Contrabang! #14 Unified Theory of Nonsense

This week's edition comes a couple days late, as I've been dealing with a little bout of midsummer flu. In this one, we'll only dive into a single article, and take a glancing blow at a second.

Sorry, Black Hole Aren't Actually Black (link)

This title - another clever variation of the no-comma (honorable mention also goes to this week's Yes, Virtual Particles Can Have Real, Measurable Effects) - is sure to raise curiosity. Well, then what color are black holes? Green? Blue? Desert camo?

Physicists sure do give counterintuitive names to the things they find.

Or things they don't find. Despite the implications of the language, scientists have never "found" a black hole. They are assumed to exist because (1) General Relativity allows that they could exist and (2) they are required to account for galactic dynamics. But, enormous peripheral clouds of dark matter are also required. It might just be that they don't actually understand galactic dynamics.

Some might claim that the recent imagery of a black hole does mean one has been found. All that has been shown is that given enough data and a big enough algorithm (over 900,000 lines of code) an image can be generated to match theory if the reward is worldwide fame and praise.

In explaining black holes, he provides this gif, along with the caption,

Both inside and outside the event horizon, space flows like either a moving walkway or a waterfall, depending on how you want to visualize it. At the event horizon, even if you ran (or swam) at the speed of light, there would be no overcoming the flow of spacetime, which drags you into the singularity at the center. Outside the event horizon, though, other forces (like electromagnetism) can frequently overcome the pull of gravity, causing even infalling matter to escape.

The animation depicts the black hole as pulling the very fabric of spacetime into its murky abyss. That seems to be in direct contradiction of last month's article (also an excellent no-comma) No, Black Holes Don’t Suck Everything Into Them, which assured us that black holes do not have any special powers to pull matter into them; they behave like normal massive objects, and just so happen to be particularly massive. (The article itself is internally contradictory, as it contains the same animation, but we did not adequately address that before.) The explanation for all the infalling matter is thus attributed to theoretical accretion disks. But here, Ethan is depicting black holes as having the special ability so suck spacetime into them. Thus, a star in a normal, circular orbit around the black hole would be sucked into the event horizon.

The contradiction is that his refutation of the myth of "galaxies sucking everything into them" is in the context of Newtonian gravity, but then spacetime is shown getting sucked in under General Relativity. Ethan well understands the difference between the two... he explains it about every other week. Last month, he wrote an article titled This Is How, 100 Years Ago, A Solar Eclipse Proved Einstein Right And Newton Wrong. He believes that General Relativity has totally replaced Newtonian gravity. Yet he writes an article refuting a common myth which only holds in the context of Newton. If you are sitting on a rug and I pull it across the room, you'd likely not argue that I hadn't moved you across the room because you were just sitting there!

This amounts to fraud, in my judgement. I don't believe Ethan is so confused on the matter. He's explaining away some apparent shortcoming of his favored theories by paring away relevant context which he himself claims to be true and valid. It's little different than what run-of-the-mill journalists do when trying to sell sensationalism or some agenda, except that Ethan is smarter than them and should know better.

Here's another quote from earlier in the article.

Instead of viewing space as a fixed network of three-dimensional streets, it’s perhaps more accurate to view space as a moving walkway. No matter where you are in the Universe, the space beneath your feet is being dragged by all the gravitational effects at play. Masses cause space to accelerate towards them; the expanding Universe causes unbound objects to speed away from one another.

What a mess this is. It says "masses cause space to accelerate towards them." How can that possibly be true? The implication then would be that the Sun sucks the Earth toward it, the Earth sucks the moon towards it, the moon sucks lunar orbiters to it... yeah, this theory sucks. I have never heard the implication that spacetime would be such a dynamic, fluid thing. It should be relatively static. Mass doesn't attract spacetime; it distorts spacetime. I do not think that accelerating spacetime is an actual consequence of the Theory of General Relativity.

Then - the main reason I picked this snippet - he says that the expanding Universe cases unbound objects to speed away from one another. Why would he choose that language - unbound? Think of what the implication is for the expanding universe. It is universal. Thus, it should be driving the moon away from the Earth, the Earth away from the Sun, etcetera. (By my napkin math, given the official rate of universal expansion, the Earth should be moving away from the sun at 7650 miles per year.) That would, I reckon, make the orbits inherently unstable. The distance of the orbiting body increases, so it's velocity would have to decrease to maintain the circular orbit. (Perhaps they will have to invent a new force called dark drag to account for it.) I couldn't find any Starts With A Bang! articles that address this particular question, but top hits on a web search state that it is too small small to detect at the solar system level, or merely that "gravity wins out." The first is refuted by the definition of the Astronomical Unit (distance of sun to earth) which in miles is given to 8 digits. Thus, 7650 miles per year should be observable. To the second, that gravity "wins out"... they aren't even trying.

So how does Ethan account for the fact that the Earth should be getting sucked into the Sun by General Relativity (according to him) and should be getting pushed away by dark energy? The answer, I suppose, is that the two effects must perfectly cancel! What are the odds? Now we have a theory that actually relates dark energy to General Relativity. I call it the Unified Theory of Nonsense. (Actually I call it something else, but it's not fit to print.)

Ask Ethan: What Does ‘Truth’ Mean To A Scientist? (link)

This is a fairly reasonable overview of what constitutes scientific knowledge. It conveys that scientific models are only ever approximations of reality. Thus, nothing can ever be perfectly true. It also reminds us that the ultimate goal of science is to invalidate theories, not validate them, though you'd never realize that by simply observing what goes on in a number of supposedly scientific disciplines.

The article makes only a single reference to the need of theories to make novel predictions. It's very easy to make postdictions - as I call them - or backwards predictions that retroactively show how an observation was predicted by theory. Starts With A Bang! is littered with those kinds of arguments. It is often impossible to tease out the rationale from the rationalization, thus we lean on future predictions to test theories. 

These scientists are very good at explaining how science should work, but often seem inept to point out failures in practice. They often engage in a practice I call truth wrapping. To sell the lie, it must be wrapped in enough truth to appear palatable, in the way that a bitter pill is coated in sugar. Thus, anyone wishing to lie big must spend plenty of time in accumulating the proper portion of truth to mix in. In fact, he will likely spend so much time on truthful things that he assumes he is truthful in general and thus doesn't realize that the core of the pill is actually quite bitter. The best liar must first lie to himself.