The sad and sorry state of astronomy in 2017

[Michael Mozina]

Space's Deepest Secrets: The Curse Of Dark Matter.

I watched the most recent episode of Space's Deepest Secrets last night, entitled The Curse of Dark matter. It was just released this year in May of 2017, but in terms of the content, it could have been written and produced over a decade ago.

What was most striking about a 2017 show on cosmology was the fact that they made absolutely no mention at all about all the *failed* dark matter tests in the lab over the past decade. They said absolutely nothing about the negative results from LHC, nothing about LUX, nothing about PandaX, nothing about AMDx, nothing even about the xenon100 results, nothing even remotely resembling a "historical" account of events of any sort. All they showed was an introduction to the Xenon-1T experiment and they made a handwave about WIMPS still being the most likely candidate for exotic matter.

They even had the sheer audacity to go back to citing their falsified and tired old "Bullet Cluster" study while never once mentioning any of the six major mass estimation errors that were made in that study from 2006. They completely avoided any mention of anything negative related to their dark matter claims that has occurred over the past decade. Talk about a one sided "story". Holy cow.

Never did they once mention the fact that the mainstream blew the brightness of the various galaxies in that Bullet Cluster study by a factor of two. Never did they once mention the fact that they also underestimated the number of stars in those galaxies by between 3 and 20 times back in 2006. They didn't mention the fact that they underestimated the stars that are located *between* galaxies in those clusters. They never mentioned the halo of hot plasma or that second halo of neutral hydrogen atoms that they've since found around our own galaxy. They literally ignored every single bit of evidence that didn't favor their exotic matter claim. They basically just ignored everything that we've learned over the past decade and they pretended that none of it ever happened.

Where they ended up is exactly where they started over a decade ago, with no actual answers, a handwave about WIMPS, and a less than *accurate* portrayal of events over the past decade.

The show did of course get into the dark energy claims too, and of course they had the obligatory stupid commentary about how the multiverse might be "giving" us dark energy and dark matter to our universe. The whole show looked like something that literally could have been produced a decade ago because nothing new has been learned over the past decade, or at least nothing *in their favor* has been learned over the past decade, so they just edited out every negative result over the past decade.

I was disgusted at the complete lack of any sort of "fair and balanced" approach to the entire subject, and the complete lack of current information that was never presented in the show. What a waste of time and money and effort on all those 'tests' of the mainstream claims since they simply sweep all the negative results of those tests right under the carpet, and all they had over the past decade in terms of results were things that they had to sweep under the carpet.

I think the only really 'worthwhile" part of the watching that show happened at the very end when Michelle Thaller explained the real reason that the mainstream remains firmly stuck in the dark ages of physics. She literally stated:

"Wouldn't it be depressing to be in a universe where you could understand everything? I mean I don't like that idea. I love it that there are still real mysteries out there."

I think that specific quote pretty much sums up the basic problem with the mainstream in a nutshell. They don't *like* the idea of even living in a 'knowable' universe so they simply make up stuff which simply does not exist just to keep things "mysterious".

Make no mistake about it, empirical physics in the form of EU/PC theory *will* eventually allow us to live in a universe where a lot more is knowable than is known today. I don't find that depressing, I find that wildly exciting for physics.

Simply ignoring the failed history of dark matter and ignoring all those baryonic mass estimation problems in that Bullet Cluster study won't make those numerous problems go away. It's one thing to 'spin' a decade of negative results, but it's another thing entirely to live in pure denial of the results of your own so called 'tests' of your claim.

It's pretty depressing to think that astronomers know nothing more about the universe than they knew in 2006. Time is simply standing still in astronomy today because astronomers don't like the negative results of their own tests, and all they have are negative results!

What a sad and sorry state of affairs in astronomy in 2017. It's like time stood still for the mainstream for the past decade. They learned absolutely nothing in those billions of dollars of "tests" of their claims.

[Maol]

Came across that show channel surfing last night too, and after a few moments perusal found it to be Science Fiction, just as you describe, but did go on surfing and learned the fact that only one episode of Perry Mason was filmed in color, so not everything on TV is a wasteland.

[Michael Mozina]

Came across that show channel surfing last night too, and after a few moments perusal found it to be Science Fiction, just as you describe, but did go on surfing and learned the fact that only one episode of Perry Mason was filmed in color, so not everything on TV is a wasteland.

You can tell that I was bored because I actually watched the whole thing. I was actually curious to see how the mainstream would try to justify their science fiction in 2017, but it's clear that nothing has changed much in terms of the dogma over the past decade.

I think the most interesting aspect of that show was the amount of pure unadulterated denial and pure gall that was required to ignore all six of their *major* baryonic mass estimate mistakes in that 2006 lensing study and try to refer to that lensing study in a more round about way as still being 'definitive" in terms of the need for exotic matter.

They were reduced to testing only "two" cluster collision simulations, one based on their dark matter model, and one that either ignored all their stellar mass errors and didn't include any extra mass at all, or they put all the extra mass into the high temperature halo plasma. I'm not even sure that they actually included any extra mass at all in the second supercomputer simulation. They didn't even make that much clear. They certainly didn't test a second model that was based on the actual baryonic mass errors that they made in terms of adding more stellar mass to the simulation.

I was also struck by the pure unadulterated denial factor that was required to refrain from mentioning any, let alone all the laboratory failures of the past, while only focusing on and mentioning one dark matter experiment that hasn't released results yet *after their last upgrade*. The didn't even mention their prior xenon100 results. In fact they didn't even mention the LHC experiments and data in spite of the fact that it required billions of dollars and thousands of man/woman years to collect all that scientific data. Talk about being stuck on the denial-go-round. Sheesh.

I "think" I got the sense of a little less bravado this year, but I didn't even see a hint of any change in the basic dogma. Even the multiverse nonsense is still being referred to, only now being suggested as a possible "source" of their mythical dark stuff, I guess to try to work around their gigantic problem of dark energy remaining constant over multiple exponential increases in volume. I guess they're tired of me pointing out that they can't even name a single source of dark energy, so that was their "fix".

I gotta tell ya, that was just sad to watch. It was like watching little children try to describe the universe based on pure wild imagination, and no understanding of the observations and experiments of the past decade, or anything learned over the past decade. It was pure denial on a stick.

I thought Thaller's last quote told the whole story as to why and how the mainstream is stuck in pure denial. Apparently she'd be depressed to have a real understanding of how the universe works, so it's "better" for her to *not* find real empirical solutions to cosmology problems. That's pretty much their motive I suppose.

I think astronomy today is held together by a combination of fear, intimidation, and pure denial. They can't handle a real public debate on these topics (or gravitational wave discovery claims I might add), so they have ban anyone and everyone that attempts to debate them in public, or they avoid us like the plague, or they do both. They can't attack the message of empirical physical solutions to cosmology problems, so they attack the messengers instead.

Over a thousand of these folks recently signed their name to a gravitational wave paper/claim that doesn't even contain a sigma calculation that is even remotely related to cause, which has hugely flawed confirmation bias problems, and that has no scientific way to distinguish between ordinary blip transients, and extraordinary celestial events! According to Tyson, there's only around 8,000 astrophysicists in the world, so a substantial fraction of them definitely have a *serious* confirmation bias problem. Over 250 of them couldn't tell the difference between polarized photon patterns from ordinary dust and gravitational waves in that BICEP2 study a few years ago.

The whole of astronomy in 2017 is basically "science fiction". They even use "pseudoscience" to try to describe the five percent of the universe that they claim is made of plasma, so literally *none* (ZERO) of their claims are actually "science fact". Oy Vey.

I think they all went to Trump university.

[BeAChooser]

I think they all went to Trump university.

I think they all came out of the same sort of leftist *edutainment* programs pumping out all the so-called *scientists* who believe in AGW dogma ... rather than the actual data.

[Zyxzevn]

About education..

Education is certainly a problem.
Often the students learn only one way to solve a problem and
this is usually only the simplest one. Even when it is wrong.
Even PhD students follow that trend.

I had discussion in a physics forum where static magnetism was explained
with surface currents. And no-one protested against the fact that
surface currents are both wrong and do not work.
Two wrongs still do not make it right.
We do not see surface currents, and surface currents are in this case
caused by changing magnetic fields, not static magnetic fields.

Astronomy is full with oversimplified models that are not realistic
(conflict with detailed observations) and do actually not work.
They seem ok, as long you do not look too deep into them.
I see similar trends in biology, history, some variations of computer science.
It seems that each science has a "dark" corner.

It seems that scientists learn to approach a problem the simplest way possible,
without considering the alternatives.
They do not learn or realize that these simplified solutions are wrong.
They do not match what is really observed and the models do not work in details.

In physics there is also the problem that some scientists believe that we have found
the "end of physics". That the used models are enough to explain everything.
But they ignore that they can not be used in combination, and that there are some
miracles involved to make the models work.

[Michael Mozina]

I think they all went to Trump university.

I think they all came out of the same sort of leftist *edutainment* programs pumping out all the so-called *scientists* who believe in AGW dogma ... rather than the actual data.

Touche'

[Michael Mozina]

Astronomy is full with oversimplified models that are not realistic
(conflict with detailed observations) and do actually not work.
They seem ok, as long you do not look too deep into them.
I see similar trends in biology, history, some variations of computer science.
It seems that each science has a "dark" corner.

It seems that scientists learn to approach a problem the simplest way possible,
without considering the alternatives.
They do not learn or realize that these simplified solutions are wrong.
They do not match what is really observed and the models do not work in details.

In physics there is also the problem that some scientists believe that we have found
the "end of physics". That the used models are enough to explain everything.
But they ignore that they can not be used in combination, and that there are some
miracles involved to make the models work.

I think you're right, and that oversimplification issue has plagued the mainstream as far back as the Chapman/Birkeland debates. Chapman's model was "simpler" to explain to students from a mathematical perspective, but it wasn't correct. Birkeland's model was mathematically messy and harder to explain in a classroom setting, but it actually worked in the lab. The fact that Chapman's model was mathematically simpler however made it seem like a "more elegant" solution from the mainstream perspective, but nature is often rather "messy".

It's inconceivable to me however that the mainstream could be so resistant to the notion of incorporating electricity, electric fields, current, and circuit theory into their plasma physics models. It's not like electricity is "new" or that it doesn't have a tangible effect on plasma in the lab. When we heat plasma to very high temperatures here on Earth, we typically use E fields and current to do it. Electrical discharges here on Earth "naturally" produce x-rays and gamma rays and high temperature plasma. Somehow they look at the x-rays from million degree coronal loops in the solar atmosphere however and they pretend that magnetism alone is responsible for not only heating plasma to millions of degrees, but also sustaining plasma at those temperatures for days and weeks on end. It just doesn't make any sense.

I think I'm most dismayed at the mainstream's pure arrogance. It's one thing to hold beliefs with a fair amount of humility about the fact that 95 percent of your "belief system" is nothing more than placeholder terms for human ignorance.

It's another thing entirely to hold such beliefs with a "math-ier than thou" attitude while publicly misrepresenting alternatives to your own beliefs. Brian Koberlein's erroneous commentary about EU/PC solar models predicting "no neutrinos' demonstrates that either they don't have the first clue about EU theory, or they have no ethics whatsoever. In his particular case I'm inclined to believe that it's an ethics problem, but no one from the mainstream has confronted him on his nonsense, and that probably speaks more to their collective ignorance of competing ideas. Some folks in the mainstream are *so* arrogant, they actually go out of their way to willfully misrepresent the basic concepts of EU/PC theory on their websites, and they've become so detached from reality that they publicly ridicule empirical physical alternatives to their supernatural nonsense. It's the arrogance factor that gets them in trouble IMO, not necessarily their educational background. For all that education, they typically do *very poorly* in any sort of online debate scenario. You'd think they'd be more humble considering how little they actually 'know" about even their own theory.

Maybe it's their Phd's that go to their heads, but they seem to lack any sense of humility, even while trying to peddle a belief system that technically is devoid of actual empirical "knowledge". They can't even name a single identified source of dark energy, and the last SN1A study ended up about 2 sigma short of a even rising to the level of "discovery" in terms of acceleration/dark energy. That supernatural bad boy makes up the vast majority of their belief system, and they can't answer even the simplest questions about it.

I think somewhere along the line they simply learned to repeat dogma very efficiently, but they forgot how to think critically, or they were punished for thinking critically, and they were taught to *not* think for themselves in an independent manner. It's like listening to the steppford wives repeating the same dogma over and over again without any real understanding of what it even means.

There's also a significant amount of pure denial involved in propping up their dogma today, particularly after the revelations of the past decade. I don't see it getting any better anytime soon either. They have become emotionally and intellectually dependent upon sweeping all information that conflicts with their dogma right under the rug. The last decade's worth of lab results were all negative, yet not once in that video did they mention that fact. Instead they simply pointed to the Xenon-1T upgrades and the acted like none of their other tests ever occurred.

I think they're running scared in the age of the internet because they're just not used to having to justify their belief systems to a skeptical audience, and they're basically clueless to alternative theories. Few if any of them have read Alfven's work, or Birkeland's work, and those that have either don't understand it, or they're so afraid of it that they go out of their way to *misrepresent* the material!

I'd say that the educational system itself is partly responsible. It rewards unquestioning allegiance to a single belief system, and it tend to punish independent thought. I think that's also why they don't tend to do well in a public debate because they aren't used to thinking for themselves, and they aren't particularly knowledgeable about alternatives to their belief system.

The part that blew me away the most in that 2017 episode on dark matter is their complete denial of all the failed tests of their claims. They literally blew off billions of dollars of failed tests of their claims over the past decade without a single mention of them. They failed to even acknowledge all the baryonic mass estimate problems in that 2006 Bullet Cluster study too. That's just stunningly arrogant of them to continuously and methodically filter out any and all information that is not congruent with their claims. They're constantly having to lie to themselves, and lie to everyone else by their constant omission of any and all relevant evidence that doesn't support their claims, or that refutes their claims. That kind of selective filtering ends up working against them in a public debate because they end up being oblivious to the historical facts.

[Zyxzevn]

I'd say that the educational system itself is partly responsible. It rewards unquestioning allegiance to a single belief system, and it tend to punish independent thought. I think that's also why they don't tend to do well in a public debate because they aren't used to thinking for themselves, and they aren't particularly knowledgeable about alternatives to their belief system.

One problem is that most good scientists are getting good jobs in the industry, while the lesser
scientists stay behind and have to explain things-that-they-don't-understand, to students.
And at the same time these oversimplified models are promoted with as a dogma, because
the teachers do not want to discussions about the validity of the models or their simplified explanations.

Another problem is the popular science trends to spread fake ideas with fake head-lines.
Like: "Quantum Teleportation successful" or "gravity waves proof big-bang."
So, if you are not educated in the area, you get the impression that something very interesting
has been discovered. While if you know more, or look deeper in to it,
you find out that all of it is just speculation.

The students themselves learn from old books that promote over-simplified models.
That is because they have to learn a bit from everything to finish their study.
But that also gives them the wrong ideas on almost everything.
And to compensate that, we have "sceptics", that promote the wrong models to
these students and chair-scientists. They explain that having different ideas is
like supporting "flat earth". And they discourage anyone from exploring
deeper into the subjects by spreading lies and false information.
Because it is more important for them to "stop people from getting wrong ideas"
(as one sceptic said to me), than to be actually true with their information.
They actively stop people to find out for themselves what is correct,
sometimes with threats of violence, or harassment.
Sadly they have forgotten that people get smarter by exploring different ideas and models,
not with lies and violence.
They always believe that people with other observations or ideas are crazy or lying to justify their behaviour.

The mythbusters on the other hand, correct wrong ideas with actual experiments. They did not attack
the ideas or the people themselves. Which is a lot better, and it encourages people to do
real testing of their ideas. Or to revise your ideas when they appear wrong.

In Astronomy though, the astronomy myths are busted almost every day.
And still these "scientists" don't change their ideas.

The part that blew me away the most in that 2017 episode on dark matter is their complete denial of all the failed tests of their claims.

This is because most of the sciences have gone a long way, by correcting each error with an addition
to the model. Big bang is corrected with dark matter and dark energy, etc.
Yet their minds can not go back to question the model that they started with.
It seems that you have to be smarter than all the scientists involved.
Yet they forget that all these other scientists are only trying to keep the
house of cards standing.

[Michael Mozina]

They actively stop people to find out for themselves what is correct,
sometimes with threats of violence, or harassment.

I think that's best exemplified by the behaviors of folks like "reality check' (Koberlein?) that go out of their way to harass and belittle the individual instead of sticking to the topic. It's the attack on the individual that irks me the most, along with the blatant misrepresentation of EU/PC models.

Sadly they have forgotten that people get smarter by exploring different ideas and models,
not with lies and violence.
They always believe that people with other observations or ideas are crazy or lying to justify their behaviour.

They're welcome to "think" whatever they like, but when they publicly crucify the individual, it's counterproductive to the free exchange of ideas. I do have to wonder however how "honest" the critics actually are, particularly when they botch simple stuff like neutrino predictions. No EU/PC solar model predicts "no neutrinos" as Koberlein erroneously claims. Birkeland didn't promote *three* solar models or predict that the sun only emits electrons as Bridgman erroneously claims. Where do they even get such nonsense? Are those even "honest" mistakes?

I also get tired of the whole 'debunking' mentality as though they think they can "debunk" an entire cosmology theory by focusing on some perceived problem in a solar model, and often the original perception isn't even correct to start with.

It would be like trying to "debunk" LCDM theory by willfully misrepresenting the theory, and then 'debunking' a complete strawman. It's just pathetic how little they understand, or how little the care about honesty, one of the other. They don't even seem to be honest with themselves as far as I can tell.

The mythbusters on the other hand, correct wrong ideas with actual experiments. They did not attack
the ideas or the people themselves. Which is a lot better, and it encourages people to do
real testing of their ideas. Or to revise your ideas when they appear wrong.

The problem with the mainstream is that they never question their core assumptions when something appears to be wrong with it. Take for example the "cold spot" they found in WMAP and verified with Planck, or the hemispheric variations they found in Planck. Those observations do not fit the inflation model well. They could look at that cold spot as a falsification mechanism of inflation theory, but instead they try to justify the existence of that cold spot by claiming to have evidence to support 'multiverse" theory. If something doesn't work right with four supernatural claims, just add a fifth one! Oy Vey.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017 ... ace-could/

The same thing is true of "dark matter". You'd "think" that the lensing data from 2006 would have caused them to reconsider the validity and accuracy of their baryonic mass estimation techniques based upon light. Instead, they simply "assumed" their baryonic mass estimates of galaxies were correct, and they "assumed" the existence of some form of exotic matter, and away they went claiming to have "proof" (ya, they actually used that word) of 'dark matter'. All they all actually "proved" in that study is that their baryonic mass estimates were a joke in 2006, as many later studies have since verified. None of the information of the past decade matters one iota to them however, at least not from what I saw on that recent video. Time might as well have simply stood still for the past decade as far as their dogma is concerned. It's like the LHC experiments, and LUX experiments and PandaX experiments, etc, never happened.

In Astronomy though, the astronomy myths are busted almost every day.
And still these "scientists" don't change their ideas.

Well, in fairness they have "changed" big bang theory over the years, typically for the worse in terms of their introduction of additional ad-hoc supernatural constructs like inflation and dark energy. Even the meaning of the term "dark matter" has changed over time. When I was in college that term didn't necessarily imply exotic matter. Today they can't even live without exotic matter lest their nucleosynthesis claims go up in smoke. In fact they can't even modify the percentages of exotic matter very much and still get it work right.

This is because most of the sciences have gone a long way, by correcting each error with an addition
to the model. Big bang is corrected with dark matter and dark energy, etc.
Yet their minds can not go back to question the model that they started with.
It seems that you have to be smarter than all the scientists involved.
Yet they forget that all these other scientists are only trying to keep the
house of cards standing.

It's not even about "being smart", it's about "being logical". If you need multiple placeholder terms for human ignorance to describe 95 percent of your model, it's not a "good" model to begin with. The logical thing to do is to start over from scratch and begin putting together a theory that is based upon pure empirical physical solutions to various observations. They don't even seem capable of starting over from scratch in spite of the fact that they don't understand 95 percent of their own theory! It's just sad.

I once held belief in LCDM like they did, but the more they added ad-hoc stuff to it, the less attractive it became to me. Dark energy was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for me. If you need to add 70 percent supernatural gap filler over *one* observation, something is *seriously* wrong with your model. They never even once questioned their assumed "cause" of photon redshift, not for a single second. Their "fix" was to simply make up another ad hoc construct and stuff it into another BB variation.

The dark matter theory in particular has been 'tested' to the tune of billions of dollars. Their 'predictions" with respect to lab results have been a 100 percent *failure*. If it has no predictive usefulness, what good is it? Why spend billions of dollars supposedly 'testing' your claims if you absolutely refuse to accept any sort of falsification scenario? Its just wasted time and money apparently since that video didn't mention a single NULL lab result. What then is the point of even doing the experiment in the first place?

I gotta tell you, if the 'skeptics' of EU/PC theory are any indication of the knowledge level of the mainstream, they are absolutely clueless about any real alternatives to their beliefs. They don't even understand the most basic aspects of EU/PC solar models, let alone the cosmology side of the debate.

I really think LCDM proponents are doing current astronomy students a serious disservice when they willfully misrepresent other theories, while they blatantly ignore the glaring problems in their own theory, and they belittle everyone who questions their dogma. All they are doing is creating a generation of astronomy 'students" that are in for serious disappointment the first time they try to debate cosmology ideas on the internet. Not only are their new students likely to be ignorant of the problems in LCDM theory because they keep sweeping the problems under the rug, they also end up spewing *misinformation* about EU/PC ideas and they end up looking entirely foolish.

I pity current astronomy students in college today. They're being fed pure BS at this point and they're getting a completely "whitewashed" view of history. I'm sick of hearing the mainstream claim that "Hubble proved that the universe is expanding". Hubble did nothing of the sort. All Hubble ever claimed to demonstrate is that there is a distance/redshift relationship. Period. Hubble didn't dismiss the idea of tired light theory, or dismiss the possibility of a static universe, but to listen to the mainstream tell the story, a student of astronomy today would never know that, just like they'd never know that Alfven rejected 'magnetic reconnection" as 'pseudoscience", or that Einstein rejected the concept of an infinitely dense point called a "black hole". New astronomy students today are clueless about the real history of astronomy because their "professors" handed them pure BS in class.

[Michael Mozina]

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/First ... r_999.html

First we get the obligatory sales pitch:

Dark matter is one of the basic constituents of the universe, five times more abundant than ordinary matter. Several astronomical measurements have corroborated the existence of dark matter, leading to a world-wide effort to observe directly dark matter particle interactions with ordinary matter in extremely sensitive detectors, which would confirm its existence and shed light on its properties.

Sure, forget the fact that that those "astronomical measurements" are physically incapable of distinguishing between ordinary matter and exotic forms of matter, and their infamous Bullet Cluster study was shown to be *riddled* with mass estimation errors....

So what did they find?

"WIMPs did not show up in this first search with XENON1T, but we also did not expect them so soon!" says Elena Aprile, Professor at Columbia University and spokesperson of the project.

"The best news is that the experiment continues to accumulate excellent data which will allow us to test quite soon the WIMP hypothesis in a region of mass and cross-section with normal atoms as never before. A new phase in the race to detect dark matter with ultra-low background massive detectors on Earth has just began with XENON1T. We are proud to be at the forefront of the race with this amazing detector, the first of its kind."

Their mythical WIMP is supposedly 5 times more abundant than ordinary matter, but not a single detection in a whole month's worth of data. Who would have guessed?

Don't worry though, Xenon-1T is more sensitive and many times better than it's predecessors at finding absolutely nothing.

[Zyxzevn]

There is a new theory (again!) that tries to explain dark matter stuff.

This time with "quantum vacuum":
https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00543
which is of course related to the worst prediction in Science.
https://youtu.be/g20JZ2HNZaw?t=386

I feel a disturbance in the field..