good evidence that a strong majority of scientists believe in the opinion. 

Because of the almost total non-existence of secret ballot polls of scientists, there are almost no claims about scientist opinions that are well supported by evidence. We know that certain opinions are what we may call reputed majority opinions of certain types of scientists. For example, it is repeatedly alleged that most cosmologists believe in dark matter and that most biologists believe in the doctrine of common descent, that all species are descended from a common ancestor. But what percentage of cosmologists believe in dark matter, and what percent of biologists believe in the doctrine of common descent? 

You cannot tell such a thing by asking for a show of hands at a meeting of cosmologists or a show of hands at a meeting of biologists. When there is a reputed majority of opinion about something in some scientific field, a scientist in that field may think that he will get in trouble by publicly stating an opinion contrary to the majority in his field.  So such a scientist may fail to honestly state his opinion whenever he can be publicly identified as someone holding a contrarian opinion. 

You can try to figure out what scientists think about a hypothesis by going through their public statements, but that would be a not-very-reliable approach.  Publicly scientists will often make statements that do not show a definite belief about something.  For example, having read innumerable scientific papers on memory, I know that an extremely common type of statement in such papers is for a neuroscientist to say something like this: "It is commonly maintained that memories are stored in synapses." But what does that tell us about what the author of the paper believes? You cannot tell. 

The only way to get a reliable measure of the opinion of a scientist is to do a secret ballot poll, one that includes a variety of belief options including "I don't know" or "I'm not sure." However, such polls are virtually never done. When opinion polls of scientists are done, they typically fail to be secret ballots, and also fail to offer a full spectrum of answers including options such as  "I don't know" or "I'm not sure."  

In his recent interview  fantasy-physics salesman Leonard Susskind gives us this little bit of "go with the herd" talk using the word "consensus":

" Think about the consensus of the largest fraction of physicists working on these things, and you’ll probably be right. The overall consensus of the field tends to be right. Peculiar individuals, no matter how famous they are, no matter how brilliant they are, if they’re off that consensus, and they’ve been off that consensus for a long time, they’re probably wrong. That doesn’t mean for sure that they’re wrong. Don’t look for the weirdos. Look for what the consensus of the majority of well-respected, highly accomplished physicists believe. And you’ll probably be right. "

This is bad advice, because in the fifty years there have been claims of a physicist or cosmologist c0nsensus on ideas that have failed very badly. Specifically:

• Physicists got all excited about a wildly speculative theory called supersymmetry, which has failed all observational tests.
• Not waiting for supersymmetry to be confirmed, physicists built upon it an even more speculative mountain of speculations called string theory, which has never been supported by any evidence. 
• Physicists kept telling us most of the universe's mass energy is dark energy, but no one has ever directly observed dark energy, and no has ever been able to connect it to the Standard Model of physics. 
• Physicists kept telling most of the universe's matter is dark matter, but no one has ever directly observed dark matter, and no has ever been able to connect it to the Standard Model of physics. 
• Physicists and cosmologists got super-excited about something called primordial cosmic inflation theory,  a theory that has not been confirmed by any evidence. 

So Susskind is way wrong in trying to suggest that it is a sound principle that you should follow what is claimed as a  consensus or majority opinion of theoretical physicists.  He fails to have any sociological insight about how often stupid herd effects and baseless bandwagons arise in the little belief communities that are the small tribes of theoretical physicists and cosmologists. 

What often goes on in the world of science is that misleading claims are made about a consensus when there is no actual agreement among some group of experts.  We saw a recent example in an article by cosmologist Ethan Siegel, who has spent decades being a tireless pitchman for the empirically groundless theory of primordial cosmic inflation, invented to try and explain away very precise fine-tuning in the earliest part of the Big Bang. Siegel claimed that "almost everyone" believed in such a theory.  95% of scientists have no opinion on such a theory. And even among the tiny little tribe called cosmologists, it is not true that almost all of them believe in such a theory. 

To prove that, you have to do the very hard work of looking for an opinion poll of cosmologists. Scientists are extremely bad about running polls about their own opinions, and it is all but impossible to find a poll of cosmologists. But I found such a poll at the end of a 2016 paper, the one here. 

In Question 11 of the poll, on page 77, cosmologists were asked to complete a sentence beginning with "Our understanding of inflation  will..."  The results were these:

• Only 44% predicted success for the main effort of cosmologists to get evidence for the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, predicting that there would be  "primordial B-mode detection" occurring.
• 7%  predicted that inflation would be "ruled out."
• 5% predicted there would be a detection of "non-zero spatial curvature," something that would rule out the theory of primordial cosmic inflation. 

Clearly at this time there was no unanimity-type consensus in favor of the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, with a significant fraction of cosmologists rejecting it.  In the eight years since the poll, there have been big expensive projects trying to get "primordial B-mode detection," but all have failed. If the poll were to be taken today, it would probably show an even larger fraction of cosmologists rejecting the theory of primordial cosmic inflation.  

Moreover, the poll discussed above was not a secret ballot poll. The poll makes no claim to have followed a secret ballot  methodology. Whenever scientists are given an opportunity to confess to some belief regarded as heresy, you will always get a much higher rate of people confessing to such a heresy if you do a secret ballot poll. 

So Siegel's claim that "almost everyone" supports the theory of primordial cosmic inflation was false.  The same writer sometimes claims that almost all cosmologists believe in dark matter. But on page 78 of the 2016 paper, 10% of the polled cosmologists predicted that the theory of dark matter would be "overturned."  And in Question 14 of the poll (page 77),  18% of cosmologists predicted that the future would show that dark matter "is modified gravity," a statement equivalent to the belief that dark matter does not really exist.  And since this 2016 paper, all searches for dark matter have failed. If you were to do a secret ballot poll of cosmologists today, you may easily find 25% or more rejecting the doctrine of dark matter. 

Most claims by scientists about a consensus in some scientist group should be rejected unless they are supported by a well-designed secret ballot poll or are claims about some topic utterly uncontroversial.   Since scientists are almost never polled about whether they believe in controversial scientific theories (in well-designed secret ballot polls), almost all claims made about the popularity of such theories are unreliable. 

The very idea of using an alleged popularity of some theory as an argument for the theory is a misguided idea. Theories should be defended by facts and arguments, not dubious claims about their popularity. There are all kinds of sociological and economic and psychological and "gone viral"  reasons why some theory may become popular in some group of scientists, despite a lack of a sound rationale for the theory.  In the case of Susskind's multiverse,  it is pretty clear what was  the main reason why he conceived the idea. It was mostly analgesic, a very clumsy attempt at irritation relief. 

The idea of a multiverse does absolutely nothing to diminish the evidence value of cosmic fine-tuning, for the elementary reason that you do not increase the chance of success of any one trial by increasing the number of random trials.  The odds of you throwing a deck of cards into the air and getting a triangular house of cards out of the thrown deck is basically zero. You do not increase by even .000000000001 percent the chance of you ever getting that result by imagining an infinity of card deck throwers.  Ditto for universes. Imagining some infinity of them does nothing to increase the chance of getting a habitable universe on any one try. 

For a discussion of the reasons why imagining a multiverse does nothing to explain cosmic fine-tuning in our universe, see my posts here and here. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin confessed the willingness of materialists to believe in absurd explanations, a willingness stemming from their zeal to exclude purposeful divine agency. He stated this:

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

The quote above by Lewontin is found on page 27 of the paper "Balloons on a String: A Critique of Multiverse Cosmology" by Bruce L. Gordon, an excellent expose of multiverse nonsense, which can be read here. On page 28 he states this:

"So with all due respect to Leonard Susskind and his coterie of devout string landscape naturalists, there is no landscape of mathematical possibilities that gives rise to a megaverse of actualities and provides a mindless solution to the problem of cosmological fine-tuning, for even an infinite arena of mathematical possibilities lacks the power to generate one solitary universe. The mindless multiverse 'solution' to the problem of fine-tuning is, quite literally, a metaphysical non-starter."

That would actually be a futile maneuver

Postscript: A recent news article states this:

"The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming the popular hypothesis that invisible dark matter helped the earliest stars and galaxies clump together. Instead, the oldest galaxies are large and bright, in agreement with an alternate theory of gravity, according to new research from Case Western Reserve University published November 12 in The Astrophysical Journal."