Astronomers Lie About Dark Matter
It’s as indefensible as believers in ghosts lying about observational evidence for them.
Dark matter may exist. Spirits of the dead, similarly, may walk the earth. Neither has any hard physical evidence. Multi-million dollar dark matter detectors built deep underground continue to find nothing. If investigators into the paranormal ridicule belief in ghosts, why do they excuse belief in dark matter as scientific?
So dogmatic are astronomers about their beloved dark matter, they will lie to the press, confidently asserting it has been discovered. To see the lies, the alert reader has to keep focus on the question, ‘what is dark matter?’ Just as a believer in ghosts cannot allege that rustling leaves in the trees is an effect of a passing ghost, cosmologists cannot assume that motions among galaxies or stars is an effect of dark matter, which they cannot describe. What is it? What is it made of? Without those answers, the term ‘dark matter’ is a placeholder for ignorance.
Scientists Find the ‘Missing’ Dark Matter from the Early Universe (Live Science). No, scientists did not find dark matter. What the headline alleges the body text takes away. Mara Johnson-Groh writes,
Dark matter makes up approximately 85 percent of the total mass in our known universe, but the mysterious substance does not interact with light, leaving scientists in the dark about the its precise nature. So, instead of viewing it, astronomers must rely on dark matter’s gravitational pull on the normal matter, called baryonic matter, that makes up the stars, nebulas and planets we see in the night sky, as well as all the trees, rocks and people on Earth.
In our analogy, investigators did not see the ghosts, but watched the rustling of leaves in the trees. Read further and you find that not everyone was convinced by the Royal Society notice. Also, the article hedges its bold headline by admitting, the “team’s results were highly dependant [sic] on the model they used.” Models are not evidence. Saying that scientists have found the missing dark matter amounts to a highly misleading statement at best, a bald lie at worst.
Dark Matter on the Move (Science Daily). This article’s coverage of the Royal Society notice calls the survey the “smoking gun” evidence: “This study may be the ‘smoking gun’ evidence that takes us a step closer to understanding what dark matter is,” an astronomer from Carnegie Mellon says. It may be, or it may not be. The article points to smoke with no gun. Other things than guns can emit smoke – like overhyped news.
Dark Matter Behaves Differently in Dying Galaxies (Live Science). Breathes there a reporter willing to critique the belief in dark matter? Rafi Letzter pretends to tell what dark matter does, without knowing what it is. Notice the bizarre incongruity in these statements:
Dark matter detectives barely know anything about dark matter, but now they know this: It behaves differently on the fringes of old galaxies than in new ones.
Dark matter is the stuff we can’t see in the universe. It makes up most of the mass in the universe but doesn’t emit light. However, it does tug on everything with gravity. Everything in the universe acts like it’s being pulled on by big heavy clouds of something we can’t see. Astronomers just aren’t sure what that something is.
This is like saying that ghosts account for most of the motions of leaves in the trees. Can nobody stand up and say that other causes than dark matter could account for the movements of galaxies? Letzter also wrote another article on Live Science, “Four dark matter searches to watch in 2019.” The headline implies that dark matter remains lost. He says of all searches to date,
As usual, astronomers didn’t actually find any of the stuff, which is invisible to all our telescopes but appears to make up at least 80 percent of the universe by mass.
It looks like dark matter can be heated up and moved around (Phys.org). In this article, astronomer Paul Sutter talks as if ghosts are real, even though we cannot detect them. When you observe a galaxy, you see lots of real objects. But –
What you wouldn’t see is what most of that galaxy is really made of. You wouldn’t see the invisible, the hidden. You wouldn’t see the bulk of that galactic mass. You wouldn’t see the dark matter.
Saying that dark matter can be heated up and moved around is like saying that ghosts can act more frenzied in some places compared to others, based on which branches of a tree do the most rustling.
A ‘Mirror Image’ of Our Universe Existed Before The Big Bang (Science Alert). Does it advance science to explain one occult phenomenon with another occult phenomenon? Can you explain one thing you can’t see with another you can’t see? How bizarre can the dark matter believers get to preserve their pet theory? Jon Christian writes,
A new story in Physics World explores the new theory, which was proposed by a trio of Canadian physicists who say that it could explain the existence of dark matter.
The new theory, which is laid out in a recent paper in the journal Physical Review of [sic] Letters, aims to preserve a rule of physics called CPT symmetry. In the anti-universe before the Big Bang, it suggests, time ran backwards and the cosmos were made of antimatter instead of matter.
This new theory is compelling, according to a news release about the new theory, because it would mean that the universe is filled with “very massive sterile neutrinos” that could explain dark matter, a mysterious material that is believed to make up much of the universe.
Writers for Uncommon Descent had some fun with this trekkie idea.
Update 1/17/19: New theory could explain missing 95 percent of the cosmos (Phys.org). This has to be one of the most bizarre excuses for dark matter we have ever seen. Cosmologists at the University of Oxford are proposing a substance with “negative mass” for dark matter. This brings to mind phlogiston theory for the explanation of combustion— a widely used example of how some scientists may be willing to give up rationality before abandoning a pet theory. According to the proponents of this new idea,
“We now think that both dark matter and dark energy can be unified into a fluid which possesses a type of ‘negative gravity,” repelling all other material around them. Although this matter is peculiar to us, it suggests that our cosmos is symmetrical in both positive and negative qualities.”
The existence of negative matter had previously been ruled out as it was thought this material would become less dense as the Universe expands, which runs contrary to our observations that show dark energy does not thin out over time. However, Dr. Farnes’ research applies a ‘creation tensor,” which allows for negative masses to be continuously created. It demonstrates that when more and more negative masses are continually bursting into existence, this negative mass fluid does not dilute during the expansion of the cosmos. In fact, the fluid appears to be identical to dark energy.
Go figure. This sounds like the defunct steady-state cosmology. What will it take for cosmologists to admit the possibility that dark matter is a myth? If negative mass fluid is identical to dark energy, is it not reasonable to assume that both occult phenomena are equally unreal?
Find our previous articles about dark matter in the Search bar.
There have been occasions when appeals to unknown entities, sometimes dubbed “occult forces,” have served science. Oxygen, electrons, neutrinos, and even fundamental forces once were theoretical entities that were subsequently confirmed. Recently, astronomers claimed support for finding the Higgs Boson and gravitational waves. Critics might complain that the latter two are model-dependent, but at least these entities, some of which cannot be determined directly, can be measured to a high degree of accuracy. What is dark matter? Scientists have no idea. They don’t know if it is made of WIMPs or MACHOs, whether it consists of theoretical axions or something completely indescribable. All they know is that they need it for their theories. They need it for an old universe and the big bang theory. They’ve been looking for it for over a century. How much more time do we give them? More importantly, why are so very few in the media recognizing that non-detection of dark matter is a crisis? Misleading the public by assuming its truth is dishonest. A placeholder for ignorance is just that: ignorance hoping for promotion to reality in the future. Stop treating it like a fact. Be open to alternatives.
The case of dark matter shows that some education in philosophy of science and history of science helps you interpret claims. Science’s biggest reason for being taken seriously is evidence. You can’t expect people to believe in things forever when there is no evidence. It can’t be taken seriously when someone’s pet theory needs it. In this case, the consensus trusts the pet theory. But where is the bold prediction that dark matter confirms? Where is the allowance for falsification? Are the believers in touch with reality? Dark matter may turn up some day, but we’d like to see less bombast, more humility, and more willingness to be proved wrong. Until then, dark matter and dark energy are the cosmologists’ pseudoscientific ghosts. Another ghost is natural selection which, as we will continue to see, is being used by scientists as a ghostly agent that no biologist or geneticist can nail down with any confidence. That one is not only a placeholder for ignorance, a vacuous idea, and a self-refuting concept; it is a weapon against critics of Darwinism.