This article caught my eye ...

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BeAChooser
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This article caught my eye ...

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Dec 07, 2022 2:42 am

https://bgr.com/science/james-webb-tele ... rk-matter/
James Webb telescope breakthrough lets us ‘see’ dark matter

By Joshua Hawkins
I said ... like ... really?

Reading on ...
a trick with the James Webb space telescope could let us “see” dark matter.
COULD

“see”

Hmmmm ... sounds like click bait.
Previously, scientists discovered a never-before-seen particle that they believed could have been dark matter. It very well could still be dark matter, too. But there just isn’t enough evidence to say for sure.
That's intriguing. Turns outs the “never before seen particle that they believed could have been dark matter” is (https://bgr.com/science/scientists-disc ... rk-matter/) … “the cousin of the Higgs boson particle” … the “axial Higgs boson." What? You never heard of it? Neither had I. So I went digging starting with the author’s link to another article by him describing this axial Higgs boson discovery. Hmmmm … very intriguing I thought. Maybe they've finally found DM.

But then I found someone who appears to see the problem in that claim …

https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/06/1 ... iscovered/
News Flash: Has a New Axial Higgs Boson (Possibly Dark Matter) Been Discovered?

June 11, 2022 by Matt Strassler

No.

No, no, no.

I was tempted to blame the science journalists for the incredibly wrong articles about this, but in fact it seems entirely the fault of the scientists involved.
Wanting to find out more, I read on ...
Look at the opening of their abstract in Nature.

“The observation of the Higgs boson solidified the standard model of particle physics. However, explanations of anomalies (for example, dark matter) rely on further symmetry breaking, calling for an undiscovered axial Higgs mode.”

These first statement is true. The second is true/false, à la Cicero, where you can’t say it’s either one. It weaves grains of truth into a misleading sentence, implying all sorts of false things that would give any non-expert the wrong impression. What comes next?

"The Higgs mode was also seen in magnetic, superconducting and charge density wave (CDW) systems.”

Suddenly we’re not talking about the Higgs boson anymore. We’re talking about “the Higgs mode” — that’s a Higgs-like ripple in an object made of atoms — an analogue to the Higgs boson found in an physical material. This kind of “Higgs mode” cannot exist outside of that material.

“Uncovering the vector properties of a low-energy mode is challenging, and requires going beyond typical spectroscopic or scattering techniques. Here we discover an axial Higgs mode in the CDW system RTe3 using the interference of quantum pathways.”

Oh, so that’s what this was all about… finding an axial mode in a physical material, which cannot exist outside of that material. Cool. But not what it sounded like initially.

In short, this discovery has nothing directly to do with either Higgs bosons such as we see at the Large Hadron Collider, nor dark matter as seen in its possible effects on galaxies… both of them being phenomena which can exist in empty space anywhere in the universe. If you’d gotten the impression that this was going to be a paper about particle physics, well… Bait and Switch.
So ... maybe Joshua should learn how to use his browser before writing future *science* articles.

Reading on, Matt Strassler concludes ...
The blatant over-advertising of this discovery in condensed-matter physics, as though it were a major discovery in particle physics as well, has directed attention away from this nice experiment (which I would otherwise have been happy to blog about), and focused our attention instead on the authors’ public relations. What is the public to think when claims of huge discoveries are made, and broadcast through the media as virtually Nobel-Prize-worthy, which have nothing to do with what has actually been done in the experiment? When journalists are led to write headlines such as “Physicists Discover Never-Before Seen Particle Sitting On a Tabletop; The Newly Discovered Particle Could Account For Dark Matter”, when in fact this is a “quasi-particle” inside a material from which it cannot escape (and moreover, table-top discoveries of quasi-particles are not uncommon), then something has gone very wrong indeed. The authors have caused immense confusion, and damaged science’s reputation, for the sake of fifteen minutes of infamy.
Oh my … maybe that’s why neither you or I every heard anything about this. Because they did NOT discover dark matter. Joshua is just confused and indeed seeking his own 15 minutes of infamy.

Now, back to his claim that JWST could be seeing the stuff. He is really cagey … or confused … not actually saying how JWST is going to do it. He talks about a “new technique” that “traces” the “distribution” of dark matter with a “system" "known as intracluster light”. Then he links another article (https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/973180) saying the “new method essentially lets us trace out dark matter and map it out in ways that have never been possible before.” End of article. Go to the link and it talks about the JWST seeing intracluster light. But all it says about dark matter is that "these observations not only offer clues about the formation of galaxy clusters, but also about the properties of a mysterious component of our universe: dark matter. The stars which emit the intracluster light follow the gravitational field of the cluster, which makes this light an excellent tracer of the distribution of the dark matter in these structures. 'The JWST will let us characterize the distribution of the dark matter in these enormous structures with unprecedented precision, and throw light on its basic nature' concludes Ignacio Trujillo, the second author of the article." In other word, more vague claims.

So the author, Joshua Hawkins, is putting out click bait that essentially says nothing. So I checked him out by clicking his name at the bottom of the article. He looks like a young high school teen … with 958 such articles cluttering the internet. Heaven help us. Look further (https://www.lifewire.com/joshua-hawkins-5080531) and you find out he graduated from something called “Full Sail University” (which appears to be connected to the entertainment industry) and has a B. F. A. in “Creative Writing for Entertainment”. Ahhhhhh.

Like I’ve said before, there’s a whole cottage industry that has built up around astrophysics' many gnomes.

Please stop funding mainstream astrophysics ... and put these people out of work (at least those reporting fantasy as science).

Science has enough problems as it is.

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