Contrabang #5 Dark Matter Bonus

A short one this week. Ethan didn't write much on the topics that are relevant to this blog series. He did produce a podcast on the expanding universe (a theory I oppose) but I'm not interested in listening to the full hour, let alone providing counterpoint on it.

Some of his articles this week covered particle physics and quantum mechanics. While my skepticism of all scientists continually grows, I see no apparent fault with the conclusions of those particular fields, nor any of the contradictions so prevalent in astrophysics. I have no argument to make, so I leave them alone.

One article that might be in bounds is this one regarding Einsteinian bending of light. General relativity is perplexing because it does not seem - to me - to be either totally correct, nor totally incorrect. I'm not sure where the split is (and if I did, I suppose I could become very famous one day). Einstein made some predictions which are solidly verified, some which have been verified through means the deserve skepticism (such as the gravitational wave detection at LIGO), and some which are inherently preposterous, such as black hole theory. As far as this particular article goes, I have no argument to make about Einstein's apparently successful prediction of gravitational light bending, so I must leave it alone.

What's left is a single article...

Dark Matter Search Discovers A Spectacular Bonus: The Longest-Lived Unstable Element Ever (link)

In their search for dark matter, they've found something totally unrelated. Great, but that is in no way a validation of the search for dark matter. It's a bit like saying that our alchemy funding did not yet turn lead into gold, but it did guide us towards a fantastic recipe for tomato bisque soup. If finding nearly stable elements is the goal, then we should fund those initiatives directly.

Miscellaneous

Researchers at Arizona State University (a renowned party school) have announced that the asteroid visited by the Japanese Hyabusa I probe contains high levels of water, based on analysis of five tiny grains of material, nine years after the probe returned to Earth. If these results are valid, they counter our predictions that the current Hyabusa II mission will fail expectations. We won't know for certain until the probe returns to earth late next year, plus perhaps nine years for processing.