Cosmologists Bash Heads Against Reality

When observations don’t fit your ideology, invent paranoid delusions.

Observational astronomy continues to militate against the expectations of big-bang cosmologists:

• Neutral result charges up antimatter research: Scientists push boundaries of antimatter research in quest for answers (Science Daily): The Antimatter Problem continues to resist natural explanations. The work is “the latest contribution in the quest to chase down the answer to the basic antimatter question, “If matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang, where did all the antimatter go?‘” No success yet, despite hope. Roger Jones has nothing to offer in his “Explainer: What is antimatter?” on The Conversation. The universe doesn’t play by the theorists’ rules, he says. “It is almost entirely made of matter, so where did all the antimatter go? It is one of the biggest mysteries in physics to date.“
• This Monster Galaxy is Too Bright for Its Own Good (Space.com): A huge galaxy appears to be tearing itself apart, emitting huge amounts of energy and creating turbulence. “If all the galaxies in the universe lay at the same distance from the sun, this one would shine the brightest,” Nola Taylor Redd says. Something 12.4 billion light-years from the Milky Way is uncomfortably close to the big bang to be so large and compact.
• Monster Galaxy Cluster Is Biggest Ever in the Early Universe (Space.com). This is the old Lumpiness Problem. There shouldn’t be large structures early in the universe.
• Newly discovered star offers opportunity to explore origins of first stars sprung to life in early universe (Science Daily). Still eagerly searching for Population III stars (the first generation after the big bang), astronomers proposed this rare candidate star, an ultra-metal-poor “relic from the Milky Way’s formative years.” But it’s not metal-free. Meaning; it’s at least a second-generation star.
• Traces of the First Stars in the Universe Possibly Found (Space.com). “An enormous cloud of dust and gas may bear the fingerprints of the first stars in the universe.” What can clouds of gas say about stars, though? This is divination, not empirical science.
• Green pea galaxy right after the Big Bang (Science Daily): This article is about the Reionization Problem. What it needs is some observational evidence. “Despite twenty years of intensive research, no galaxy emitting sufficient radiation had been found” to kickstart the ionization of hydrogen. Some astronomers find a candidate galaxy, but it only “opens an important new avenue for our understanding of the early Universe.” The avenue has no passengers. Maybe the James Webb Space Telescope will help.
• Gravitational-wave rumours in overdrive (Nature). Has the LIGO instrument found long-predicted gravitational waves? Some are excited about the rumors, but one commenter complained, “Krauss, Motl and those who seem unable to restrain their wishful thinking, should STOP it. It is harmful to science and the public’s view of science when the much-hyped hints and rumors fall flat. We all would like to see a bona fide detection of gravitational waves, but most of us hold our tongues until the evidence becomes compelling.“

With mounting anomalies and few confirmations, cosmologists continue to wander further off the reservation (5/17/14). They are deep into Fantasyland now, as the following news items demonstrate:

• Time might flow backwards as well as forwards from the big bang (New Scientist). Joshua Sokol follows Caltech materialist Sean Carroll into Alice in Wonderland’s mirror world of imaginary realities. A “trippy idea,” indeed. Wake up and come to.
• Black Holes Set the Clock for Life on Earth (Space.com). Rational people will stop reading this after the first line: “There is a chance – just a chance – that if black holes rule the universe, they could have ‘switched on’ habitable planets, such as Earth, allowing them to support complex life.“
• Theorists propose a new method to probe the beginning of the universe (PhysOrg): Bendable clocks, quantum wiggles and heavy particles behaving like pendulums decorate fanciful speculations by Xingang Chen about what came before the inflationary epoch of the big bang, even though the article admits, “The beginning of the cosmos is cloaked and hidden from the view of our most powerful telescopes.” Can clocks reveal what produced the initial conditions of the big bang? If so, what gave the initial conditions to the clocks?
• Maxwell’s demon as a self-contained, information-powered refrigerator (PhysOrg). “The work of the team led by Pekola remains, for the time being, basic research, but in the future, the results obtained may, among other things, pave the way towards reversible computing” (see Perhapsimaybecouldness Index). Don’t they realize that the higher entropy of the demon swamps the reduced entropy of the result? Go back to basic thermodynamics.
• New theory of secondary inflation expands options for avoiding an excess of dark matter (PhysOrg). Spike Psarris suggests we not be too harsh on this proposal. “After all, the evidence for secondary inflation is just as good as the evidence for primary inflation” (i.e., none).
• Supermassive black holes might be hiding entire universes inside (New Scientist). Need we respond? Let them waltz into their own fantasy: “A quirk of our leading theory of cosmic history could mean that black holes were once portals to a multitude of universes beyond our own.” Spike Psarris’s third DVD dismantles the multiverse as not just bad science, but anti-science.

It’s nice to see that some cosmologists recognize they are in trouble. Thomas Kitching on The Conversation writes, “Cosmology is in crisis” – but then adds – “but not for the reasons you might think.” We’ve just shown some pretty good reasons to think that. What is his reason?

We still have no idea what the vast majority of the universe is made of. We struggle to understand how the Big Bang could suddenly arise from nothing or where the energy for “inflation”, a very short period of rapid growth in the early universe, came from. But despite these gaps in knowledge, it is actually human nature – our tendency to interpret data to fit our beliefs – that is the biggest threat to modern cosmology.

Bingo.

Thank you, Thomas, but who’s “we”? All “your” problems would vanish if you would trust the Manufacturer’s Manual. One reliable Eyewitness trumps a thousand imagineers, especially when they are all demonstrably psychotic (for evidence, buy this video).