Headlines

On December 2, 2014, Nature published a story headlined “European probe shoots down dark-matter claims”  (link). Reading such a headline, one is inclined first to ask, What exactly are “dark matter claims”? The first thought that springs to mind is the claim that dark matter exists. And if that claim has been shot down, why, that’s actually Big News. But that can’t be true, can it? If it was, the headline would be bigger—and even CNN might have mentioned it since December 2, 2014 (or even December 11, 2014, when the article was last revised).

The article concerns a news announcement, by the European Space Agency, that a full analysis of data on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), collected by the Planck spacecraft, is now being prepared for publication. Some highlights were presented on December 2.

 Reading the brief-enough article, one learns that despite the “shoot down” Planck data still “confirm that 26% of the total mass-energy budget of the Universe is made up of dark matter.” Therefore dark matter is alive and well. What that dramatically announced “shoot down” means is that some conjectures about dark matter—namely that excess positrons found in the CMB is explained by dark matter—has been shown to be false. So one conjecture has been falsified, but dark matter is still in the saddle. Had the headline signaled that, I wouldn’t have bothered reading the article.

Compare that headline to another published by Phys.Org on December 4 (link). It said: “Researchers report on data analysis from Planck spacecraft.” The substance of that story is essentially the same as Nature’s. Clever headlines capture readers, but dark matter lingers on.

Sound of Two Hands Clapping

While reading Irreducible Mind, by Kelly and Kelly et. al., I’m learning in painful detail how modern science has denied the existence of Mind because it cannot detect it in material ways. Today a good paper Brigitte passed me on cosmology documents the way modern science is absolutely certain of the existence of Dark Matter—which it also cannot detect in material ways. Are we dealing here with science or are we dealing with Faith?

Black Hole Denial Revisited

A while back (December 2011), I had a post entitled “Flirting With Black Hole Denial” (link). It surprised me, therefore, that Stephen Hawking appears to have doubts of his own, the doubts released January 22, 2014. Hawking, of course, is a top-ranked physicist and foremost student of black holes. The story is here. In his paper he says: “There are no black holes—in the sense from which light can’t escape to infinity.” His conclusion is based on the apparent conflict between quantum mechanics and relativity. He is quoted as saying to CBC News: “The conflict is that with quantum mechanics, you’re never destroying information. If information gets completely lost and falls into a black hole, there’s no way of reversing this. So either Einstein’s theory of relativity is incomplete, or quantum mechanics is incomplete.”  It will be fun to watch this one evolving over time.

What’s likely to fall into the devouring jaws of Doubt next? Dark matter perhaps? (link).

Dark Matter? Maybe Not.

Great orthodoxies in astrophysics are like the Tower of Siloam (link). They grow cracks and begin to crumble in almost unnoticed ways—until, one day, they crash down with a roar. I became aware of another little crumble this morning (ht to Montag). It takes the form of a press release from Case Western Reserve University reporting on a study which appears to legitimize Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and thus throws doubt on the existence of dark matter (link).

MOND, a theory introduced by Mordehai Milgrom, the Israeli astrophysicist, in 1983, suggests that Newton’s theory of gravity may not operate uniformly at all stellar distances, hence Newton’s theory needs “modification.” Wikipedia’s article on MOND (link) brings a graphic that neatly illustrates the problem.

Expected (A) and observed (B) star velocities as
a function of distance from the galactic center.

The dotted blue line illustrates the expected rotational velocities of stars at increasing distances from a galactic core. The red line illustrates the actually observed velocities. In order to explain that gap, between velocities predicted by Newton’s law of gravitation and what is actually seen, astrophysics has invented dark matter to supply sufficient amounts of mass to justify the observations—while keeping Newton’s laws untouched. The problem, of course, is that dark matter has not been physically observed. It is simply a projection of gravity-producing mass into a void which may be empty.

The current study is headed by Stacy McGaugh and Mordehai Milgrom and deals with the rotational behavior of seventeen dwarf galaxies that circle around Andromeda. This sort of thing interests me—because I feel quite uneasy about a cosmological picture in which virtually the whole universe (96% of it) is supposedly made up of dark energy and dark matter—of which we have not even the slightest knowledge in a touch-and-feel sense.

The word mond in German means “moon.” Well, it isn't full moon yet in astrophysics, but the light is certainly increasing.

Is Ether Back?

A May 19, 2011 story in Science Daily (here) carries this headline: Dark Energy is Driving Universe Apart: NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer Finds Dark Energy Repulsive. Most of the text is quoted directly from NASA’s own site here, a press release also dated 5/19/2011.

Fascinating story. We’re approaching a major redefinition of reality. Herewith some background I’ve extracted from Wikipedia. The notion of dark matter surfaced in 1934 and is attributed to the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky. His calculations suggested that the Coma galaxy cluster had to have considerably more mass than its luminosity indicated. He referred to the invisible mass, necessary for the rotational behavior of the cluster, to be due to “dark matter.” Dark energy got its name in 1998 from the American cosmologist Michael S. Turner. He took his phrasing from Zwicky to give a name to something. That “something” was an even more invisible mass necessary in the cosmos, but present outside of galaxies. This “something” was what caused the observed expansion of the universe; it was some kind of force. Ironically, the theoretical root of this concept dates to 1917 when Einstein introduced a fudge factor into his gravitational field equations; he called it the cosmological constant. Einstein’s equations suggested that gravity would ultimately cause the universe to collapse. A steady-state universe was then the orthodox view; the cosmos was neither growing nor expanding; for this reason Einstein chose a constant that would counteract the gravitational pull suggested by his equations just to the right extent to keep the cosmos in a steady state. When Edwin Hubble’s later observations suggested an expanding universe, Einstein is said to have labeled his constant his biggest blunder; and removed it. Prematurely, it seems. The constant is now back, as dark energy.

Indeed there is, based on calculations of the expansion (now said to be accelerating) and the anomalies observed in galactic rotation (that cannot be explained by gravity working on the visible bodies), far more of it than anything else. Contemplate the picture (from Wikipedia here but downloaded from NASA) of the constitution of the cosmos. Virtually all of the cosmos is dark energy and dark matter, leaving a mere 4 percent for matter; of that 4 percent only 0.4 percent are stars, and the matter of planets is too small to note.

To this I might add that both dark energy and dark matter are based on inferences, not on direct observations, one of cosmic expansion the other of anomalous galactic rotation. I will not be surprised if, in the fullness of time, the two will be found to be the same. It’s all dark energy. And that, folks is the cosmos.

* * *

Now Brigitte (my unfailing muse) pointed me to that story in Science Daily yesterday because of an earlier discussions about David Bohm (see this post). It turns out that Bohm’s own formulation of Quantum Theory in 1993—but already articulated in various forms in 1980 and before—offers a grand theory of the cosmos entirely in consonance with what we are seeing today. Bohm suggests that reality consists of two orders. One he calls the Implicate (enfolded) and the other the Explicate (unfolded) Order. He pictures the first as an “immense ocean of cosmic energy.” A sudden wave pulse within that ocean could create our universe, the Explicate Order, in extent tiny relative to that ocean. “This pulse,” Bohm continues, “would explode outward and break up into smaller ripples that spread yet further outward to constitute our ‘expanding universe’.” These words are from Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), p. 192. The scientific presentation of these ideas is in his 1993 The Undivided Universe.

In Wholeness Bohm introduces this subject saying:

What is implied by this proposal is that what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.… In this connection it may be said that space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty. The two opposing notions of space as empty and space as full have indeed continually alternated with each other in the development of philosophical and physical ideas. Thus, in Ancient Greece, the School of Parmenides and Zeno held that space is a plenum [fullness]. This view was opposed by Democritus, who was perhaps the first seriously to propose a world view that conceived of space as emptiness (i.e., the void), in which material particles (e.g., atoms) are free to move. Modern science has generally favored this latter atomistic view, and yet, during the nineteenth century, the former view was also seriously entertained, through the hypothesis of an ether that fills all space. Matter, thought of as consisting of special recurrent stable and separable forms in the ether (such as ripples or vortices), would be transmitted through this plenum as if the latter were empty. [p. 191]

Well, it seems to me that ether is back once more, but differently named. New names are necessary because reputation is so vital in science, and while it is now fashionable to be darkly energetic, it will not do to be ethereal.

Words, words, words. To see our great universe as a minor bubble deep in an ocean of eternity, a bubble broken up and carried by the ocean’s immense energy towards re-absorption in the whole (read expanding universe), is humbling but has a promising flavor. Indeed, NASA seems to agree. It suggests that as Dark Energy has its way with the universe, time will come when we will no longer see the stars out there. Eventually even our own galaxy will begin to spread apart.

As Through a Cosmos Darkly

It’s almost time to launch another ship.
Outward bound on yet another trip.
It is a noble, an expensive venture.
We want to see, to test if, peradventure,
A very complex modern instrument
Can finally detect an element.

We know that it exist out there in Space.
We cannot see it but detect its trace
In gravitational anomalies.
Galactic orbital trajectories
Suggest more mass out there than we can see.
That something’s there on that we all agree.
We have devised a name for it, Dark Matter.
The meaning is that galaxies are fatter.
They weigh more although they look quite slender,
Never mind their shape, their size, or gender.

Fritz Zwicky was he who first got to see
This troubling mystery in ’33.
In a galactic cluster named Coma
On its edges, around its corona,
Galaxies orbited much, much too fast.
Sky-gazers since have felt, have been, harassed
By this aptly named problem of missing mass.
Tracking the orbits or staring through glass,
They failed to fathom why something out there
Refused their sensors and even their prayer.

Dark matter thus turned into a brave sort of punt,
A clever proposal, a never-done stunt.
Physics boasts many such daring forays,
Many such elegant mental ballets.
Red shifts that signal endless expansion,
Black holes that cap galactic contraction,
A Bang that spewed cosmos from a mere dot…
Was that—or not?—the original Fiat?

Sail on brave ship into the cosmic black.
Beware Dark Matter of our brave attack!
We are determined to see, to sense starkly—
Even if only through a glass darkly.

[Suggested by a story in today’s New York Times titled “A Costly Quest for the Dark Heart of the Cosmos.”]

Three Follow-Up Notes

   
Empedocles

My post on “diamond bodies” could have mentioned the legendary Empedocles, a pre-Socratic Greek (around about 490-430 BC) who, in the Graeco-Roman-Western line of civilization was the first to concern himself with the origin of elements (or the first of whom something survives). It is from him that we have the core elements—fire, air, water, and earth—and theories of how these fundamentals generate all else. The western world embraced this classification.

If we permit ourselves patronizing chuckles in looking back at this sort of thought, we shall be viewed as very naïve and backward when we arrive in heaven. This was serious thought, on Empedocles’ part as well as on the part of those who found merit in it later. These words were technical concepts (or so we would call them today); they referred to certain fundamental qualities that fire, air, water, and earth brought to mind—rather than the actual phenomenon of oxidation, gas mixtures, H₂O, or a mixture of minerals and organics. Great thinkers are never stupid; but those who dismiss them inevitably are.

In the early, creative stages of civilization the sage-scientist-poet-mystic is one complete personality; in late stages comes specialization. Newton engaged in biblical commentary, indeed spent much of his time on it. Einstein, the latecomer, only permitted himself some few expressions of not-quite-mathematical wonder. Empedocles was a wizard, you might, say—and expressed himself in verse. Here are the first lines of his poem, one of two we know of, called Hymns of Purification. We have this fragment thanks to Diogenes Laertios who wrote about Greek philosophers in the third century of our era. I've rendered this fragment in my own words to heighten its effect a little. The translation is referenced below. The lines produce the aura of its author:

To friends who live near mighty, tawny Acragas,
To those who love good deeds in the proud citadel
Crowning its noble height—my greetings to you send.
Amongst you I wander, an immortal I am,
Death have I conquered, am honored by all, adorned
With holy diadems; blooming garlands cover me.
No matter what illustrious towns I visit,
Men and women merge their praises and follow
In my steps by thousands thirsting for deliverance.
Some ask for prophecies, some beg for remedies
Against a swarm, a pest of all kinds of disease.

In the above I don’t rely on my “learning,” which is conspicuous mostly by absence, but on the Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, edited by William L. Reese, Humanities Press, 1980. The original of the edited fragment courtesy of Wikipedia here.

Dark Matter

In waxing eloquent on elements two posts back and above, I failed altogether to mention the latest fly in the ointment, namely dark matter. Dark matter is a latecomer too, like Einstein. It was first postulated the other day, as it were, in 1934, two years before I came screaming into the world one stormy night in July. With such a theory already in the air, I had reason to be displeased!

Here is my understanding of the (dark) matter in a thimble. Dark matter—you cannot see or weigh it; it is transparent and seems to have no mass—is stipulated to exist for a reason. And the reason is? The reason is that the rotation of stars on the outer fringe of galaxies takes place at a slower, a much too stately, pace than it ought to based on the laws of gravitation as propounded by the above mentioned Newton. This gravitational anomaly forces the conclusion that there is much, much more matter in the cosmos than we can actually detect. The issue really is the gravitational anomaly as such. Dark matter is the hypothesized cause.  One possible alternative explanation of this anomaly is that gravitation diminishes in force over very great distances. Now we have a description of gravitation, not really an explanation of it. We have yet to detect particles that are exchanged (gravitons, as it were). Our explanation is that mass distorts space—a theory at least as marvelous as dark matter itself. If we understood gravitation better, the anomaly might disappear. Since that problem—gravitation—is thought to be settled by space-time equations, it is, as it were, no longer on the table, hence we reach for dark matter.

I detect the seeds of a quite different explanation in the work of David Bohm (1917-1992), particularly in his book, The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory. He wrote it with B.J. Hiley. Bohm’s very novel theory is that our universe is a tiny part of a greater cosmos that has been unfolded (explicated) from a greater whole, the implicate (enfolded) cosmos. Thus what we call the universe is a minute little bubble of expansion within a vastly more compressed surround. The seed notion here (it’s mine, not one that Bohm proposed) is that gravitational anomalies may be due to the presence of the greater whole as a container—and that this influence is detectable only in very large segments of space, not in the local, e.g., the solar system.

Undivided Universe is very tough reading. It took me years to get used to its premise—and never mind the thick bristling of equations. A more accessible book is Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996.

Inspired on Tuesday by Monday

This third note to tip my hat to a fellow blogger and reader of Ghulf Genes who styles himself Montag, which happens to mean Monday in German. His blog is here. Montag made some comments yesterday elsewhere. He mentioned both Empedocles and dark matter—and these annotations made me reflect this morning and thus led to the above.

Books mentioned at Amazon:

The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory.
Wholeness and the Implicate Order.