The Nobel Prize in Creative Writing

In rhetoric, the strongest argument one can make is an a fortiori argument, where a claim is provided by providing a much stronger, encompassing argument. The a fortiori argument says if it is true in the unlikely case, then it must be true in the likely case. We often use a fortiori arguments here when referring to liberal news sources, not because they are dependably honest, but because they are dependably biased, and it is unlikely they will report on news damaging to other liberals unless its unavoidably true. A fun form of the a fortiori argument to use is of the form even if all your unproven assumptions were correct, your claim would still be provably false. That is a good way to go about disproving the junk science that gets promoted even by the most credentialed of scientists, such as neutron stars. Even if all their hypothetical assumptions were valid (that neutronium is even possible as a state of matter, that an neutral body can generate one of the strongest magnetic fields in the universe, that a dead star with only residual heat can generate enormous amounts of X-ray and even gamma radiation) the theory still fails because some neutron starts exceed the physical limits for how much radiation a body of a given size can emit. (No doubt some exotic hypothetical functionality has been proposed to explain that as well.) I can be confident that the hypothetical neutron star is wrong, not because I have more expertise or credentials than the scientists in academia, but because the a fortiori argument that can be crafted from their own evidence and explanations is so compelling.

A common trope made against conservatives by our mortal enemies is that we are "science deniers." One type of response would be those of the form "no we aren't" - evidence showing conservatives are more scientifically literate and whatnot - but an even better response would be of the form "have you seen the science?" Turning the question around like that can be effective because (a) they probably don't actually know anything about science, and (b) the science actually is shit. Usually their claims are derived from climate studies where the only fact they know is that 97% of climate scientists worship a small statue of Al Gore every night before bed. But, they aren't content to just stop at calling us global warming retarded, they want to call us science retarded. So we can either argue with them about climate science and then play the inevitable game of moving goalposts, or just clear the whole table with a single a fortiori argument.

It should be uncontroversial to state that some science is faulty. Look at the replication crisis in the social sciences. Most progressives I've ever debated believe that studies of IQ correlations are bunk and a big conspiracy. So that point can always be ceded. It will be much more controversial to propose that the topmost in science is faulty. Because if that were so, the a fortiori argument quickly follows. If the highest, most acclaimed reaches of science are prone to colossal blunders, then surely the entirety of the scientific knowledge should be treated with a degree of skepticism.

There is nothing more prestigious in science than the Nobel Prize in physics. Even most conservatives, who see the Nobel peace prize as almost a joke, still respect the awards in the hard sciences like physics and chemistry. However the peace prize, which was awarded pre-emptively for campaign promises that never materialized, was not revoked and its prestige diminished. What would happen if it was shown that a Nobel prize was awarded for debunked science? Would it be revoked? It seems that it would not, but the prize's prestige would suffer in kind.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three Americans for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe based on observing supernova redshifts. Or more accurately, for hypothesizing the accelerating expansion of the universe. As summarized in Astronomy Magazine,

Sixteen years ago, two teams of supernova hunters, one led by Saul Perlmutter of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and the other by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University, declared that the expansion of the universe is accelerating — a Nobel-prize-winning discovery tantamount to the discovery of dark energy.

The language is correct in stating that the supernova hunters declared that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but comparing it to the discovery of dark energy is possibly misleading, because dark energy has not been discovered, merely hypothesized to exist. Dark matter and dark energy are the magical entities required to make the favored theories work. So much is needed, in fact, that they are estimated to make up 95% of the universe.

As mentioned in The Science is Settled, dark matter arose because galaxies appear to have too little mass to remain intact, and rotational velocities of objects are not inversely proportional to their distance from the center, as is seen in our own solar system. (We obey the law in these parts.) Scientists decided that the most logical explanation is that there are vast amounts of additional matter - much greater than what is observed - that must exist in proximity to the galaxies but outside the orbits of its visible components. Dark matter was born. What else do we know about dark matter? Nothing. Only that it must exist, because the theories are akin to holy scripture and must not be wrong. Many hypotheses are floated, tests are performed at great public expense - often by launching a new thingy into orbit - but always the dark matter stays dark.

Dark energy was similarly concocted because, without it, the theories break. According to the Wikipedia article, it is on even shakier ground than dark matter.

The nature of dark energy is more hypothetical than that of dark matter, and many things about it remain matters of speculation.[19] Dark energy is thought to be very homogeneous and not very dense, and is not known to interact through any of the fundamental forces other than gravity. Since it is quite rarefied and un-massive — roughly 10−27 kg/m3 — it is unlikely to be detectable in laboratory experiments. The reason dark energy can have such a profound effect on the universe, making up 68% of universal density in spite of being so dilute, is that it uniformly fills otherwise empty space.

Like dark matter, no observations of dark energy have ever been made, and it is assumed that it could not be detectable in a laboratory, meaning at best it must always remain an exotic material. Just like how the whole mythology of neutron stars stems from a single observation - that there are flickering stars - the expanding universe hypothesis and resulting dark energy "discovery" all emanates from a single observation: that there are redshifts, which occur when light examined from distant objects is at a lower frequency. (This can be observed because the various common elements of the universe emit light with unique and consistent spectral signatures.) The redshift effect is compared to the pitch changes we hear when a locomotive or police car speeds past. Scientists have decided that relative motion is, in fact, the only explanation for observed redshifts, and thus have assumed that observed redshifts are all directly proportional to relative velocities. The more redshifted a star appears to be, the faster it must be moving away from the earth.

Since most objects are redshifted, and increasing distance is assumed to be the only cause of a redshift, then the universe must be expanding. That much has been standard science for almost a century. From the expanding universe came the Big Bang theory, that the universe began as a point of pure energy, exploded, and cooled as it expanded allowing matter to condense out of the primordial soup and form the structure of the cosmos. Physicists were focused on determining the mass of the universe as well as the deceleration rate of the expansion. The big question was whether the universe expansion would eventually slow to zero, before beginning a contraction phase, or if it would expand forever. (In short, would the universe end in a "Big Crunch" or a slow, fading heat death).

The work that won the 2011 Nobel prize was to use a subclass of supernovae (Type 1a) that were considered to be "standard candles" - that is, their brightness was consistent for all instances, and then compare the perceived brightness (since dimness equals distance) with their redshifts to determine the deceleration rate. They observed that nearby supernovas were more redshifted than expected compared to more distant (and thus older) supernovae, and came to the surprising conclusion that the expansion of the universe is increasing. There was, of course, no known force that works against gravity and is much stronger.

Now, before we continue on with the saga of dark energy, its worth revisiting that if one's theory, combined with observations, results in impossible or absurd conclusions, it should be assumed that either the theory or the observations are faulty. Frequently we hear language from principal investigators of significant projects using language like, "we must revisit our fundamental assumptions about the universe." That doesn't ever seem to happen, though. Instead, theorists response by just making shit up. More complexity is heaped onto the Rube Goldberg machine that they call the universe to explain the nagging experimental failures. Let's continue.

The unknown force driving the expansion of the universe wasn't the only confounding conclusion to come out of redshift research. The age of the universe was calculated to be just shy of 14 billion years, meaning the theoretical limit of the diameter of the universe must be 28 billion light years. Redshift theory implied a size of 93 billion light years. In the post-Einstein universe, the only constant is the speed of light. Thus, an implied size larger larger than the distance light could have traveled during the life of the universe should not be possible. Rather than conclude that either theory or observation were faulty, two more exotic theories were proposed.

First, the expansion of the universe can't be thought of as objects more apart from each other, like billiard balls after the break, but that the scale of the universe itself is expanding. Einstein's spacetime is not just a static rubber mat, can can be expand or shrink, dragging its contents with it.

Second, empty spacetime itself contains a slight, unknown energy that tends to repel against itself. Thus, spacetime pushes against itself and stretches out, which creates new expanses of space time, which has even more of the repulsive energy, which leads to even more stretching, etc etc. That is the theoretical dark energy in action.

They get around the violation of the speed of light because that only applies to objects within the universe, not the essence of the universe itself. The First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, and forbids perpetual energy systems, also doesn't apply for the same reason. (The laws of thermodynamics do not fundamentally preclude dark energy from being a perpetual funding system.) Spacetime seems to serve a purpose similar to the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution, giving all sort of leeway for otherwise illegal activities.

Imagine you hired a contractor to build your dream home. After taking the keys, you are shocked to discover that the house is only a fourth of the size of what you paid for. You confront the builder, and he claims, "I built the house exactly as specified. The problem is that the scale of the universe shrank, and the resulting disparities are completely outside my control." You would certainly drag the guy to court, and might even drag him some place where they wouldn't find the body. Peculiarly, you wouldn't tell by looking that the house was smaller. Even your trusty tape measure would report that the house had been built to spec. The only way you would expose the conman contractor would be to shine a laser from one end of the house to the other and measure it's time. Because in modern physics, the only constant is the speed of light, and everything else is maddeningly arbitrary. Even the fabric of space time might stretch right under our feet. [Note that to make this example work I had to assume that matter itself is stretched with spacetime, which I don't think is what the physicists are actually saying. Because if matter stretched then the meter would be redefined, and the speed of light would scale proportionally with the expansions of the universe, so there wouldn't be a stretching of light waves into lower frequencies. The scale of the universe could jump around all day and we'd be none the wiser. The example still conveys the basic logical framework at hand.]

We are told that, even though redshift theory has resulted in a huge body of scientific conclusions which are strongly counter-intuitive, we must accept where the theories are going because they are in such unison with the observed world. That can be very dangerous rationale and they apply it liberally. Of course the theories align with observations...they constantly retrofit the theory to accommodate the latest failures! That's where the power of prediction comes in, which is what separates a science from a pseudoscience. These people don't predict anything until after-the-fact. They make surprising observations, thrown in dark matter, dark energy, dark fluid, cull the outliers, ignore the contradictory observations, and then assure us its a perfect fit so we have to go with it.

By this point you might suspect I'm getting far too cynical here. It's not like I can propose any theory as good as the standard model of cosmology right? Actually I can, and so could you, I'm sure. Here's my stab at it. I theorize that there are Dark Fairies, and at each Planck second (the theoretical smallest quantum of time) they emerge from their Dark Space and move all the matter of the universe around using a Dark Force during a period of Dark Time. Thus, what we observe on Earth isn't actually the result of physical processes but merely the creation of the Dark Fairies who in turn obey the will of the Dark Lord, whose nature makes Him unlikely to be observable by humans in the laboratory, but does speak to us indirectly through His prophet, Al Gore.

Farfetched? Eh, it seems pretty reasonable to me, but some will disagree. (Mostly liberals.) But look, it has all the major characteristics of a theory in modern astrophysics!

1. It uses hypothetical Dark Things in all the right spots.
2. It perfectly matches observations.
3. It can't be disproven.

The last point is actually kind of a big deal, because theories that can't be disproven are not supposed to be valid theories at all. Remember superstrings? A couple decades ago they were the next big thing in physics, a theoretical sub-subatomic particle which explained all matter and all fundamental forces (including gravity) as resulting from a single entity. It was eventually abandoned because scientists couldn't come up with a way to disprove the theory. It's not quite clear to me how expanding spacetime could ever be disproved, either.

Perhaps you can see an a fortiori argument developing here against dark energy and the Nobel prize given for it. Because even if all the assumptions made to get to dark energy hold up, you're still left with a theory that may be unprovable, and thus not a valid theory at all. Even in the unlikely case that all this mumbo jumbo adds up, it's still invalid science. There are a lot of unproven assumptions holding up dark energy.

• That it is theoretically valid for dark energy to act only through gravity and not any of the other fundamental forces.
• That a mechanism exists for dark energy to "kick in" in only the last 5 billion years.
• That spacetime is real and "dynamic", rather than just an abstraction.
• That Type 1A supernovae are indeed a reliable standard candle.
• That redshift correlates to relative velocity.

Any of those could overturn the apple cart. The last one is especially juicy. If you are a young astrophysicist seeking to become famous, or perhaps infamous, disproving the redshift theory would be explosive. You would simultaneously invalidate the expanding universe, the Big Bang, dark energy, and at least one Nobel prize. Hopefully you are independently wealthy or have a benefactor who is, because you're not likely to find grant money for that work.

To wrap this one up, the common excuse liberals use to dismiss conservatives is that we are backwards, superstitious, and anti-science. In fact, we have strong reason to suspect that much of the most venerated science today is faulty, and it doesn't stem from an ignorance of work that's been done. It seems that some of the most prestigious awards were given for wild scientific postulates that should have never been "believed" in the first place. As we routinely see, they have a belief system all of their own. The idea of a belief in science segues into the next topic all look at in this thread, which is to examine how religion squares up to modern physics.