Standards of evidence.

[Michael Mozina]

After the last claim about the supposed "discovery" of gravity waves by LIGO, I'm trying to decide if astronomers today even have any scientific standards of evidence at all. They are certainly not bound by purely "empirical" standards as it relates to any cause/effect claims of "evidence", in fact they seem to shun empirical standards altogether!

In terms of the recent gravity wave claim, nothing that was *certain* to be celestial in origin was even actually observed. The only thing that was actually "observed" was an event on Earth, which was *interpreted* to be related to some invisible process in spacetime at a distance of 1.5 *billion* light years. Talk about special pleading.

The BICEP2 fiasco paper was in fact based upon an "observation" from space, but the claimed "cause" of that observation was simply another example of special pleading.

The same was true of the 2006 lensing paper that claimed to find 'proof' (not even evidence mind you) of some type of exotic "dark matter". They simply "pretended" to be able to eliminate ordinary baryonic forms of matter as part of the "claim". It turned out however that they simply botched the stellar mass estimates by a whopping factor of between 3 and 20 depending on the type of galaxy and the size of the star. The also underestimated the number of stars *between* galaxies in a cluster, and the amount of plasma around every galaxy.

If we look at "dark energy" claims, they all stem from the mainstream *assumption* that all SN1A events are 'standard candles', yet we already now have evidence that they are not as "standard" as first "assumed".

Guth's imaginary inflation friend began it's life as a postdicted fit to a 'homogeneous" layout of matter, yet Planck has since demonstrated that there's a noticeable variation in the two hemispheres.

The whole concept of "space expansion" is based upon the premise that one can eliminate every possible combination of inelastic scattering and/or object movement from consideration. Another example of special pleading.

There's really nothing left standing in terms of any actual "evidence" to support any of the core mainstream claims.

The common denominator always seem to be their dubious claim to be able to eliminate all other possible mundane explanations for the observation in question, therefore "our new supernatural mythology of choice did it".

Is there any actual "standard" of evidence that can be applied to LCDM theory and have it actually pass that standard of evidence in 2016? It sure can't be applied to "dark matter" theory. It can't be applied to "dark energy" theory either. Never has any photon exhibited any form of redshift from "space expansion" in any lab on Earth.