Contrabang! #17 Grasping At Straws

This One ‘Anomaly’ Is Driving Physicists To Search For Light Dark Matter (link)

Scientists are not looking for signatures of new light particles (again) because of some 'anomaly', but because they've exhausted even the range of absurdly large particles, and are circling back around in their endless quest for dark evidence.

Sometimes, the solution to a puzzle you’ve been stymied by lies in a place you’ve already looked. Only, until you develop better-precision tools than you’ve used to conduct your previous searches, you won’t be able to find it. 

See what I mean? There is no lack of evidence that will dispute the dark matter hypothesis. As a promissory science, a lack of evidence merely indicates that we need "better-precision tools", i.e. more funding.

Here, Ethan does us a favor by reviewing the success rate of looking for new particle types that might be dark matter. [emphasis added]

We’ve been looking for new particles not predicted by the Standard Model with an enormous variety of experiments for decades, from accelerators to underground laboratories to rare, exotic decays of everyday particles. Despite decades of searching, no beyond-the-Standard-Model particles have ever turned up.

The anomaly here refers to a problem that depends on the Big Bang Theory and it's associated model for the stellar lifecycle, where all particles are derived from nuclear reactions of hydrogen. (That is to say, there may not even be a problem at all.) In that theory, there is no straightforward route to come up with all the carbon-12 seen. One hypothetical & complicated route has been proposed, but not all the reaction products have been accounted for. Thus, the search for the missing pieces has been hijacked as a hopeful search for dark matter as well. Thus, the discovery depends on both Big Bang Theory and Dark Matter Theory being correct.

The jury is still out on whether this anomaly is as good as it’s hyped to be, but until we have a robust explanation, we have to both keep an open mind and look everywhere the data tells us new physics might reasonably be. Despite the null results, the search continues.

Nothing about this seems reasonable. Do you note a sense of creeping desperation to this? The search for dark matter has fully entered the grasping-at-straws phase.

Has LIGO Just Detected The ‘Trifecta’ Signal That All Astronomers Have Been Hoping For? (link)

Under General Relativity and the normal explanation for supernovae (accretion leading to explosive nuclear fusion), they should emit electromagnetic radiation, neutrinos, and gravitational waves, all traveling at the speed of light. The major goal now for LIGO is to find an event that registers in all three signals.

From the gravitational waves alone, scientists were able to perform a fast analysis and restrict the location where the originating event may have occurred to just 55 square degrees (out of ~40,000 on the entire sky) as the best place to look for other types of messenger signals.
Completely independently, the IceCube neutrino detector at the South Pole detected a track-like neutrino event that corresponds to almost the exact same time of origin.

They independently found a gravitational wave signal and concurrent neutrino signal.

Of course, all of this is just preliminary at this point. The LIGO collaboration has yet to announce a definitive detection of any type, and the IceCube event may turn out to be either a foreground, unrelated neutrino or a spurious event entirely. No electromagnetic signal has been announced, and there might not be one at all.

That's a lot of disclaimers. It's a little early to be getting this excited, but that's what cheerleaders do.

This Is Why Black Holes Must Spin At Almost The Speed Of Light (link)

Many of them are spinning at nearly the speed of light. When you do the math, there’s no other way it could have been.

The problem is you can make the math work for about anything, if you're clever and persistent enough. The spinning of black holes turns out to be a contentious subject. Ben Davidson of suspicious0bservers.org argues that the law of conservation of angular momentum disproves black holes. If a spinning accretion disk is feeding into a black hole, that implies that a zero-radius singularity must be spinning at infinite speed, which isn't possible. The astrophysicists have noted this as well, and tell us that the single-point singularity model of black holes is only an ideal model for a non-rotating, neutrally charged black hole. Real black holes contain not a singularity of infinite density, but a ringularity - as we call them. Ringularities were proposed because they can spin, thus account for the rotation. There is nothing else to the theory, no explanation for how infalling matter would form itself into a ring, and so forth. Only the fact that someone made a mathematical model.

If you compress that volume down to be very small, those objects have no choice. If angular momentum has to be conserved, all they can do is spin up their rotational speeds until they almost reach the speed of light. At that point, gravitational waves will kick in, and some of that energy (and angular momentum) gets radiated away. If not for that process, black holes might not be black after all, instead revealing naked singularities at their centers. In this Universe, black holes have no choice but to rotate at extraordinary speeds. Perhaps someday, we’ll be able to measure that directly.

At the point the spin reaches the speed of light, gravitational waves will "kick in"? What does that mean...how does that work? It isn't explained, nor why it would ever happen. Perhaps the size of the ringularity expands as necessary to keep the speed within limits instead. He doesn't even attempt to explain how any of this would all work. He says that if it weren't for that process, then naked singularities (should be ringularities) would be exposed. Well, if it weren't for that process, as he explains it, then the spin would exceed the speed of light, which isn't possible. It's not a valid hypothetical, so you can make whatever absurd conclusion you desire. If not for that process, cows would say oink. 

This is a weak explanation of actual black holes. Their approach has been to use an idealized but impossible black hole to sell to the public, then provide a mathematically valid model to deflect criticism, without ever bothering to explain how the actual black hold would work.