Tag Archives: dark matter

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.