Intersectional Astrophysics

Last year, a feminist academic from Europe stirred a few amused headlines when she attempted to co-opt quantum physics into her social analysis. The gist of her article is that Newtonian physics with its discrete state space is separatist and bigoted, but the wave function distributions of quantum mechanics sounds more appealing to people who use terms like genderfluid. She doesn't realize that those wave functions only represent uncertainty and collapse to classical states upon observation, but that's what makes it fun. We can see why wave functions would appeal to professionals of the various intersectional "studies" programs - which all amount to an assault on objective reality. Their whole ethos is not to be judged, since they inherently know they don't measure up. They much prefer the pre-observation wave function uncertainty to post-observation discrete reality.

The normal reaction is to scoff at the feminists for attempting to latch onto more serious disciplines to substantiate their fake studies. I would counter that it is merely the logical progression for astrophysics - a field that already rejects objective reality in favor of magical fantasies. If we can't dismiss what the astrophysicists are claiming, then we can't really dismiss the feminists either. It is a free-for-all where everyone is always right. Sounds exaggerated? Consider this AP science article that appeared this week, covering the recent work of a Nobel Prize recipient. (That is, it couldn't be more mainstream.)

New Study Says Universe Expanding Faster and is Younger.

The universe is expanding faster than it used to, meaning it’s about a billion years younger than we thought, a new study by a Nobel Prize winner says. And that’s sending a shudder through the world of physics, making astronomers re-think some of its most basic concepts.

The last sentence should catch your attention if you regularly read the science articles here...and I love pointing these out. Results routinely mandate that the world of physics should "re-think some of its most basic concepts." They always say that, and yet it never happens. It's comical, at this point, to see the constant flood of results indicating that the basic assumptions are wrong, and yet they just keep trudging along, adding complexity where they can to try to get the numbers to work.

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Johns Hopkins University astronomer Adam Riess concluded in this week’s Astrophysical Journal that the figure is 9% higher than the previous calculation, which was based on studying leftovers from the Big Bang.

The trouble is, Riess and others think both calculations are correct.

Confused? That’s OK, so are the experts.

What happens when results are contradictory? In astrophysics, everyone gets to be correct! Or at least so long as they've won a Nobel Prize. (One of the other fun aspects of modern physics is seeing how blatantly wrong Nobel Prize-winning results will have to be for the scientific community to admit it.)

They find the conflict so confounding that they are talking about coming up with “new physics,” incorporating perhaps some yet-to-be-discovered particle or other cosmic “fudge factors” like dark energy or dark matter.

“It’s looking more and more like we’re going to need something new to explain this,” said Riess, who won the 2011 Nobel in physics.

(For background, the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics is the same one that this blog critiqued last year in The Nobel Prize in Creative Writing as the foremost example of the Nobel Prize being issued for what are most likely flawed conclusions.)

It is quite pleasing to see honest reporting these days. Scientists are "confounded," and hypothetical constructs like dark matter and dark energy are "fudge factors." That is entirely correct. I wish they'd go one step further and describe these research institutes as "fudge factories."

NASA astrophysicist John Mather, another Nobel winner, said this leaves two obvious options: “1. We’re making mistakes we can’t find yet. 2. Nature has something we can’t find yet.”

Everyone here understands the pattern, I suspect. The correct option is #1, yet they will go with #2.

To come up with his measurement of the Hubble constant, Riess looked to some not-so-distant stars. Riess observed 70 Cepheid stars — stars that pulse at a well-observed rate — calculated their distance and rate, and then compared them with a certain type of supernovae that are used as measuring sticks.

Both approaches make the same flawed assumption, which is that class 1A supernovae are "standard candles" - all of identical luminosities. Questioning the standard candle theory is the kind of "re-thinking of basic concepts" that they always talk about, but never do.

It took about two years for the Hubble telescope to make these measurements, but eventually Riess calculated an expansion rate of 74. Using that 74 figure means the universe is somewhere between 12.5 billion and 13 billion years old. That’s much younger than the established estimates of 13.6 billion to 13.8 billion. [...] Riess calculated the odds that the disparity between the two calculations was an accident at 1 in 100,000.

On the other hand, the odds of a disparity when basic assumptions of the domain are false is very high.

The next section just needs to be posted in its entirety.

While there is a chance either the Riess team or the Planck team is off, astronomers are talking about both being right.

Both calculations make sense and “nobody can find anything wrong at this point,” said distinguished University of Chicago astrophysicist Wendy Freedman. Other outside experts praised both teams’ research.

If that’s the case, astrophysicists need to make adjustments in Einstein’s general relativity theory.

“You need to add something into the universe that we don’t know about,” said Chris Burns, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “That always makes you kind of uneasy.’

In the past, astronomers added hard-to-fathom dark energy and dark matter to explain why calculations didn’t add up, borrowing from a once-discarded Einstein theory. Now they’re saying they need to do something similar again.

It could be there’s an extra “turbocharge” from a past odd pulse of dark energy — an unseen expansion force that fits well in Einstein’s theories — that caused the speeded-up expansion, Riess said.

Or there could be a new particle of matter that hasn’t been discovered, Burns said.

“We have this dark sector that already has two ingredients, and maybe we’re discovering a third,” said Planck team member Lloyd Knox of the University of California, Davis. “That’s a scary prospect. Are we just going to always be introducing fudge factors?”

Yes, you are always going to be introducing fudge factors until either (1) you actually do what you always say you'll do, and question basic assumptions like redshift theory, or (2) the funding runs out and you are forced to take productive jobs.

Astronomers at the University of Chicago, led by Freedman, spent five years looking at different stars than Riess to come up with a third calculation of the expansion rate. They just submitted their work to the same journal. Freedman wouldn’t reveal her number but said it is between the two other figures.

A third study using a third set of stars comes up with a third result. More evidence that theory is flawed? Of course not! Like gender studies, everyone gets to be correct. It just means more opportunities for hypothetical exotic states of matter and - most importantly - more opportunities for funding initiatives.

If astrophysicists are allowed to be wrong over and over again, and attribute their shortcomings to as-yet unknown universe magic, why can't feminists? It only seems fair. At this point, the "intersectional physics" is probably more realistic than the actual astrophysics.