Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof

[tkingdoll]

You-There is a UFO parked out front.
Me-what?
You-A UFO! In my driveway!
Me-what is a UFO?
You-You know, an unidentified flying object!
Me-what? what does that even mean? Did you see it fly? Did it land?
You-No, it is just parked.
Me-what? then how can it be a flying object?
You-It looks like one.
Me-what? what does a UFO look like?
You-A flying saucer! You know, a space ship! Aliens!
Me-what? have you been drinking today?
You-No! I'm telling you, it is a UFO!
Me-what? How do you know that?
You-Just come see it!
Me-I don't think so.

Exactly. You just proved my point. It would take a hell of a lot to prove to you that there's an alien space ship outside. You won't even go to the window, because it's such an extraordinary claim.

Now, have that conversation again with the first claim. There's a red car parked outside my house.

 

[athon]

First, my caveat, I only have had a high school physics course and one college level astronomy course (20 years ago) and the only other knowledge I can claim is that I have read and understood parts of scholarly articles and books on the topic.

However, if my understanding is correct, there have been no specific claims about what dark energy and matter are except that certain unaccounted for forces or force are need to explain the observed evidence of an ever expanding universe. I still have trouble understanding how this was deduced but leaving that aside, this seems similar to how other objects in our solar system were deduced to exist and then found due to mathematical calculations based on perterbations of the orbits of known planets and other objects.

I agree.

Dark matter reminds me of the old vitalism-mechanistic historical debates. Some vitalists posited that there was an 'unknowable' force which accounted for living things. Other vitalists claimed it was novel to physics and chemistry, however was still within the bounds of science. Some vitalists were essentially mechanists - they claimed that life was the result of known chemistries and physics working in unknown ways. This was their view of 'vitalism'.

Today, dark matter is like early day 'mechanistic' vitalism (for lack of a better term). There is something going on, on account of observations, however what that is remains unknown. It is probably a phenomena explainable using the models of physics we currently have, in different contexts. I have no more problem with that than I do with the vitalists of centuries past who felt the 'vitalism' of life was genuinely explainable using known chemistry and physics.

Athon

 

[athon]

Robinson, please enlighten us: what do you think is a claim about the universe that is less extraordinary than the existence of dark matter and dark energy plus general relativity?


(Before you answer, please bear in mind that any claim which conflicts with observational data is almost certainly more extraordinary than one which does not, since it requires all that data to be wrong.)

Bumping this question as it phrases things perfectly.

Robinson?

Athon

 

[CapelDodger]

That is so wrong. It is like this:

You: "My dog has invisible fleas."
Me: "Hang on,there is no such thing as invisible feas."
You: "I dunno, lots of dogs have fleas, I bet there are invisible fleas."
Me: "How can you say that?"
You: "Fleas are invisible anyway, you're probably missing them. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that my dog doesn't have a invisible fleas."
Me: "Um? Fleas are not invisible."
You: "Oh yeah? How do you know? Someone who doesn't know that fleas are invisible and can teleport has no business making wild claims about dogs with invisible fleas!."

That''s a sad and sorry response.

 

[CapelDodger]

To continue:

You-There has to be invisible fleas. We eliminated all fleas, and the dog still scratches.
Me-It could be something else.
You-Nonsense. There is nothing else that can make a dog scratch.
Me-Sure there is.
You-No, there is not. It has to be an unknown flea.
Me-It could be another skin condition.
You-Nonsense! There is no other reason a dog scratches like that!
Me-Sure there is.
You-No. And since I'm sure there are invisible fleas, you can't prove otherwise.
Me-What is your proof?
You-We have observed several dogs scratching, and they have no fleas!
Me- Uh, are you on any mediciation?

That's a sad, sorry, and offensive response.

 

[CapelDodger]

Agreed. That's why we didn't believe it until we had extraordinary evidence---that evidence being the direct SN1a observations. The rest of cosmology had been hinting at the 75% dark energy for a long time, but many people didn't believe it because it was an extraordinary claim. but now we have extraordinary evidence.

The nub of the matter . Hypothesis has followed the evidence.

As robinson goes about his life he doesn't see dark matter or dark energy, so what's that all about, eh ?

 

[CapelDodger]

It is sort of like a rule. If you make some kind of Extraordinary claim, we get to demand extraordinary proof. Trying to switch the situation, and claiming now we have to disprove the Extraordinary claim, is not allowed.

The extraordinary evidence (not proof) came first. Extraordinary in your terms, of course, stuff you don't see every day. It's hardly surprising that you also find associated hypotheses extraordinary.

If that's all you've got to say, well, you've said it.

 

[Damien Evans]

That is so wrong. It is like this:

You: "My dog has invisible fleas."
Me: "Hang on,there is no such thing as invisible feas."
You: "I dunno, lots of dogs have fleas, I bet there are invisible fleas."
Me: "How can you say that?"
You: "Fleas are invisible anyway, you're probably missing them. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that my dog doesn't have a invisible fleas."
Me: "Um? Fleas are not invisible."
You: "Oh yeah? How do you know? Someone who doesn't know that fleas are invisible and can teleport has no business making wild claims about dogs with invisible fleas!."

hmm, you don't know very much about this subject, do you?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

That is so wrong. It is like this:

You: "My dog has invisible fleas."
Me: "Hang on,there is no such thing as invisible feas."
You: "I dunno, lots of dogs have fleas, I bet there are invisible fleas."
Me: "How can you say that?"
You: "Fleas are invisible anyway, you're probably missing them. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that my dog doesn't have a invisible fleas."
Me: "Um? Fleas are not invisible."
You: "Oh yeah? How do you know? Someone who doesn't know that fleas are invisible and can teleport has no business making wild claims about dogs with invisible fleas!."

This has been said above but you missed it so let me simplify things for you:

Invisible: Usually refers to not showing in the visible field of the observer.

Ways we detect things: Visible light and the entire rest of the electromagnetic spectrum from sound waves to Xrays for example.

Then there is dark matter which we can detect the gravity of but which we observe does not interact with light at any wavelength except where the gravitational field of the dark matter interacts with light. Gravitational lensing recently identified exactly where the dark matter was thus making it 'visible'. Gravity bends light. Where the light bent around dark matter not otherwise detectable via the electromagnetic spectrum, we were able to see the outline of it.

As for dark energy, again see above for how we detect it despite it not being detectable in the way one would detect normal energy (that is by the energy coming past us in the way of light and Xrays, gamma rays etc.

What you need to grasp is how are we detecting these things. Because they are not any more 'invisible' than gamma rays.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

For anyone interested:
Giant Sheets of Dark Matter Detected

Because the dark matter, by definition, is invisible to telescopes, the only way to detect it on such grand scales is by surveying huge numbers of distant galaxies and working out how their images, as seen from telescopes, are being weakly tweaked and distorted by any dark matter structures in intervening space.

"We measured the shapes of millions of galaxies and then mapped the stretching of their light," explained astronomer Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia. The international team from France and Canada studied the galaxies with the Canada-French-Hawaii Telescope Survey's MegaCam telescope in Hawaii.

The resulting map of distorted galaxies reveals the locations of the vast dark matter structures, with more dark matter located where the greatest distortions are seen, he explained. A paper describing the discovery by Van Waerbeke and his colleagues appears in the latest issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The dark matter of the giant structures can distort the appearance of distant galaxies because dark matter has gravity, which can alter the course of light--or "lense" it--as it flies through space. So although the galaxies themselves are not affected, their images are distorted as seen from Earth when their light passes near significant concentrations of dark matter.

Picture the light inside the lighthouse being bent outward by the lens around it. These images speak a thousand words.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Dark energy OTOH may still be more of a hypothetical construct. However, there are some proposed means of detecting it as well that are currently being discussed.

Physical Evidence for Dark Energy Detected

Posted on: Tuesday, 22 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

Sloan Digital Sky Survey -- Scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey announced the discovery of independent physical evidence for the existence of dark energy.

The researchers found an imprint of dark energy by correlating millions of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and cosmic microwave background temperature maps from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The researchers found dark energy's "shadow" on the ancient cosmic radiation, a relic of cooled radiation from the Big Bang.

With the combination of results from these two large sky surveys, this discovery provides physical evidence for the existence of dark energy; a result that complements earlier work on the acceleration of the universe as measured from distant supernovae. Observations from the Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics (BOOMERANG) of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) were also part of the earlier findings.

Dark energy, a major component of the universe and one of the greatest conundrums in science, is gravitationally repulsive rather than attractive. This causes the universe's expansion to accelerate, in contrast to the attraction of ordinary (and dark) matter, which would make it decelerate.

"In a flat universe the effect we're observing only occurs if you have a universe with dark energy," explained lead researcher Dr. Ryan Scranton of the University of Pittsburgh's Physics and Astronomy department. "If the universe was just composed of matter and still flat, this effect wouldn't exist."

The OP is one of those typical failures to understand the science leading people to draw false conclusions about the validity of the evidence.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Sheesh, robinson, there is an entire thread on this topic. Did you make no effort to actually understand the science here?

 

[Dorian Gray]

Are you going to answer my question, Robinson?

If you can't, you have no basis for calling the existence of DM and DE extraordinary claims.

Fallacy, dude. You don't need to come up with a better idea to conclude that a particular idea is bad. Ideas can be and often are objectively bad, without comparison.

I'm not saying DE/DM don't exist, but I'm not saying that the universe doesn't split at every decision node, either.

 

[sol invictus]

Fallacy, dude. You don't need to come up with a better idea to conclude that a particular idea is bad. Ideas can be and often are objectively bad, without comparison.

Very convincing. You say it's bad, without any argument for why we should take your opinion seriously, without commenting on the fact that every time we build a bigger accelerator we find new particles (making it rather presumptuous to think we've found them all already, no?), without noting that we didn't think neutrinos were massive until we discovered that a few years ago (and a little heavier and that would be that), without offering a better idea, and without noticing that, with about 4 parameters a theory of DM+DE can explain every single one of the millions of observations we've ever made about the universe... but since you say so, it must be.

I'm not saying DE/DM don't exist, but I'm not saying that the universe doesn't split at every decision node, either.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

 

[robinson]

Robinson, please enlighten us: what do you think is a claim about the universe that is less extraordinary than the existence of dark matter and dark energy plus general relativity?


(Before you answer, please bear in mind that any claim which conflicts with observational data is almost certainly more extraordinary than one which does not, since it requires all that data to be wrong.)

That doesn't make any sense. Which is why I ignored it.

 

[drkitten]

That doesn't make any sense. Which is why I ignored it.

Perhaps I can unpack it for you.

A claim that widely accepted observational data is wrong is among the most extraordinary claims that a person can make. Think of the no-planers and how hard they have to work to explain away the photographs and wreckage of the planes.

A claim that cats don't chase laser pointers would be astonishingly extraordinary --- because anyone with a cat and a laser pointer can confirm for herself that they do. (There's even a patent on the use of a laser as a kitty toy!)

So, what's your claim about how the universe is put together that a) doesn't involve DM, and b) isn't even more extraordinary than DM because it calls into question all the data we have like skeptigirl's photos?

 

[robinson]

Lets go back to the extraordinary claims.

Everything we know, everything we can detect, is only 5% of the entire Universe! - Extraordinary claim!

20% of the Universe is something we can't see or detect, that doesn't obey the laws of physics, except it has mass, but passes through everything, including itself, and leaves no trace. - Extraordinary claim!

75% of the Universe is energy that defies known laws of physics, it negates gravity, can't be detected, and causes the entire Universe to go faster, with no known source for the energy involved in causing that! - Extraordinary claim!!!

I'm stating that those are, all considered, an Extraordinary claim. So it requires Extraordinary evidence.

Not a couple of pictures we can't explain, and certainly not just theory and calculations. Extraordinary evidence. If you claim 75% of the Universe is some unknown dark energy that is driving everything apart faster and faster, you better have some extraordinary evidence to back it up.

 

[drkitten]

Lets go back to the extraordinary claims.

Do. But, please, state them properly.

Everything we know, everything we can detect, is only 5% of the entire Universe! - Extraordinary claim!

Wrong. We believe we can detect dark matter. We can even photograph its effects. What we can't do is see it by its own light.

20% of the Universe is something we can't see or detect, that doesn't obey the laws of physics, except it has mass, but passes through everything, including itself, and leaves no trace. - Extraordinary claim!

Wrong. DM obeys all the laws of physics as we understand them.

75% of the Universe is energy that defies known laws of physics, it negates gravity, can't be detected, and causes the entire Universe to go faster, with no known source for the energy involved in causing that! - Extraordinary claim!!!

Wrong. DM obeys all the laws of physics as we understand them.

I'm stating that those are, all considered, an Extraordinary claim.

And I'm stating that none of your strawmen are actual claims that physicists have made.

 

[robinson]

That should be, "DE obeys all the laws of physics as we understand them."

You used DM twice.

 

[robinson]

This mysterious "dark matter" is believed by most scientists to be the most common stuff in the universe, perhaps making up 90 percent or more of the total mass.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/dark_matter_sidebar_010105.html

The most common "stuff" in the Universe is something nobody is quite sure of.

So what is dark matter made of? No one knows for sure.

Normal matter -- you, your computer and the air you breathe -- is made of atoms, which are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. Scientists call this "baryonic" matter. They suspect some dark matter is of the normal, baryonic variety. This might include brown dwarf stars and other objects that are simply too small, or too dim, to be seen from great distances.

But most dark matter is thought to be non-baryonic -- truly strange.

If this is true, then just finding the stuff will be difficult, because researchers don't even know what they are looking for.

I call that an Extraordinary claim.

Yes, truly strange.