Today’s news roundup contains a link to a recent New York Times article on cosmology, which explores the difficulty those in the field are experiencing in matching observation to theory. The most troubling aspect of the piece is that it may be the astronomers, cosmologists and physicists themselves who are “Dark, Perhaps Forever.”
I touched on my concerns about how the field of cosmology appears to be in the death grip of a particularly rigid paradigm in my TDG blog entry Adventures in Cosmology earlier this year. The Times piece points to the actual gravity of this situation when we learn, on the first page:
This fall, NASA and the Department of Energy plan to invite proposals for a $600 million satellite mission devoted to dark energy.
The article continues to explore the bewilderment experienced by the best and brightest in the field. Then, on the last page we read:
Some astronomers have complained that $600 million is less than half of the $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion the academy committee estimated was necessary to do the job.
“We are placing a large bet,” Dr. Mountain said, “using our credibility as collateral, that we as a community know what we are doing.”But many stressed that it was going to be a long march with no clear end in sight. Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University told them, “In spite of the fact that you are liable to spend the rest of your lives measuring stuff that won’t tell us what we want to know, you should keep doing it.”
Let’s consider that last quote again: “In spite of the fact that you are liable to spend the rest of your lives measuring stuff that won’t tell us what we want to know, you should keep doing it.”
God forbid that we actually clear our heads and revisit fundamental assumptions.
My previous piece on this topic referenced Michael Disney’s column in the September/October 2007 issue of American Scientist. While the Times piece regularly reminds us that the universe “was born 13.7 billion years ago in the Big Bang”, as if this was absolute fact, Disney expresses a dollop of healthy skepticism, especially remarkable considering his position as a professor of astronomy:
While it is true that we presently have no alternative to the Big Bang in sight, that is no reason to accept it. Thus it was that witchcraft took hold.
The scientific community rightly screams when creationists suggest that fossilized remains were placed in the earth by God to mislead us into believing that the earth and cosmos predate 4004 BCE. Yet cosmologists are oblivious to their own attempts to ad hoc the Big Bang hypothesis by forcing observations to fit theory. Disney concludes his column with a quote from Daniel Boorstin, when he writes:
The historian of science Daniel Boorstin once remarked: "The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the Earth, the continents and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments and contradictory witnesses." Acceptance of the current myth, if myth it is, could likewise hold up progress in cosmology for generations to come.
As the Times piece makes clear, acceptance of the current myth could not only waste the formidable intellectual talents of generations of cosmologists, but may also result
in wasting vast sums of money. If we consider that the project mentioned in the Times is just one project of who-knows-how-many over the past 80 years, the total investment to support current mythology is sobering indeed.
what to do ?
Are you suggesting a different course of action?
I agree that "dark matter" and "dark energy" are basically accounting terms, they quantify by how much the current theory is inaccurate. Because these factors are very large, compared to what we can measure, we can seriously doubt some basic assumptions of the current theory.
Things such as the various constants being constant, as opposed to variable. Variable over time, or over distance. Or maybe these "constants" are really a function of local conditions, and not constant at all. We can only measure conditions in our local neighborhood here, and over a really small time period. A measly few thousand years.
Then you have the electric universe people who present an alternative theory. They say their theory, or variations of it, explain things better.
And of course there are the creationists and intelligent design people, who say they don't have to explain s%#@t, it is a miracle designed to confuse us.
And then the people who say we are a computer simulation. Perhaps "half-hearted design" is the appropriate term for this theory.
There is reason to favor the current theory of physics - it does make very good predictions here, locally. Within the solar system, it is quite accurate: our machines work, our spacecraft go where we want with reasonable accuracy. The engineering mistakes are much worse than the theory.
A big problem is that all we know about other regions of the universe comes from light, electromagnetic radiation of various wavelengths. We can't make any measurements over there.
So what are we to do?
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if everything is under control, you are not going fast enough (Mario Andretti)
it's not how fast you go, it's who gets there first
You forgot...
You forgot the pastafarians earthling, I'm sure that for them, dark matter & energy is nothing but and excess of tomato sauce in the Spaguetti Monster's meatballs :-)
The very basis of modern science is the premise that what we observe here in our little corner of the Universe must be valid for the rest of it: the same physics laws, the same chemical elements, the same velocity for light or strenght for gravity, so if we start to doubt that then the whole card castle crumbles.
So the core of our science is that there's nothing particularly special about us, which brought upon a whole series of phylosophical shifts, and instead of being God's top creation we came to be seen as a mere surplus in the cosmic evolution, a queer side-effect.
Then again, inflationary theory gives a different light speed during the very early moments of the universe, so maybe our constants are not so constant after all. The same could be for gravity, as Mordechai Milgrom suggests.
I do believe that in the next couple of decades there is going to be very interestng developments in physics. We are weeks to the starting of the Large Hadron Collider, and that could really open a whole new can of worms if they do find the famous Higgs' boson, and if they don't... that would be even more interesting!
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
A different course of action
Are you suggesting a different course of action?
The different course of action is to allocate funding to investigate alternative ideas. The current funding is so dominated by BBT proponents that there is virtually no funding available to explore alternate cosmologies.
As Disney discusses in the American Scientist column, the BBT is propped up by several theoretical speculations (inflation, dark matter, dark energy, etc), that have been tacked on to maintain the original theory.
We have reached the point where cosmologists requesting $1.5 billion dollar projects are going into these projects making statements like, “In spite of the fact that you are liable to spend the rest of your lives measuring stuff that won’t tell us what we want to know, you should keep doing it.”
No one appears to be humble enough to suggest that maybe "measuring stuff that won't tell us what we want to know" is wasting time and money because maybe the stuff we're supposedly measuring doesn't exist in the first place! And perhaps we should allocate some funding to alternative ideas.
I personally think that the cosmos has existed eternally, and that plasma and electricity play a larger role in the cosmos than we currently understand, but we don't fund exploration of these ideas because the mainstream's certainty leads them to cast alternative ideas as pseudoscience. The situation is so severe that there isn't even a clearly defined alternative theory out there - whether that involves fractals, plasma, electricity or anything else - and there's not likely to be until we free up funding. And we won't free up funding because alternative ideas are "pseudoscience". It eerily reminds me of the bishop refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.
It's a sad state of affairs. Maybe the saddest thing is that instead of inspiring current students to go into cosmology or physics with a sense of wonder and a thirst for new discovery, we are paralyzed by the idea that "we've nearly figured it all out". On second thought, the saddest thing is that paradigm paralysis is rampant throughout our entire educational system, and pervades fields well beyond the hard sciences.
In any case, I'm in no way suggesting that we abandon our current understanding of physics, but I am suggesting that it's long past time that we revisit fundamental assumptions of current cosmology, and begin to allocate at least some resources to alternative ideas.
such as?
you say:
Yes that is a good idea. But what alternative ideas?
We should propose looking for something that has not been looked for so far. Or making an experiment that challenges the current theory. Anything. But we should propose something half-way specific.
Not just complain that the money is not well spent.
So again, I ask,
what are we to do?
As opposed to, what are we not to do.
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if everything is under control, you are not going fast enough (Mario Andretti)
it's not how fast you go, it's who gets there first
Maybe a start . . .
Would be to earmark a portion of funds to the Alternative Cosmology Group. In reading through some of their materials, it appears that there is no particular ideology that they share in common, though they do exhibit a healthy skepticism towards the status quo.
When there are single project requests (as mentioned in the Times article) that involve $600 million, it would seem to me that we could allocate enough funds for this group to meet their initial goals (listed on the home page). If they were to establish a peer review process, then alternative ideas could, and should, be selected for subsequent funding and investigation.
The Open Letter, published in New Scientist in '04, speaks to the need for this, and is encouraging in that it does include several hundred signatories from the scientific and engineering community.
This is just one particular area that gets under my skin. When I read of pleas for $600 million so we can "measure stuff that won't tell us what we want to know", or of astronomers engaging in wild speculation that a billion light year-wide gap in the CMB (which should not exist according to accepted theory) is, "the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own", I'd rather see at least some funding going to people who think we might be on the wrong track, and are willing to entertain new ideas.
There are too damn many astronomy articles that open with "Astronomers are puzzled by . . . (insert observation)". Giving some credence to alternative ideas would not necessitate dedicating entire missions to test these ideas - in many cases hypotheses could be tested by designing selected projects to include additional instrumentation.
It's not rocket science! (Couldn't resist!) :-)
I agree with you, but
I agree with you in this issue Michael, but we should be mindful of trying to see this from the point of view of the cosmologists.
To them, asking to share the all-too scarce funds they receive to research alternative views, would be akin to ask the government to grant public funds to the Creationist Museum that was founded by the 'Answers in Genesis' organization.
Yes, I know this is a completely different debate, but surely there wouldn't be a short supply of outraged astronomers who would be eager to make the comparison if need be. They would fight with teeth and claws to retain their grants—they already do!
This idea would only fly if:
a)the alternative theories got the support of a wealthy patron like Bill Gates, or
b)they came up with an experiment so simple—and cheap—that it could be performed in conjunction with the mainstream projects that are already trying to detect dark energy & matter.
Yes, $600 million seems like an awful lot of money, but compared with other venues, like trying to come up with deadlier WOMD, it's chump change :-)
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
But . . .
I agree with you in this issue Michael, but we should be mindful of trying to see this from the point of view of the cosmologists.
To them, asking to share the all-too scarce funds they receive to research alternative views, would be akin to ask the government to grant public funds to the Creationist Museum that was founded by the 'Answers in Genesis' organization.
This is essentially the entire point, Red. The mainstream cosmologists are interested in defending dogma rather than practicing science. To quote the Open Letter linked above:
The BBT has continually, virtually since it was proposed, encountered observations that would be regarded as fatal to nearly any scientific theory in any other field. Beyond the observations that have falsified it, and to quote the letter again, "the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation."
It's one thing to defend a theory that has stood up to observational scrutiny over time. It's quite another to defend a theory that has encountered the severe contradictory observations that this one has. The mainstream is now requesting billions of dollars to investigate "dark energy" and "dark matter" - both of which are human mathematical constructs created to explain away observations that would otherwise falsify the underlying theory.
It's all too clear to me that the "Creationists" involved in this situation are the cosmologists themselves. And it's long past time to start allocating funds to scientists who are interested in investigating reality.
alternatives
I agree that the Big Bang Theory seems to have some Big Holes.
However, saying only that, and then saying "give me some money" is not enough. Saying it is "alternative" is just as much of a cop out as saying there is "dark energy".
What are the alternatives?
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if everything is under control, you are not going fast enough (Mario Andretti)
it's not how fast you go, it's who gets there first
Alternative Models
Well, three alternative models that immediately come to mind are Plasma/Electric Cosmology, Steady-State, and Fractal.
The point is that the BBT is so entrenched that even if working cosmologists themselves grow skeptical of the theory, they tend to remain silent for fear of losing funding or telescope time. Neither cosmology or theoretical physics (string theory proponents) have been engaged in genuine science for decades. (Genuine science being defined as establishing a hypothesis and testing it against subsequent observations).
They've been engaged in thought experiments and esoteric mathematics instead. As a consequence, we're told that 96% of the universe is composed of dark energy/matter (though there's no direct evidence to support the idea), black holes (which also have no observational support) have morphed from rare anomalies in which "gravity is so strong they capture everything, including light", to prevalent beasts that now spew vast amounts of energy from their cores when anomalous observations require it. Observations have even called into question basic assumptions regarding the composition of the stars. Are they really balls of gas fueled by nuclear fusion?
The entire field is in the clutches of a gravity-centric paradigm, and the media is along for the ride. I think that the reason this is so obvious to me is precisely because I'm a layman. Most of those working in the field are so close to it that they've effectively blinded themselves by what they've been taught, and subsequently come to believe.
As for myself, I think I get so wound up by this because it's an excellent example of how little progress we've made in understanding the epistemological foundations of human knowledge. When we look a few hundred years back and see the control the church once had on 'knowledge', we can clearly see that men were told what to think. It's the rare individual who understands that the same thing is still going on today - the only thing that has changed is the institutions that decide what is 'true'. The real issue here isn't that we are wasting tens of billions of dollars on frivolous projects in cosmology (though that's serious). The issue is that our entire educational system and and other societal institutions are still focused on telling us what to think, while genuine progress will only come about from recognizing and then changing how we think.
So it goes.
yes but
There was a reason why the steady state model was abandoned, and people came up with the big bang stuff. Red-shift.
Also there was a reason why these electrical models came up when they did: electricity was just being understood, and more importantly used for practical purposes. So it was fashionable to explain everything with electricity.
At the times of the Greeks, when geometry was first formalized (sorry egyptians), everything was explained with geometrical shapes. Spheres within spheres, intersecting spheres and such things.
I favour space exploration, and in particular better observation methods. Even if they are expensive. You see, the problem is that we cannot see enough. So getting more data, that were not available before, is a good idea. Maybe we can get more information from the raw data. If we don't look, we won't find.
Ok, I admit that my approach is not complete. But really, what it is that you are proposing? What should we look for?
A shotgun approach, just look for anything we don't know, does have some value. There could be some key information.
And do me a favour, be honest, what is the "C" word?
Don't play games, let us have an honest debate.
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if everything is under control, you are not going fast enough (Mario Andretti)
it's not how fast you go, it's who gets there first
What we should look for
As I wrote earlier, earthling, I think that we need to begin to allocate funds to investigate new ideas. The Open Letter that I linked above outlines a methodology involving establishment of a peer review process that would determine which projects would be selected for serious consideration and funding. I'm a layman, but the little that I've read leads me to believe we need to revisit plasma and electricity especially. It's the engineers and plasma physicists who would know what specifically we could test for, and what instrumentation would be required. The problem is, as things stand right now, no ideas that conflict with the BBT can be funded at all - so it's a moot point.
If you're interested in the more technical aspects of this issue, like what specifically we might look for, I'd suggest that you take some time to explore the forum at the Thunderbolts site. There are some pretty intelligent contributors over there - Michael Mozina (who manages the Surface of the Sun website that I also linked earlier) makes some particularly striking observations, and several of these guys are continually doing battle with mainstream cosmologists on other sites. Some of them been banned from mainstream sites for just mentioning that there may be alternatives. I'm dead serious - these guys posted nothing more inflammatory than, "Have you ever considered . . ."
As far as the mention of redshift, Halton Arp has spent his entire career cataloging astronomical phenomena that imply that certain objects, such as quasars, may contain intrinsic redshift. If this is correct, then it calls into question all sorts of assumptions critical to current theory - including the very idea that the universe is rapidly expanding. Thunderbolt's "Picture of the Day" archive has several articles regarding Arp's work in the "Redshift" category, and Arp's website is linked in my previous blog entry Adventures in Cosmology.
This issue interests me mostly from the standpoint of watching brilliant people defending a paradigm. I find it fascinating just from the perspective of psychology - it's remarkable how volatile some people become when their paradigms are threatened. The problem with this lack of clear heads is that it has severely infected both cosmology and theoretical physics. The waste of money, severe as it is, is nothing compared to the waste of intellectual talent involved.
By the way, the "C" word that Ross mentioned is consciousness. And I'm being perfectly serious in my reply to him.
Oh...
I thought that the "C" word was... Creator ;-)
PS: BTW, you guys might find this highly interesting, and pertinent to the current discussion.
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
What no one understands Red . . .
I thought that the "C" word was... Creator ;-)
. . . is that consciousness is the creator!
:-)
being done
There are in fact efforts to promote what I call the shotgun approach. DARPA is one of them, Sadly, NIAC was discontinued in 2007. The US military has long been funding research that is not really military - they just want technology and science to advance. The are guessing that some military application will come out of new stuff.
These things do happen, and some of them do get funding.
Sure not everyone's pet theory is being funded. But then some pet theories are nonsense.
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if everything is under control, you are not going fast enough (Mario Andretti)
it's not how fast you go, it's who gets there first
Arp and 'Seeing Red'
Adding to your comments about Arp and responding to earthling's query of what to do: Arp has been looking over the shoulders of everyone else who manage to get scope time because they are on the 'inside'. This is the best example of allowing very small diverted funding to gain huge benefits. If Arp was able to request just a few specific observations, I suspect he could drive a stake through the BBT heart in fairly short order. He is already making these guys look ridiculous, if anyone actually reads his papers (as I have).
Furthermore, funding becomes its own end for most of these guys. It is how you build your bona fides. Other than replacing/modifying the Hubble scope for even finer measurements (big bucks), most of the fights are in getting (any) time on the instruments (small bucks).
Cheers,
X_O
Arp
All of these are good points. What I've read of Arp's work has caused me to question whether we can even be certain that the universe is expanding.
This is just another example of how we've moved away from actual science - I don't remember who it was that said paradigms change one funeral at a time, but I think there's more truth to it than we know.
Anger
Wow, Michael, you get even more brilliant and cogent when you get mad! Super stuff. Only one thing...you haven't quite got mad enough to mention the "C" word yet..! Come on...don't be shy!
Laugh out Loud!!!
I did. Really.
As for the "C" word - well . . . I don't really want to actually come out and say that if someone looked deeply enough within, they'd discover the entire cosmos in that direction as well. I think people will just have to discover that for themselves.
:-)