Contrabang! # 25 Dark Entropy

There was no edition of Contrabang! last week because Starts With A Bang! didn't leave a whole lot to chew on. However, there is plenty for this week. There's a lot to go through, but if you make it all the way to the last article, you'll learn about another "dark" element of the universe previously undiscussed here that is needed to make modern cosmology work.

Three Astrophysicists Reveal Structure Of Universe To Win The 2019 Nobel Prize (link)

Well, you can pretty much tell by the title what has happened. Another Nobel Prize for Physics has been issued which will eventually have to be retracted if the award is to have any merit. (I predict it will not be, and eventually the Nobel Prize for Physics will carry about as much credibility as their Prize for Peace.)

This year’s physics prize goes to three individuals ⁠ — Jim Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz ⁠ — for discoveries in theoretical cosmology and exoplanets. At last, looking into space and existentially dreaming of what’s out there, and then physically/astronomically discovering it, has its own Nobel Prize.

At issue here is Jim Peebles for his "discoveries in theoretical cosmology," not the work in exoplanet discoveries made by the other two recipients. Peebles is perhaps an even more ardent cheerleader for the mainstream narrative than Ethan Siegel, and his contributions towards the Big Bang Theory should have instead won him a Nobel Prize for Creative Writing. Rather than taking on Ethan's rambling monologue for this one, lets look at the more succinct description give by the Nobel board.

James Peebles’ insights into physical cosmology have enriched the entire field of research and laid a foundation for the transformation of cosmology over the last fifty years, from speculation to science. His theoretical framework, developed since the mid-1960s, is the basis of our contemporary ideas about the universe.

The Big Bang model describes the universe from its very first moments, almost 14 billion years ago, when it was extremely hot and dense. Since then, the universe has been expanding, becoming larger and colder. Barely 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe became transparent and light rays were able to travel through space. Even today, this ancient radiation is all around us and, coded into it, many of the universe’s secrets are hiding. Using his theoretical tools and calculations, James Peebles was able to interpret these traces from the infancy of the universe and discover new physical processes.

The results showed us a universe in which just five per cent of its content is known, the matter which constitutes stars, planets, trees – and us. The rest, 95 per cent, is unknown dark matter and dark energy. This is a mystery and a challenge to modern physics.

So the prize was given for contributing to the notion that 95% of the universe is constructed from hypothetical states of matter of which there is no evidence at all. They really should have narrowed the scope (such as his prediction of the cosmic background radiation) because making the award about his general contributions to the fabulous fairy tales now en vogue will probably become embarrassing when those theories are eventually discarded.

Did Our Universe’s Structure Grow From The Top-Down Or From The Bottom-Up? (link)

If there’s one lesson that humanity should have learned from the 20th century, it’s this: the Universe rarely behaves the way our intuition leads us to suspect.

Eh, that's a dangerous mindset to take. Why shouldn't our intuition be generally in sync with how the world operates? Our minds have either (a) evolved specifically to make intuitions about how the universe behaves, or (b) been given to us by the same spiritual force that created the cosmic order. Why should our intuition be generally at odds with the world? I don't buy the verbiage that the 20th century shows our intuitions rarely help us. The two examples he likely refers to - quantum mechanics and general relativity - only apply at very tiny scales or at near light-speed velocities.

Cosmologists — people like me who study the large-scale structure of the Universe — have known about these peculiar motions for a long time. If you map out where each galaxy is according to its redshift, you’ll find something unexpected: the map you make of the Universe will have galaxy filaments that all appear to point towards your location. Decades ago, cosmologists called this effect “Fingers of God,” because they all point at you no matter where you are. Fortunately, we immediately recognized that this is not a real, physical effect, but an effect of incorrectly analyzing our data.

The "Fingers of God" go away if the strict assumption that redshift equals distance is relaxed. A lot of problems do, actually, such as the need for dark energy. There are structures of the universe that appear to be physically connected, yet have different redshifts. Astronomers assume that the appearance of physical connection is just an illusion and that the redshifts reveal the ultimate truth. Thus, their models depict the structures as stretched out radially from Earth.

The way that the Universe looks on the largest scales provides us with an enormous amount of information. Because we know how gravity works, we can use these observations to reconstruct two things together:

1. What the Universe is made out of: dark energy (68%), dark matter (27%), normal matter (4.9%), neutrinos (0.1%) and radiation (0.01%).
2. What the initial conditions of the Universe were: in what ways and by how much it departed from being perfectly uniform. 

I always enjoy reading these kinds of statements; strong testaments to the Dunning-Krueger effect running rampant at the highest levels of academia. Because we know how gravity works, we know that 95% of the universe consists of theoretical states of matter of which there is no supporting evidence.

The two possibilities for how our cosmic web came about are known as top-down or bottom-up scenarios. In a top-down Universe, the largest imperfections are on the largest scales; they begin gravitating first, and as they do, these large imperfections fragment into smaller ones. They’ll give rise to stars and galaxies, sure, but they’ll mostly be bound into larger, cluster-like structures, driven by the gravitational imperfections on large scales. A bottom-up Universe is the opposite, where gravitational imperfections dominate on smaller scales. Star clusters form first, followed later by galaxies and clusters, as small-scale imperfections experience runaway growth and eventually begin affecting larger scales.

Reading this, what do you predict will be the result of their analysis? I'll give you a hint: there is a precedent that has been discussed before in the Contrabang! series.

Today, our best measurements of the Power Spectrum of the Universe and of the scalar spectral index, n_s, tells us that n_s = 0.965, with an uncertainty of less than 1%. The Universe is very close to scale-invariant, but it’s tilted to be just a little bit more top-down than bottom-up.

The precedent was the analogous question of whether spacetime is curved convex or concave, and then discovering it is actually flat - which also happens to be what we'd observe if spacetime isn't really a thing in the physical world but an abstraction created in the minds of physicists. Here, also, they're trying to decide if the Big Bang proceeded in a top-down or bottom-up fashion, and finding the result that is the equivalent to "flat". That is, the answer just so happens to correspond to the one that would be found if the Big Bang theory was false. Quite a coincidence, idn't it?

Physics, Not Genetics, Explains Why Flamingos Stand On One Leg (link)

There’s an enormous evolutionary advantage for flamingos to stand on one leg, but only physics explains why.

Mostly we criticize Ethan for regurgitating unsound science, but sometimes there is cause to suspect that he doesn't really know what he's talking about. In this article, he relates one advantage given to flamingos by their habit of standing on one foot, which is reducing body heat lost to their aquatic environments through their large, webbed feet.

But the flamingo is perhaps best known for an odd behavior: they can often be found standing on one leg. There’s a scientific reason for this, but it’s based in physics, not biology.

I don't think the behavior is actually all that rare. I've seen ducks doing it. At any rate, he says the cause is physics, not genetics, as scientists have not found any genes associated with the behavior. Well, what does he think the body is? All of the form & function of the physical body is physics. According to mainstream evolutionary biology (a paradigm Ethan has previous parroted), all that physics within the body is explained by genetics. This blog has - outside the scope of the Contrabang! series - taken the stand that genetics don't explain the physics of the body because there are not nearly enough genes. Ethan helps us out here by providing evidence for an animal behavior that is not explained through genetics, but he alleges is acquired by social learning. That is, the survival advantage of standing on one leg is a trick passed on from one flamingo generation to the next. Conveniently, it is bird behavior. (We have previously used the example of birds building nests as a behavior that is not learned, but can't be genetically programmed either.) The social learning hypothesis should be easy to scientists to test.

• Do flamingoes raised in isolation display the behavior?
• Do they display the behavior if raised in water?
• Do they display the behavior if raised on dry land?

If so, then when know that there is some aspect to inherited traits that does not come from genetics and does not come from social conditioning. That is, that there is a major component of inheritance that the modern scientists are unable to account for. Of course, we already know that to be true, but this would be yet more evidence in that direction.

Ask Ethan: How Dense Is A Black Hole? (link)

Black holes are a favored subject of modern astrophysicists, which are not only predicted by General Relativity, but one which they are convinced have been proven to exist - they even have a photograph! But all is not well in black hole theory.

Under the rules of General Relativity, black holes can have mass, electric charge, and angular momentum.Once you make a black hole, all the information (and hence, all the entropy) associated with the components of the black hole are completely irrelevant to the end-state of a black hole that we observe. Only, if this were the true case, all black holes would have an entropy of 0, and black holes would violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Hey look, they're pretending to be concerned about violations of the laws of thermodynamics. The problem is that, if you model a black hole and its surrounding accretion disk as closed system, the entropy of the system would be decreasing in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

If the singularity at a black hole’s center doesn’t depend on those properties, there must be some other place capable of storing that information. John Wheeler was the first person to realize where it could be encoded: on the boundary of the event horizon itself. Instead of zero entropy, the entropy of a black hole would be defined by the number of quantum “bits” (or qubits) of information that could be encoded on the event horizon itself.

The proposed answer is that the in-falling particles leave information encoded on the black hole's event horizon: an imaginary line in space where light is unable to overcome the pull of the singularity's gravity. How does this information get encoded into empty space? It doesn't matter! It's dark entropy, and it makes their equations work, so it must be real.

There is one other aspect of this article to address before we call it a week.

If your black hole is non-rotating, the singularity is nothing but a mere point. If all the mass is compressed into a single, zero-dimensional point, then when you ask about density, you are asking “what happens when you divide a finite value (mass) by zero?”

Yes, that is a question that a skeptic of black holes would be asking.

If you need a reminder, dividing by zero is mathematically bad; you get an undefined answer. Thankfully, perhaps, non-rotating black holes aren’t what we have in our physical Universe. Our realistic black holes rotate, and that means that the interior structure is much more complicated. Instead of a perfectly spherical event horizon, we get a spheroidal one that’s elongated along its plane of rotation. Instead of a point-like (zero-dimensional) singularity, we get a ring-like (one-dimensional) one, which is proportional to the angular momentum (and the angular momentum-to-mass) ratio.

This is quite a paragraph, because it reveals that Ethan is confused about his own domain of expertise. In previous editions, we talked about the fact that, because all black hole systems in reality will be rotating, there cannot be a point singularity at the center of a black hole, but a ringularity, or ring singularity as they call it. The ringularity is a theoretical construction made by physicists to account for the violation of angular momentum that would occur by a point singularity. If the rotating body collapses to a point of infinitesimal radius, then finding the rotational velocity requires dividing by zero. Because that's not possible, the ringularity was introduced. It has some radius and rotates, thus angular momentum is conserved without the need for infinite velocities. How does the ringularity physically function and form? They don't say, but it makes their equations work, so it must be real.

Now, Ethan is addressing a different problem: the question of infinite density. If mass is pushed into a volume of size zero, then finding the density also leads to a divide-by-zero error. Ethan remembers there is an issue with division by zero, so he throws out there answer: ringularity! But that is for angular momentum...it does not solve the problem of indeterminate density. It's almost as if this PhD in astrophysicists, who writes extensively on the subject, doesn't actually understand the domain that well but mainly recites the answers he has been trained to provide.