Contrabang! #23 Overwhelming Evidence

Not Only Didn’t We Find Water On An Earth-Like Exoplanet, But We Can’t With Current Technology (link)

One of the characteristics of mainstream science writing is that it must frequently sell the public on the benefits of perpetually increasing science funding. If you want to be accepted as an establishment science writer, you gotta have the endorsement of establishment scientists, and they are ultimately more concerned with the funding than the science. That's not necessarily bad, scientists still have kids to feed and bills to pay, but it is important to keep in mind what many of the motivations really are in the industry.

It’s a great scientific opportunity of modern times, but we won’t get there with our current observatories. One of the holy grails of modern science is to find a world, beyond Earth, with life on it. [...] For that, we need new, larger, more sophisticated observatories. Unless we build them, we’ll never find the Earth-like worlds we dream about.

Talking about dreams and holy grails is not exactly the verbiage of sober scientific discussion. Hearing a science writer invoke vaguely religious metaphors gives the same slimy feeling as a restaurateur "selling the sizzle, not the steak" or a car salesman describing an automobile in terms of experiences and feelings rather than its mechanical specifications. Do any readers here really dream about finding "Earth-like worlds?" I don't think anyone really cares, including the scientists. It seems more like a sales pitch to try to keep the public interested in funding science. What exactly would be proven if we found rocky planets with liquid water? We know water is not rare. It's a simple molecule formed from two of the most common elements in the universe, and is found throughout our own solar system. The probabilities show that there must be lots of watery planets. Finding one doesn't really tell us anything but to confirm what we already know must be true. It would not be completely useless, as we always want evidence to confirm our assumptions, but it's not exactly the great discovery he makes it out to be. Remember when all the rage was finding water on Mars? Nothing really changed from that discovery...they only pushed the great search for funding water to further reaches of the galaxy.

This Is Why Neutrinos Are The Standard Model’s Greatest Puzzle (link)

I rarely comment on his particle-physics articles, but I found one sentence particularly amusing.

The bosons are responsible for the forces between all particles, and — with the exception of a few puzzles like dark matter, dark energy, and why our Universe is filled with matter and not antimatter — the rules governing these particles explains everything we’ve ever observed.

When Ethan is wearing his astrophysics hat, then dark matter and dark energy absolutely dominate the universe and are the most important questions in science to solve. In the context of particle physics, dark matter & energy are just "a few puzzles." It's because he's always selling something. So the importance of dark matter depends on whether or not he's trying to sell us on astrophysics or particle physics. He then says "the rules governing these particles explains everything we've ever observed." Statements with this type of child-like hyperbole appear in Starts With A Bang! on almost a weekly basis. If we've really explained everything we've ever observed, I guess the job of the scientists is done and they can go get normal, private-sector jobs like the rest of us.

As to the neutrinos, I find their mysterious nature to be compelling and would rather see tax dollars go towards that endeavor than another comet probe mission whose results will be totally ignored by the astrophysicists anyway.

Was Dark Matter Really Created Before The Big Bang? (link)

Of all the unsolved puzzles in the Universe, perhaps the most confounding is the dark matter problem.

Ope, looks like it's back to being important again.

Whether we’re looking at a spiral galaxy rotate, individual galaxies moving in a massive cluster, or simulating how the large-scale structure of the Universe forms, we cannot get the right answer without adding an enormous amount of extra mass: 5 times as much as the normal matter we infer. That mass must not absorb or emit any light, and hence it’s known as dark matter. But what is dark matter, and when did it arise in our Universe? That’s the big question we’re trying to answer.

I can imagine asking my young daughter about a broken glass I suspect she broke, and her giving an answer like, "Well, we know whoever it was he must be invisible." That is something like the answer given by scientists who don't know how to explain observed galactic dynamics. What I can't imagine her saying is something like, "and we also know that there must be at least five invisible people for every visible person living in the house." That's the kind of story that can only be sustained by generous government funding.

The evidence that exists for dark matter is overwhelming and comes in an enormous suite, but suffers from a distinct drawback from the ideal scenario: it’s all indirect.

The evidence for dark matter is neither overwhelming nor indirect...it is non-existent. The sum of all evidence for dark matter amounts to zero. None. A lot of people reading his blog will now mistakenly believe there is enormous evidence for dark matter, when there is actually the polar opposite. The discrepancy is qualitative, not quantitative. That is, it is not just an exaggeration, but an outright lie. However, we'll give some benefit of the doubt and assume that he just doesn't know what evidence is.

The existence of a problem in not evidence for a particular hypothesis. I think that's worth repeating. The existence of a problem in not evidence for a particular hypothesis. Imagine a wife who notices that her husband keeps coming home late from work. She suspects he's cheating. That is a valid hypothesis, but it's even more likely that he's just getting slammed at work. The coming home late is not evidence of cheating, because cheating is just one hypothesis for the coming home late. She should search for actual evidence before she begins making dangerous accusations that are likely to destroy the marriage in any case.

Dark matter is just one hypothesis for the unexplained galactic dynamics. The only evidence is that something is driving the dynamics that we don't understand. That is not evidence for dark matter. The "overwhelming" aspect of the evidence is merely that it overwhelmingly indicates that the current models are not complete. And "indirect" is a term mistakenly used by failing to understand that the problem itself is not evidence for any particular hypothesis. By his logic, for any problem that is known to exist, then any hypothesis that hasn't been explicitly disproven thus has overwhelming, indirect evidence. That is not how science works. They teach the scientific method in schools. I would expect that most of the brighter junior-high kids should be able to understand why Ethan is making an unscientific blunder in his reasoning.

It would be one thing if scientists were calling out these kinds of false statements. Starts With A Bang! is the largest independent science blog out there, and the author is a trained physicist with a PhD. Why is he not being held to any standard? Why is he allowed to make such wild claims with no pushback from the scientific establishment? (Rhetorical question, we already saw the answer in the first section of this week's post.) Even scientists who believe that dark matter is indeed the correct answer to the problem should be clear-headed and honest enough to dismiss the notion that there is any supporting evidence for the theory, let alone overwhelming evidence. In an ideal world, Ethan would have his PhD revoked for making such fundamental errors. But the academies are fully dependent on his kinds of funding narratives. Only here at Contrabang! do we roll up our sleeves each week to call out the false claims. Not because of better expertise, but merely because there are no funding narratives to defend, no careers to promote, no reputations to protect, nothing to cloud the mind from engaging in pure reason.