This Is How, 100 Years Ago, A Solar Eclipse Proved Einstein Right And Newton Wrong (link)
The problem with this one isn't the subject matter so much as the hubris. Indeed, it was an observation of apparent gravitational lensing that brought Einstein's theory of gravity into the mainstream. Still, Ethan overstates his case with claims like this.
The predictions of General Relativity have never once failed.
The reality is that general relativity has not failed because they've not let it fail. For instance, their theory of gravity does not properly predict galactic rotational dynamics. Instead of admitting that it's even possible that General Relativity is not, if fact, the holy grail of gravitational theories, they've had to create vast quantities of unobservable "dark matter." The theory is rock solid, if you can just believe enough in hypothetical unobservable exotic matter that vastly outweighs all the other matter in the universe. Similarly you have to believe that experiments like LIGO are above scrutiny. Tweaking the noise-canceling algorithms until the signal matches one of your 20,000 theoretical event signatures is not something that any properly skeptical scientist should accept as comprehensive proof of anything. Finally, under general relativity, with its non-instantaneous force of gravity, many-bodied systems - like our own solar system - are not stable. And yet, here we are anyway. They'll explain it away by stating that our solar system is not stable in the long run, are we are just enjoying an era of stability in the otherwise chaotic cosmos. Ethan is all about "making hypotheses and going out and testing them." Well, there is nothing in general relativity that predicts our quiet, orderly solar system.
This Is Why It’s Meaningless That Dark Matter Experiments Haven’t Found Anything (link)
In this one, we are told that, just because all experiments testing various hypotheses for dark matter have failed, that doesn't mean we should become skeptical or anything like that. He ends his piece with:
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. When it comes to dark matter, don’t let yourself be fooled.
I used to love irony, but these days it is often too painful. Absence of evidence means nothing, he says! Well gee, I suppose we can apply that principle to all theories, can we not? Just because we've not seen the Yeti, that does not prove he does not exist. Therefore, the Yeti is a valid scientific hypothesis, deserving of heavy public funding. And, while alchemists have not yet turned lead into gold, they have not yet tried everything, have they? The lack of evidence that lead can be turned into gold is not evidence that it cannot be done. 😄
You can imagine that the response to such criticism would be something like: that is a false comparison because there is not a theoretical underpinning for alchemy like there is for dark matter. That would be false, however, because there is no theoretical underpinning for dark matter. It was never predicted by anything. It is, in essence, an experimental error. The difference between theoretical predictions and the actual observations is called dark matter. The bigger the dark matter, the more erroneous the theories are. And the dark matter is very big, at six times the sum of all observable matter in the universe. That is literally a very massive experimental error.
As is common in so many realms of science these days, all observations support the theory, whatever they may be.
When Will The Universe Get Its First ‘Black Dwarf’ Star? (link)
Cosmologists have a theoretical stellar lifecycle model based on observations of the diverse array of different star types in the universe, in conjunction with the Big Bang Theory. The theory is that stars are born form the accretion of gases and dust into a sphere, they burn by nuclear fusion until the fuel runs out, and then one of a variety of things may happen, depending on the mass and the energy of the star.
When you read this article, keep a couple things in mind. First, neutron stars are a joke theory. (One of these days we'll do a deep dive into the various ways they've been disproven.) Second is that there are no observations to support the stellar lifecycle. And truly it would be difficult to do so, given then timespans involved. Ethan promotes a theory of "black dwarfs", which won't exist for another 10 trillion years, long after the universe has died its slow heat death, he tells us. If there's one thing modern scientists like more than creating hypotheses for which there is no possibility of collecting contradictory evidence, it is promoting their materialistic despair for the futility of life.
And our final entry for the week:
Ask Ethan: What’s It Like When You Fall Into A Black Hole? (link)
In this one, I was looking for Ethan to make a particular mistake, which he managed to avoid. We learned in a previous Contrabang! that the stereotypical depiction of black holes as a point mass singularities surrounded by an even horizon isn't really accurate, because it violates the conservation of angular momentum. Why the didn't just call it dark angular momentum and move on is beyond me, but they didn't, and now they use a model where there is not a singularity, but instead ring of singularity, which I've taken to calling the ringularity. There is no explanation given for how the accreting matter would accrue into a ring of infinite density, only that it must occur that way for the math to work. (Again, why they are willing to accept infinite density but not infinite angular velocity is beyond me.)
At any rate, Ethan is careful to state that his hypothetical description of a person falling into a black hole is a simplistic model, and that a real system would require a ringularity - which no one wants to have to thing about.
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