Tag Archives: dark matter

The ACER, The ERDG And Gravity

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A mathematical similarity between gravity and electromagnetism has long been noted and commented upon. There are also qualitative analogies that are occasionally mentioned but beyond noting the fact that the gravitational effect around a a gravitating body falls off at the same 1/r2 rate as the density of the electromagnetic radiation being emitted by the body, little thought is given to this rather striking overall correlation. Coupled with the observation that light moving through a gravitational field behaves as if it were traversing a medium with a density gradient, there would seem to be at least a strong indication of a causal relation between gravitational effects and the electromagnetic field (EMF) especially since a gravitational field is only posited, not observed

It will argued here that all gravitational effects can be attributed to the interaction between matter and electromagnetic fields. First, two definitions:

  1. the ACER (Ambient Cosmic Electromagnetic Radiation} that pervades the Cosmos. This is the cosmological scale field that constitutes The Spectrum of the Universe as described in the document of the same name. This radiation does not have a density gradient but is approximately uniform in distribution around any free-standing body.
  2. the ERDG (Electromagnetic Radiation Density Gradient) which is the aggregate EMF of all the electromagnetic radiation being emitted omnidirectionally by a radiating body. The strength of that field falls off as 1/r² and therefore it has a density gradient

The Deflection of Light in a Gravitational Field

The EMRG comprises the medium through which the ACER (all external radiation)travels in the vicinity of a radiating/gravitating body. The ERDG is a transparent medium with a density gradient. Light passing through a “gravitational” field behaves as if it were passing through a medium with a density gradient. The ERDG fully accounts for the “gravitational” effect of the curvature of incident light — without invoking an otherwise invisible gravitational field. Essentially the ERDG constitutes a particular type of EMF that causes the effect traditionally attributed to an undetected gravitational field.

Gravitational Attraction

Initially let us consider the isolated case of one star, ignoring for the moment any nearby stellar neighbors. The star in this case has surrounding it both the omnidirectionally sourced ACER and its own locally self-produced ERDG. The ACER that falls on the star directly is absorbed and eventually reemitted as part of the ERDG. There is an additional inflow of radiation from the ACER that can be attributed to the ERDG curving the ACER passing closest to the star onto the surface.

All of this radiational inflow is omnidirectional onto the surface of the star. In a sense the inflow attributable to curvature can be thought of as a “pulling on the nearby ACER but as it is a “pulling” in all directions there is no net effect on the star’s motion through the ACER. The ACER is essentially an inertial medium. Since the ACER is being curved by the ERDG of the star it is reasonable to think of the ERDG as the gravitating medium of the star. The curvature of passing radiation in the vicinity of a gravitating medium is an observed fact predicted by General Relativity but it is also predicted and observed behavior for light passing through any transparent medium with a density gradient

Now we introduce a small, but not infinitesimal, nearby test particle, a planetary object the size of the Earth, with some velocity relative to the star that is not significant with respect to Relativity Theory. Let us also assume that the initial trajectory is toward but not directly at the star. This test body will interact with the ACER that surrounds it in exactly the same way that the star does, with the exception being that the planet is only passively reradiating the radiation from the star that falls upon it – it is a passive not active emitter of electromagnetic radiation. Consequently the radiation density at the planet’s surface will be <<< than the radiation density at the surface of the star and the “gravitational effect” of the planet on the star-planet system will be much weaker.

As the planet draws closer to the star two simultaneously acting effects are taking place. Along the line that joins their centers of mass over an area that is defined by the projection of the planet’s shadow, the star will be curving the nearby passing ACER but no direct inflow will be taking place in that shadow region only a “pulling in” of the passing ACER that lies between the two bodies. A similar but smaller inflow is taking place over the surface of the planet facing the star.

At the same time the planet is passing through the star’s ERDG, with the surface of the planet closest to the star experiencing a stronger “gravitational effect”. That effect is directly attributable to the ERDG – the radiation density from the star is higher on the closer side of the planet. The primary higher density effect is that physical processes slow down in the denser radiation.

The result of the higher density will be the same as it is in any medium with a density gradient – among other things it will slow the passage of the nearer surface through the ERDG medium producing a curvature of the planet’s path while also inducing a rotation. The curved path of the planet is analogous to the curved path of light being caused by a slowing of light in the denser portion closer to the surface of the star. This behavior is typical in mediums with a density gradient. Gravitational attraction then is entirely explicable as an interaction effect between matter and an EMF with a density gradient (ERDG).

Galaxy Clusters

Gravitational lensing around a galaxy cluster requires considerable amounts of undetectable Dark Matter to “fit” the observations (of gravitational lensing) to the standard model. The excess observed curvature implied relative to calculations based on the mass distribution can be attributed to the fact that the x-ray hot plasma that constitutes up to 90% of a cluster’s mass has a higher radiation output than an equivalent stellar mass would produce. That excess high energy radiation will produce a stronger “gravitational” effect than the observed mass alone would predict using the standard gravitational models that correlate gravitational effects with mass density rather than radiation density.

This higher radiational output is due to the diffuse nature of of the cluster gas which is radiating outward from within its entire volume whereas a star is only radiating from its surface area; effectively the x-ray hot gas has a much lower Mass/EMR ratio than a star or galaxy.

This x-ray hot gas constitutes 90% of the cluster’s mass and produces a large excess of high density, high frequency radiation. And that radiation tracks the “gravitational” effects. That’s what’s there. What’s not there is Dark Matter. If gravitational effects are attributable to the density of the cluster’s EMF rather than the unobserved mass-dependent “gravitational” field, the mass discrepancy problem evaporates and with it the need for Dark Matter. Mercifully.

The Cosmological Redshift

It is a demonstrable fact that the General Relativity based math (Schwarzschild solution) that describes gravitational redshift can also be used to calculate the cosmological redshift for an Expanding Spherical Wavefront (ESW) of electromagnetic radiation. The resulting redshift resembles the cosmological redshift of the standard model which uses a different GR solution (FLRW) describing an Expanding Universe. See: Gravitational Redshift & Expanding Spherical Wavefronts

The mathematics involved here is not satisfactory because the Schwarzschild solution does not take into account the variation of light speed in a gravitational field. However, the qualitative picture presented, of an ESW losing energy as it is gradually absorbed by its encounters with galaxies and other intervening matter, demonstrates once again that an effect that can be described with standard gravitational math can be understood as arising from the direct interaction of Matter and electromagnetic fields.

The ACER is the aggregate of all the ESWs streaming through the Cosmos. A galaxy’s ERDG becomes a continuous outflow of ESWs on cosmological scales as the density gradient becomes negligible.

Coda

It is certainly fair to say that none of the foregoing constitutes “proof” that Matter-EMF interactions are responsible for all the various observed effects attributed to gravity. However science does not deal in “proofs” – those lie in the realm of mathematics and mathematics is not science. Science and physics deal in empirical evidence and the facts as presented here constitute, at minimum, strong evidence that the observed gravitational effects are correlated with observed Matter-EMF interactions.

As mentioned these correlations are not unknown and have been remarked upon elsewhere (excluding the ESW section) but that is all that has transpired. No serious research, either empirical or theoretical, has been conducted to determine if that correlation indicates a causal relation. Yet, MTP offers no explanation for the physical cause of gravity at all. Why then, this peculiar incuriosity? It seems attributable to the scientific academy having some legacy math that has been handed down for a century or more (if you count Newtonian gravity) and though neither the Newtonian nor Einsteinian gravitational models work on the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters there exists a dogmatic belief, despite this obvious evidence to the contrary, that those models constitute Universal Laws.

The irrational result is that modern theoretical physicists appear to believe they know everything there is to know about gravity because they have some math (that doesn’t work well) and therefore there is no reason to do any research into what they do not know (the cause of gravity) because if it was important someone would have taught them about it in graduate school. Something like that. There really is no sensible explanation for the situation.

Mathematicist Follies & the DWRT

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Here are some choice tidbits from a recent Tim Anderson article titled Zero-point energy may not exist. I’m always supportive of any effort to drag theoretical physics back into contact with empirical reality so the suggestion that ZPE may not exist is at least promising. It even suggests the possibility that modern theoretical physics might emerge from its self-imposed exile in Plato’s cave, the cave-of-choice in this case being mathematicism.

In reading the article any hope of a scientific restoration is dashed, as one is quickly immersed in sea of mathematicist illogic. Here for instance is the “reasoning” that underlies the ZPE concept:

…it means that nothing has non-zero energy and because there is an infinite amount of nothing there must be an infinite amount of energy.

While it is clear that the author is distancing himself from the ZPE concept, that account of the underlying “reasoning” gives rise to the simple question, how did such flamboyantly illogical nonsense gain any traction in the scientific community? The answer of course is mathematicism which is itself a flagrantly illogical proposition, just not recognized as such by the denizens of the mathematicist cave. Then there is this little gem (emphasis added):

Quantum field theory, which is the best theory of how matter works in the universe that we have, suggests that all matter particles are excitations of fields. The fields permeate the universe and matter interacts with those fields in various ways. That is all well and good of course. We are not questioning that these fields exist. The question is whether a field in a ground state has any measureable effect on matter.

So in their “best theory” the universe is permeated by many fields and matter is an excitation of those fields. Physical reality however only contains one observed field and that is the electromagnetic field which is the aggregate of all the electromagnetic radiation that permeates the Cosmos. That radiation is constantly being emitted by all the luminous matter that also permeate the Cosmos. There are no additional observed fields as described by QFT. 

Despite the fact that the QFT fields are not observed the author does not wish to question their existence. Why? Mathematicism, of course. If a math model says something is there and physical reality declines to offer any evidence in support of such a conjecture, the mathematicist position is that the math is correct and reality is perversely withholding the evidence.

Imagine we have a sensitive Hawking radiation detector orbiting a black hole. The detector is in a state of free fall, meaning that it experiences no gravitational forces on it.

This last bit invokes a wholly imaginary thought experiment involving imaginary radiation emitted by an imaginary black hole. Without any empirical basis or logical connection to known physics, it has no scientific significance even if the “experiment” somehow reflects badly on the ZPE concept. In that, it only amounts to an illogical argument refuting an illogical concept.

The second sentence also presents a widely promulgated claim that has no basis in physics. The idea that an observer or detector in free fall experiences no gravitational forces on it is purely unphysical nonsense. An observer or detector can only be in a state of free fall if they are experiencing a gravitational force. The typical basis for this claim is that the observer is prohibited from making observations that would clearly show the presence of a gravitating body and thus demonstrate the presence of a gravitational field.

Einstein is usually credited with this view but in fact his conception of the equivalence principle was highly constrained and did not extend to fundamentally illogical claims like the one made above. The version of the equivalence principle Einstein employed is now called the Weak Equivalence Principle.

The two extensions of the equivalence principle contrived and adopted after Einstein’s death, the disingenuously named Einstein EP (he had nothing to do with it) and the Strong EP have no logical, scientific or theoretical justification. They were merely conjectures of mathematical convenience proposed by the physicist Robert H. Dicke, who along with his colleague John A. Wheeler, concocted a distorted variant of Einstein’s Relativity Theory. That variant is presented today as Einstein’s RT but it is a separate theory and should have it’s own name — Dicke-Wheeler Relativity Theory. 

It is in DWRT that you will find the EEP and SEP as well as a reified version of spacetime which is said to causally interact with matter and energy causing the gravitational effect and facilitating the Expansion of the Universe. There is no empirical evidence supporting those ad hoc additions to ERT. They are simply mathematicist conjectures that have no scientific basis or logical connection to physical reality. In modern theoretical physics though, they are treated as axioms — true by definition. 

Mathematicism is the principle driver of the Crisis in Physics. The reason for this is simple: math is not physics. The controlling paradigm in modern theoretical physics, however, is that math is the basis of physics and mathematical models determine the nature of physical reality. That paradigm is a philosophical belief that has no scientific basis.

As a consequence of mathematicism theoretical physicists espouse two standard models that describe a physical reality containing a large number of entities and events that are not part of the physical reality we actually observe. Modern theoretical physics does not constitute a science so much as a cult of belief. 

You have to believe in the expanding universe, in dark matter and dark energy, in quarks and gluons. You have to believe that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant even though it cannot be measured as such and is not constant in General Relativity — at least according to Einstein.* You have to believe in these things because they are not demonstrably part of physical reality. Scientists don’t traffic in beliefs but mathematicists do and so there is a Crisis in Physics

 * The speed of light is a universal constant according to Dicke-Wheeler Relativity Theory.

Simultaneously published at Medium.

Starts With a Bang, Ends With Nonsense

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Ethan Siegel’s columns for Forbes magazine are tour de forces of the illogical circular reasoning that passes for scientific discourse in the modern theoretical physics community. They are best avoided out of respect for the good name of science. It is, however, sometimes instructive, not to mention eye-opening, to slog through one, in order to appreciate just how self-deluded the pseudo-science known as modern cosmology has become.

Case in point: this article from Dec 22, 2020. Therein, Siegel is at great pains to demonstrate that dark matter and dark energy are the only scientific way of accounting for observed cosmological phenomena in the context of the Standard Model of Cosmology, commonly known as the Big Bang model. This is true of course, the BB model can only account for cosmological observations if it is allowed to invoke the existence dark matter and dark energy – so therefore dark matter and dark energy must exist despite the absence of any empirical evidence for their existence. Reasoning can’t get any more circular than that.

In some of Siegel’s arguments there is almost no logical argument at all, just a recitation of certain facts followed by an assertion unsupported by the facts presented, that those factual observations were predictions rather than post-dictions of the model (emphasis added):

What’s remarkable is that, because the laws of physics that govern particles (and nuclear fusion) are so well-understood, we can compute exactly — assuming the Universe was once hotter, denser, and expanded and cooled from that state — what the different ratios of these different light elements ought to be. We’ve even studied the reactions in the lab directly, and things behave precisely as our theory predicts. The only factor we vary is the photon-to-baryon ratio, which tells us how many cosmic photons (particles of light) there are for every proton or neutron (the baryons) in our Universe.

We’ve now measured it all. Satellites like COBE, WMAP, and Planck have measured how many photons there are in the Universe: 411 per cubic centimeter of space. Intervening clouds of gas that appear between us and a distant light source, like a luminous galaxy or quasar, will absorb a fraction of the light as it travels through the Universe, teaching us the abundances of these elements and isotopes directly. When we add it all up, only ~5% of the total energy in the Universe can be normal matter: no more and no less.

What a mess! The central assumption (emphasized above) is simply the BB model, which is itself based on two foundational assumptions:

  1. The cosmos is a unitary, coherent, simultaneous entity – a “Universe”.
  2. The cosmological redshift is caused by some form of recessional velocity.

Neither of those assumptions has any empirical basis and both date to the early 20th century when the scale of the cosmos was barely grasped. They are however, sacrosanct among cosmologists. Those foundational assumptions are, by some common but unstated agreement, true by definition in the cosmological community. They are more than just assumptions, they are beliefs, and they are almost certainly wrong. But, what of that… Assuming our assumptions are correct we can use math to massage our model into agreement with observations – just like good old Ptolemy did way back around the dawn of the previous Dark Ages.

More recently Siegel has posted a similarly obtuse argument concerning the supposed successes of the Big Bang model and its unchallengeable status. It features the same kind of circular reasoning as above: Our model is correct as long as our assumptions and postulates are correct, therefore the things we assume and postulate are correct, because the model is correct. The result of this transparently illogical syllogism, which underlies all of the author’s triumphalist claims for the Big Bang model, is the nonsensical narrative that winds from inexplicable Big Bang to the now 95% invisible “Universe”.

The reason there are no significant challenges to the Big Bang orthodoxy from within the scientific community is that the community members have been trained to accept the 100 year old premises of the model. So, again, the author is correct to this extent: if you accept the model’s premises you are going to wind up with some ludicrous depiction of the Cosmos like LCDM. However, the simplistic assumptions of 100 years ago have proven a disastrous foundation for modern cosmology. The model depicts an inane, unscientific, “Universe” that does not at all resemble, in its defining features, the Cosmos we actually observe.

In the Cosmos we observe there is no Big Bang event, no inflation, no expanding spacetime, no dark matter, no dark energy. All of those things are essential elements of LCDM . None of those things are present in the Cosmos we observe. Physical reality does not look like the LCDM “Universe”. People like the author, who, nonetheless, believe the absurd LCDM story, do so because they are functionally, mathematicists.

Mathematicism is an ancient, half-baked philosophy whose proponents believe that mathematics underlies and determines the nature of physical reality. So, dark matter (& etc.) cannot be empirically demonstrated to exist? That is of no concern to a mathematicist; it all has to be there because a peculiar model (LCDM) requires it in order to reconcile itself with observations, and therefore dark matter (& etc.) have to exist. Pay no attention to the testimony of your lyin’ eyes (and telescopes)!

Mathematicism is junk philosophy. It is not science. How we got to this state of affairs is going to provide plenty of work for future historians of science. For now though, there is much to do just to pry the cold, dead hands of mathematicism from the throat of theoretical physics (which is now barely alive in any scientific sense).

Science rests on observation (detection) and measurement, not the febrile imaginings of reality-challenged, nerd-mathematicists with a cult-model to defend. What passes for science among the theoretical physics community of the academy these days is not science in any meaningful sense. The Big Bang model is Exhibit A for that proposition.

(Parts of this post were taken from a comment I made on Siegel’s Medium article.)

Great Snipe Hunt Continues

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You can always count on Dennis Overbye of the New York Times to run full-tilt with any Big Science (BS) press release that lands in his inbox. The latest example concerns yet another in the ongoing stream of “possible detections” in the unending snipe hunt semi-officially known as the Search for Dark Matter.

Dark matter has been experimentally sought for roughly 40 years; no convincing evidence for its existence has been uncovered in all that time. This latest bit of effusive hype (that emanates, according to Overbye from, …a multinational team of 163 scientists from 28 institutions and 11 countries…), continues the now long string of dark matter non-detections. Supposedly, the experiment under consideration was seeking a certain type of dark matter called WIMPs. The experiment failed in that regard, but hope springs eternal in the Dark Matter community.

In the elaborate and needless to say, expensive, detector, an excess of “events” was observed, which could be, it is now claimed, evidence of “axions“, or maybe another hypothetical, a “neutrino magnetic moment”, or sadly but more prosaically, the presence in undetectable amounts of tritium, a well-known (and observed) isotope of hydrogen.

It should be noted that according to Overbye:

Simulations and calculations suggested that random events should have produced about 232 such recoils over the course of a year.

But from February 2017 to February 2018, the detector recorded 285, an excess of 53 recoils.

This over-represents the excess. The original paper has the expectation value as 232 +/- 15 meaning the excess events only number 38. The 285 total does not constitute direct evidence of anything but the “events” themselves. They constitute the entire data set from a year of observations on a one-off, purpose-built system that has failed in its intended purpose.

So we have a paucity of irreplicable evidence being repurposed to justify some spare theoretical fantasies that just happen be lying around unused in in the back corner of some dusty theoretical broom closet. On the other hand, “…tritium contamination will just be one more detail that has to be considered or calibrated in future detectors“. Another day, another retrenchment.

The overall effort here is of a piece with the Higgs boson “detection” at the Large Hadron Collider and the gravitational wave “detections” at LIGO. It is nothing but an exercise in data manufacturing and manipulation as substitute for empirical science. It is the essence of BS, and this science by committee approach continues to make a mess of modern physics.

As to the perpetual snipe hunt, there is one clear message being delivered to the BS community by physical reality. It was as true 40 years ago as it is today: That Dark Matter shit ain’t here! When this simple fact is going to penetrate the thick wall of mathematicism shielding theoretical physicists from reality, however, is a question that only future historians will be able to answer.