Contrabang #7 Taking on the Skeptics

This week, Ethan directly took on skepticism of the standard model for astronomy. He's not likely aware of this humble blog of skepticism, but that's a good thing, since it means there must be many other voices expressing similar sentiments - so many that he feels the need to address them.

We'll start with what might be the most hubris-soaked headline imaginable.

Cosmology’s Only Big Problems Are Manufactured Misunderstandings (link)

Everything was fine until those darn skeptics started peddling their misunderstandings! The subheading:

Dark matter, dark energy, inflation and the Big Bang are real, and the alternatives all fail spectacularly.

It has sort of the feeling of one demanding that ghosts or the Yeti are real. "The hypothetical-but-unobserved exotic states of matter we created to make our equations work are real, no matter what science deniers might say!" Also, notice the implicit Sherlock's Fallacy being set up. If the other theories don't hold up, then this one must be correct. "If you can't prove who committed the murder, then it must have been you!"

If you add [the cosmology controversies] all together, as philosopher Bjørn Ekeberg did in his recent piece for Scientific American, you might think cosmology was in crisis. But if you’re a scrupulous scientist, exactly the opposite is true. [...] We make predictions, we go out and test them experimentally and observationally, and then we constrain, revise, or extend our ideas to accommodate whatever new information we obtained.

Ethan must not track all the times experimental results conclude a need to "question basic assumptions," only for that never to happen.

The ultimate dream of many is to revolutionize the way we conceive of our world, and to replace our current theories with something even more successful and profound.

Which is why one day some ambitious young scientists will be the first to disprove Nobel-prize awards, once the institutional inertia is no longer able to prevent it.

Although science itself may be unbiased, scientists are not. We can fall prey to the same cognitive biases that anyone else can. Once we choose our preferred conclusions, we frequently fool ourselves through the fallacious practice of motivated reasoning.

Yes.

It’s where the famous aphorism that “physics advances one funeral at a time” first came from. This notion was originally put forth by Max Planck with the following statement:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. 

It reminds me of a Metallica lyric: Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel, is just a freight train coming your way. "Freight trains are what happen to all those other early scientists who became overconfident in unproven theories. But not us, because we're right!"

That’s the key that’s so often overlooked: you have to examine the full suite of evidence in evaluating the success or failure of your theory or framework. Sure, you can always find individual observations that pose a difficulty for your theory to explain, but that doesn’t mean you can just replace it with something that does successfully explain that one observation.

He suggests that if you can't come up with a better theory, then you can sort of gloss over the contradictions of the dominant theory. This is why we are skeptical of the scientists and accuse them of conducting what more or less amounts to intellectual fraud. They deliberately marginalize evidence which contradicts the prevailing model whenever there is not a good explanation. For example, neutron stars have effectively been discredited by the evidence, and yet they remain in the standard model, because astronomers have no better explanation for powerful, periodic stellar radiation. The intellectually honest answer is "we don't know what causes it." Then, they could dedicate some manpower to solving the mystery of the oscillating lights, which clearly exist, rather than the ever-elusive hunt for dark matter, which does not exist.

You have to account for everything, plus the new observation, plus new phenomena that have not yet been observed.

Minus the things you can't account for.

This is the problem with every alternative. Every alternative to the expanding Universe, to the Big Bang, to dark matter, dark energy, or inflation, all fail to even account for whatever’s been already observed, much less the rest of it. That’s why practically every working scientist considers these proposed alternatives to be mere sandboxing, rather than a serious challenge to the mainstream consensus. 

This is the problem. I don't have to provide a better, comprehensive model in order to critique the standard model. He is promoting a false requirement for skepticism, one that cannot practically be met. It's like telling the defense attorney that he must prove someone else committed the crime, or his client hangs. In science, a theory should be considered independently of other explanations. It does not matter if the other theories are deemed to be more wrong than the one under examination. Science is meant to be an objective, not subjective, pursuit of knowledge.

Ask Ethan: How Well Has Cosmic Inflation Been Verified? (link) 

The subheading again takes it right to the haters.

Some claim that inflation isn’t science, but it sure has made some incredibly successful scientific predictions.

I'm just going to cherrypick a couple parts.

What inflation specifically hypothesized is that the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning, but rather was set up by a prior stage of the Universe. In this early state — dubbed an inflationary state by Guth — the dominant form of energy wasn’t in matter or radiation, but was inherent to the fabric of space itself, and possessed a very large energy density.

This would cause the Universe to expand both rapidly and relentlessly, driving any pre-existing matter apart. The Universe would be stretched so large it would be indistinguishable from flat. All the parts that an observer (like us) would be able to access would now have the same uniform properties everywhere, since they originated from a previously-connected state in the past.

Physics is the study of how material things in the world interact. In modern physics, empty space is a thing too, in the sense that a canvas is a thing that holds paint. When they say inflation preceded the Big Bang, imagine a canvas being stretched larger first, and then the paint expanding to fill the canvas second. This solved the flatness problem, since that was as yet no explanation for why spacetime should be flat rather than curved. [Spacetime would also appear to be flat if it didn't exist at all.

Inflation has literally met every threshold that science demands, with clever new tests becoming possible with improved observations and instrumentation.

Science does not demand that inflation obey the fundamental laws of science, like the first law of thermodynamics. Also, "clever" is not necessarily a description the conveys confidence in an experiment. It's why the LIGO results are questionable. They were bound to find whatever they were looking for.

Although it’s perhaps more palatable and fashionable to be a contrarian, inflation is the leading theory for the best reason of all: it works. If we ever make a critical observation that disagrees with inflation, perhaps that will be the harbinger of an even more revolutionary theory of how it all began.

Again, the hubris runs strong. More palatable to be contrarian? Yes, that's far more preferable than promoting the establishment consensus, which is merely rewarded with federal grant money, academic positions with tenure, notoriety, and endless praise from the fawning media. Sure, Ethan has his massive exposure thanks to his syndication by massive corporate outfits like Forbes, but it is far more fashionable for me to be pointing out criticisms to a handful of regular readers.

But that's fine, Ethan has his theories, I have my own. I say it's ghosts. Yes, ghosts are the ones pushing matter into strange dynamics that can't otherwise be described. And until we ever make a critical observation that disagrees that it's ghosts - which can't be observed by mere mortals of their paltry devices - then it is simply contrarian to insist that the cosmos are ruled by anything other than ghost matter and ghost energy.