Something Cannot Be Born from Nothing
Exasperated by the lack of evidence for dark matter, some are now wondering if it came before the beginning.
Cosmology continues living in unreality. It’s a strange time, when the lack of evidence for something is exceeded by scientists’ confidence that it must be there. They would rather live in confusion than in reality sometimes (26 July 2019).
Unless one subscribes to the multiverse pseudoscience, the big bang is supposed to be the beginning of all matter, space, and time. It is for materialists, that is. The big bang, they believe, did not involve any mind or purpose. Nothing banged, and it became everything. It seems illogical to suggest that something else came before the first something even began to exist. Is that not what headlines are announcing today?
Dark Matter May Have Existed Before the Big Bang, New Math Suggests (Space.com). If dark matter came from the big bang, one cosmologist groans, we should have detected it by now. So Tommi Tenkanen and others are wondering if they can push dark matter before the singularity, the origin of everything.
Cracking the mystery of dark matter is one of the most frustrating quests of physics.
One lingering suggestion of how to explain some of the challenges of dark matter is that the strange substance arose before the Big Bang. That moment represents the most popular explanation for how the universe began, in a snapshot singularity that expanded over billions of years into everything that surrounds us. And if dark matter did come first, that changes how scientists should hunt for the substance.
Tenkanen and others like him come to this bizarre idea from particle physics and mathematical models. But if nothing existed before the big bang, then particle physics and mathematics did not exist, either. A child cannot give birth to its parents, especially when the parents don’t even exist.
Dark matter may be older than the big bang, study suggests (Phys.org). This press release emanating from Johns Hopkins University is a replay of the previous article. It repeats the error that astronomers might know dark matter came first by the distribution of galaxies. But since those distributions are wedded to the theory of dark matter, the reasoning is groundless and circular.
Fascinating New Study Claims Dark Matter May Be Older Than The Big Bang (Science Alert). Science reporters will regurgitate anything a “scientist” says, no matter how illogical or fact-free. Here is an example by Michelle Starr. She admits there’s no way of knowing, but as long as a “scientist” entertains a weird idea, it’s worth reporting. In fact, the more bizarre, the more the fun!
At this stage we just have no way of knowing. As Harvard-Smithsonian theoretical physicist Avi Loeb said earlier this year, “the current situation for inflation is that it’s such a flexible idea, it cannot be falsified experimentally.” He was talking about whether or not cosmic inflation actually happened (also a matter of debate), but the statement works for the timing of the whoompf, too.…
It’s all highly theoretical stuff, but it’s about as good a lead as any on the mysterious matter that’s playing a key role in shaping our Universe. It’ll be fascinating to see how the search for dark matter plays out in the coming decade.
In search of signals from the early universe (Phys.org). This article is not about dark matter, but assumes it. Astronomers at the University of Pennsylvania are scouring the cosmic microwave background (CMB) again, evolutionary assumptions guiding the way. With their new toys, one project participant says, “we’re going to be looking at cool stuff, the evolution of the universe over cosmic time,” which he says will be “fun.”
Dark energy vs. modified gravity: Which one will prevail? (Phys.org). There are a few astronomers willing to question the existence of dark energy, an equally-mysterious substance to dark matter. A researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences is toying with the idea of modified gravity. Their project is called GalaxyDance.
GalaxyDance will provide a new way to make cosmological tests of gravitational theories a reality. The final results, no matter which theory (dark energy or modified gravity) they favor, will have far-reaching and ground-breaking consequences for our understanding of the Universe on the largest scales.
If our tests eventually provide a signature of new physics foreseen in beyond-GR [general relativity] theories, it will shake our current view and understanding of the large-scale evolution of the cosmos. If, on the other hand, our inquiry strengthens general relativity, it will mean that we need to look harder to explain the mystery of dark energy.
How long will the belief in mysterious unknown stuff be considered scientific? Never underestimate the time on their hands for idle speculation. Science used to be against that.
One article turned up in my Android phone’s News feed today, but the link dropped off the feed, and I can’t find it. It was by an astronomer trying to argue that dark matter is not a myth. He was very adamant that astronomers did not make it up. They have very good reasons for believing in it, he tried to explain, tossing in some abstruse math and big bang diagrams. But if you read such things with a critical eye, as I do, you find that the bluffing outperforms the evidence. All his reasons depended on the big bang theory. It was circular reasoning, and he couldn’t even see it. Basically, his theory needs dark matter, so therefore it exists, and it’s worth spending millions of dollars searching for it, even if we never find it and don’t know what to look for. Such people want to force everyone into their web of belief, equating the web of belief with science. They are not open to alternatives, and they cannot think outside the box. Beware of such people.