Contrabang! #16 Dark Corpses For Eternity

Happy Birthday To Vera Rubin: The Mother Of Our Dark Matter Universe (link)

This article depicts Vera Rubin as the grand matriarch of dark matter. There is an unfortunate trend to dredge through history and find any woman or "POC" whose contribution was vital to some past success. For instance, there was a movie made a few years ago that showed the Apollo missions could not have succeeded if not for the novel contributions of some unsung black ladies. Is it true? I suspect not, but it's hard to know. The problem is that people can't tell, so they become skeptical of all such claims. The harm is done to those who actually make great contributions because people don't believe that the distribution of praise is actually meritocratic.

I've always thought women should oppose undue praise for that reason alone. In this case, especially so, because dark matter is a farce that we will one day look back upon as one of the great blunders of science. Women, you don't want your name on this one! Although, I have to admit, as a member of the demographic that is normally blamed for all of society's failures, I'm personally relieved to pass to pass the buck on this one. 😁

As it turns out, Rubin actually did make an important discovery deserving of praise, but then erred in misinterpreting it. That is very common today in experimental physics. She discovered that the galaxies were not rotating as expected by the known laws of the universe. Discovering evidence to disprove theories is the essence of science. Unfortunately, she and her colleagues interpreted the results not as evidence that our understanding of galactic dynamics is faulty, but that vast clouds of undetectable exotic matter exist in just the right places to make their equations of the universe work properly. Ah, so close.

Carnegie Science offers a little more insight into the lady scientist.

She was an ardent feminist, advocating for women observers at the Palomar Observatory, women at the Cosmos Club, Princeton, and she even advised the Pope to have more women on his committee.

So we let in one feminist and next thing you know astronomy becomes a religious cult. Despite attempts to leverage Rubin's achievement as a promotion of feminism in the sciences, it is more likely to ultimately serve as a cautionary tale.

General Relativity Rules: Einstein Victorious In Unprecedented Gravitational Redshift Test (link)

Results from a survey of stars orbiting very near to the galactic center weigh in favor of general relativity. And that's fine, we've never said there is a strong case for fully dismissing general relativity, but that the proponents are often overconfident and overeager in promoting it. For instance, they lack proper skepticism for the LIGO results claiming to have detected a faint gravitational wave in a sea of noise. Look at the title here: General Relativity Rules. That is cheerleading.

There are aspects of general relativity that do seem well supported. However, other aspects are not, and those tend to be ignored by the rah-rah crowd. For instance, general relativity does not predict the stable, circular orbits seen in our solar system and throughout space. Ethan is sure that his preferred models fully describe the entire universe with its endless exotic forms of matter from Big Bang all the way to an inevitable heat death, yet the theory doesn't even describe the normal planetary motions that man has noted for thousands of years. That should give cause for concern.

From the article,

If we look in infrared light, suddenly our view of the galactic center opens up, and we can even see the individual stars moving around. When we examine the galactic center, we see that they all make an elliptical orbit around a single point that emits no light: our galaxy’s supermassive black hole.

Well, it all sounds nice. The stars are rotating around an apparently highly massive portion of space that is dark. It sure sounds like a black hole. Except, that's not exactly what we'd expect from their theories. Scientists explain away all the unexpected phenomena of black holes by invoking accretion disks. Our own Milky Way shows not just the usual polar X-ray jets blasting from the galactic center, but enormous "bubbles" which emit in the X-ray and even gamma frequencies. Surely the accretion disk to power such a colossal, energetic structure must be massive beyond our ability to comprehend.

At its closest, S0–2 comes within just 18 billion kilometers of the event horizon of Sagittarius A*, which is only about twice the diameter of Neptune’s orbit around the Sun.

If they can see stars in infrared that near to the galactic center, then they should also be able to observe a significant accretion disk. But there is nothing. Their answer is that our galactic center was active until so recently, and there is currently no matter falling into the black hole. Well, that's not something anyone would have predicted, and seem a little too convenient. It reminds me of an old Simpson's episode. "Oh, the supermassive black hole is just resting from all the matter it gobbled up earlier. It'll gobble up some more matter soon, I'm sure of it."

If material supplied by accretion is truly irregular, then we should see evidence of it in the other galaxies. We should see astrophysical jets that are highly irregular, that cut in and out. Yet the evidence depicts continuous, turbulent flows of highly-charged particles stretched out over thousands of light years, baffling astronomers. They've created a new rule for accretion disks: they can turn off as needed to fit inconvenient observations. Just as astronomers tell us that planetary orbits really are unstable, we're just not seeing it now, they also tell us that the galaxy is powered by an enormous accretion disk...and we just aren't seeing that right now either. It's just more promises from the promissory sciences. They always assume the corroborating evidence is out there, we just haven't seen it yet.

We Have Already Entered The Sixth And Final Era Of Our Universe (link)

Yesterday's post made a reference to Ethan's philosophy of impending cosmic doom.

Look at how science writers like Ethan Siegel dwell on all the ways the world as we know it may meet its inevitable demise. That is not scientific inquiry; it is morbid fixation by the disturbed.

And so it continues this week.

From the inflationary state that preceded the Big Bang to our cold, lonely, dark energy-dominated fate, the Universe goes through six different eras. We’re living in the last one already.

Dooooom!

The Universe is expanding, which means that the distances between the largest cosmic structures are increasing with time. 

Note the disclaimer of "largest cosmic structures" in the description of an expanding universe. The Contrabang! edition from two weeks ago showed that the alleged expansion of the universe is so great that the Earth should be noticeably retreating from the Sun. They account for it by declaring that gravitationally bound objects are not affected by the expansion of the fabric of spacetime. The Milky Way's nearest significant neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, is blue-shifted. Thus, it must be immune to universal expansion because it is gravitationally bound to our galaxy. Perhaps we need to look at the Virgo Supercluster of which our Local Group is a part, or the larger supercluster of which Virgo is a part, or the even larger supercluster complex of which that is a part. At which point does gravitational binding give way to universal expansion? The answer, of course, is wherever they need it to.

When we draw the dividing lines based on how the Universe behaves, we find that there are six different eras that will come to pass. [...] We already entered the final era billions of years ago. Most of the important events that will define our Universe’s history have already occurred.

This sounds a lot like the Fukuyama End Of History hypothesis, which posited that all the great human conflicts had already occurred, and liberal democracy would be the final, steady-state future of all mankind. That theory has been discredited. The Astrophysical End Of History hypothesis will fail as well.

In the end, only black dwarf stars and isolated masses too small to ignite nuclear fusion will remain, sparsely populated and disconnected from one another in this empty, ever-expanding cosmos. These final-state corpses will exist even googols of years onward, continuing to persist as dark energy remains the dominant factor in our Universe.

Dark corpses for eternity... very gothic. It is noteworthy that Siegel insists that the very early universe and the late-stage universe are both dominated by dark energy - far greater than our current era, despite the concurrent claim that dark energy now accounts for three-fourths of all mass in the universe. If there is anything they understand even less than the current universe, it is past and future universes. Thus, even greater quantities of dark substances (i.e. fudge factors) are needed.