Lambda-CDM theory - Woo or not?

[Michael Mozina]

You've got all sorts of different things mixed up in your head, Michael. Here are some facts that almost certainly won't help you get them straight:

Well, either way I appreciate your efforts. Your explanations are typically more reasonable than most.

Fact: Newtonian gravity cannot account for the way galaxies rotate unless there is some (literally) dark matter in and around them - matter that we do not see with telescopes.

Agreed.

Fact: General relativity is very well approximated by Newtonian gravity when it comes to galaxy rotation, and therefore the same statement applies to GR.

OK.

Fact: In addition to galaxy rotation, at least four other independent lines of evidence also demonstrate the existence of extra matter. They all agree at least roughly on its abundance (roughly 5 times ordinary matter) and distribution (big diffuse mostly spherical clouds around galaxies).

Check...

Fact: Dark matter is almost certainly not baryonic, because all baryonic possibilities have been ruled out by direct searches and/or by various other effects it would have produced.

Sorry sol, on this point I simply have to absolutely, positively, without any doubt, disagree with your assessment. Here's why:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/science/space/17univ.html
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=2287
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090609-most-massive-black-holes.html

There is clear evidence IMO that not only were the original mass estimates WRONG they were wrong by a lot. In over three years I haven't seen your industry budge one single percentage point from their emotional need for "exotic" brands of matter. In fact I've seen no movement AT ALL! That says to me that your industry just isn't interested in admitting their mistakes in their mass estimation techniques.

Spare me the lecture about the Black hole not helping find the missing mass, yada, yada, yada. I'm just noting that the industry hasn't budged a single percentage point in 3 years. That alone says volumes IMO.

Ben's response (which I'll address next) exemplifies this entrenched, outrageously arrogant "insistence" that all the normal mass has been found, when clearly it has NOT been found or accounted for based on the few observations I listed.

The other "fact" you forgot to mention is that no other types of mass, other than the identified subatomic particles in the STANDARD model have been found during active experimentation at LHC. That is a fact. There are no "properties" seen in controlled experimentation that would 'fill in the gaps' of your theory. That's a fact.

 

[Michael Mozina]

Sure we did. Galaxies have mass. Galaxies are observed to be doing something inconsistent with the GR effect of positive pressure matter. There you go. Done.

Do you *HONESTLY* believe that is a "physical" demonstration of your claims Ben? Don't even get me started with your mythical "negative pressure vacuum" claims!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdrqdW4Miao

That is a physical demonstration of the fact that EM fields can and do cause particle acceleration. Care to show me a real physical demonstration of "dark energy" yet?

That is happening even though we don't know what the cause is.

The only things you know for sure are that you botched the mass estimates the first time through and photons are reshifted. The rest is an ASSUMPTION you make based on what you subjective THINK causes that redshift to occur. The problem is that space doesn't expand, and matter doesn't expand faster than light, so your claim is bogus.

Not knowing what the cause is does not make the data go away.

The data isn't "space expansion". The data is "redshift". The SUBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION is "space expansion". Likewise the "data" is "you blew the mass estimates". The "subjective interpretation" is "we did it right, the missing mass must be "invisible and it's never been seen in the lab".

Not knowing what the cause is does not make the "ordinary matter is responsible" hypothesis actually work. (It doesn't work, remember?)

Ignoring the fact that you folks grossly underestimate the normals stars in a galaxy doesn't work for me either ben. I haven't seen you guys budge a single percentage point in over three years! If you had a desire to minimize the need for 'exotic' types of mass, you folks would have done it by now. Since you haven't done a single thing, it's pretty dark clear that your loathe to admit your mistakes.

Not knowing what the cause is does not mean that we can't give it a name, "dark energy", and hypothesize about how it works.

You're also ignoring the fact that the redshift process can and has been INTERPRETED in terms of 'tired light' concepts that don't require "faster than light speed expansion" tricks, or anything of the sort.

 

[Michael Mozina]

Your ignorance will not change the fact that SUSY theories actually have been restricted to a smaller parameter space by the LHC results.

Deny it all you like, but the gaps in your your mythical matter of gaps argument just got a lot smaller.

 

[ben m]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/science/space/17univ.html
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=2287
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090609-most-massive-black-holes.html

There is clear evidence IMO that not only were the original mass estimates WRONG they were wrong by a lot.

Those measurements have nothing whatsoever to do with the baryonic mass estimates. The mass is estimated, most precisely, from the CMB (acoustic wave speeds in a plasma---depends on density and temperature, not star counting) and BBN (nuclear reaction rates in a plasma---depends on density and temperature, not star counting). These techniques are accurate at the level of 3%.

Counting stars is a *rough cross check* with error bars of 50%.

ETA: Here is what you're doing.

A) "The turnstiles tell us there are 4503 fans in this concert"
B) "It looks pretty close standing-room-only, so using the two-square-feet-per-person rule, it ought to be around 6000. Give or take 50%. So 4503 is reasonable.
A) "I just got back from the bathroom, it looks like there's 100 in there too."
M) "How can you still claim that there are 5000 people at the concert when there were 100 in the bathroom you can't even see? It was 5000 yesterday and now it's 5100. Maybe in an hour you'll find another 5000. Clearly modern concert-attendance-estimation techniques are unreliable!"

The other "fact" you forgot to mention is that no other types of mass, other than the identified subatomic particles in the STANDARD model have been found during active experimentation at LHC.

This is why we don't claim to know what the dark matter is made of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdrqdW4Miao

That is a physical demonstration of the fact that EM fields can and do cause particle acceleration.

Yes, our detailed knowledge of EM fields allows us to calculate their effect on large-scale cosmological motion. The effect is zero.

You're also ignoring the fact that the redshift process can and has been INTERPRETED in terms of 'tired light' concepts that don't require "faster than light speed expansion" tricks, or anything of the sort.

I've invited you, repeatedly, to cite a paper showing any non-LCDM model whatsoever that has been applied to one precision cosmology observable. Tired light? Does it agree with data? No it doesn't. Show me the theory/experiment comparison plot and quote the chi^2/dof.

 

[Michael Mozina]

No, I know it. The laws of physics that govern gas, plasmas, planets, stars, neutrinos, and photons are known.

No. Actually the physics that govern the universe are all "UNKNOWN" since you can't even tell me where "dark energy" comes from and it makes up more than 70 percent of your "sky religion". In fact only 4% of the physics is "known" in your religion.

If you folks understood the PHYSICS of plasma, you'd be paying attention to Birkeland's work instead of peddling what Alfven called "pseudoscience". You folks have NO CLUE how the physics actually works.

Those laws, applied to a "baryons are the dark matter" hypothesis, make predictions. Those predictions are falsified by the data. Therefore the hypothesis "baryons are the dark matter" is scientifically proven false.

No! You constantly ignore the REAL conditions of plasmas, particularly and specifically the current carrying aspects of plasmas in space. In fact you quite literally seem to think that "magnetic fields" form in the absence of current in plasma.

Other than SUSY? Sure, are you kidding? Particular hypotheses I've spent time on include: axions, quark nuggets (technically they're baryonic, but not the way you're thinking of), and hidden sectors.

So essentially you're willing to go anywhere and everywhere OTHER than back to the drawing board and review your ASSUMPTIONS skeptically. I see.

 

[Michael Mozina]

Those measurements have nothing whatsoever to do with the baryonic mass estimates.

Your "theories" don't agree with observation Ben. How do you "explain" the problem then?

The mass is estimated, most precisely, from the CMB (acoustic wave speeds in a plasma---depends on density and temperature, not star counting) and BBN (nuclear reaction rates in a plasma---depends on density and temperature, not star counting). These techniques are accurate at the level of 3%.

Just out of MORBID curiosity, how much "moving current" did you account for in those mass estimation techniques?

Here is what you're doing Ben.

"I don't care that our theories don't jive with observation and that galaxies are twice as bright as we thought, or the universe is twice as "dusty" as we thought, or that there are actually 4 times more stars in a given galaxy than we thought, we were right anyway to within 3% and we refuse to budge even 1%".

BS.

 

[ben m]

My answer to all of these questions is the same as it was the previous fifteen times. You are welcome to construct my response by quoting my previous posts on exactly these topics.

 

[Michael Mozina]

My answer to all of these questions is the same as it was the previous fifteen times. You are welcome to construct my response by quoting my previous posts on exactly these topics.

In other words you *ASSUMED* there's no current running through the universe, you don't CARE if your theory doesn't jive with actual observation, and any GAPS between observation and theory must be caused by invisible elves.

 

[ben m]

In other words you *ASSUMED* there's no current running through the galaxy, you don't CARE if your theory doesn't jive with actual observation, and any GAPS between observation and theory must be caused by invisible elves.

No, I mean I answered these questions already. Did you find me saying "I assume there is no current" etc.? No you didn't. Go find my previous comments on current and B field in the galaxy, how much I know about them, and how much it matters for cosmology.

 

[sol invictus]

Sorry sol, on this point I simply have to absolutely, positively, without any doubt, disagree with your assessment. Here's why:

OK, let's see why.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/science/space/17univ.html

Dead link.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=2287

That says that lighter stars are more abundant than previously thought relative to heavier stars. The lighter ones are dimmer, and tend to be masked by the heavier stars. But it doesn't say anything about the total mass in stars, does it?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090609-most-massive-black-holes.html

That says roughly that if there is even more dark matter in a diffuse halo than previously thought, then the mass of supermassive black holes is larger. I'm not seeing how you interpret that as evidence for dark matter being baryonic...

There is clear evidence IMO that not only were the original mass estimates WRONG they were wrong by a lot.

None of those necessarily increase the estimates of the amount of mass in baryons, so.... hmm.

I think your larger point is that many estimates in astronomy have large uncertainties. And maybe those uncertainties actually account for all that missing mass - how can we be so sure they can't? Is that a fair summary of your position?

On its face it's not an unreasonable position. When I see one study that says "butter is very bad for you, so eat margarine" and then another that says "actually butter is OK, but margarine is deadly", I lose some of my faith in the science of nutrition. The problem arises in the first place because popular accounts of scientific results almost never convey the level of certainty. Almost any result in nutrition or public health comes saddled with huge caveats, because it's literally impossible to control for many major and potentially very serious confounding factors in those studies.

Astrophysics isn't really like that - while some surveys suffer from such problems, others do not - in other words, some results are indeed very uncertain, but others are very precise, and we know which is which.

Coming back to the point, there just isn't any form of baryonic dark matter that looks like it can work. Many, many people have thought about that, because everyone would be much happier if dark matter was baryonic. Scientists hate introducing new particles - they love simplicity. If dark matter could be black holes, or very dim brown dwarfs, or dust, or plasma, or anything else more or less conventional, it would be great. The problem is, none of those possibilities are even close to consistent with data. So I wouldn't say it's completely impossible, because maybe everyone is missing something, but it really looks very unlikely.

 

[Reality Check]

I'm just noting that the industry hasn't budged a single percentage point in 3 years. That alone says volumes IMO.

Have you also noted that the 'industry' hasn't budged a single percentage point in decades on the electron mass !
Obviously the electron mass is wrong (or in MM-speak a 'dark sky entity').

You obviously do not know that one reason that empirical data is collected is to refine previous measurements. So a good measurement starts off at a value with large uncertainties and converges to a more precise value with smaller uncertainties.

 

[Reality Check]

Deny it all you like, but the gaps in your your mythical matter of gaps argument just got a lot smaller.

Display it all you like, but the gaps in your knowledge of physics are remaining abysmal :
Dark matter exists:

The observational evidence for dark matter means that it is mostly nonbaryonic matter with a tiny component of baryonic matter (e.g. MACHOs)
​

It does not have to be SUSY particles. It is just convenient if it was because SUSY is a valid extension of the Standard Model.

 

[Reality Check]

Dead link.

This is the Galaxies Twice as Bright as They Seem, Study Finds news article that MM has lied about before (it has been addressed by several posters).

As ben m points out just above, calculating the mass of galaxies from their luminosity (and then taking an average and applying that to 100 billion galaxies to get the mass of visible matter) is a rough estimate. He cites error bars of 50%.

If that paper is correct then the mass of galaxies would increase by 20%.

The results also mean that there is about 20 percent more mass in stars than previously thought. But since stars make up such a small percentage of the universe to begin with — dark matter and dark energy account for 95 percent or so — it is a small adjustment over all.

For someone who obsesses so much about plasma, it is amazing that MM ignores that most of the mass in galaxy clusters is plasma (the Intracluster medium) - not the stars in galaxies!
Only 1% of the mass of a typical galaxy cluster is in galaxies.

 

[Michael Mozina]

OK, let's see why.

Dead link.

Hmm. It worked for me, but try this one:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=25444

That says that lighter stars are more abundant than previously thought relative to heavier stars. The lighter ones are dimmer, and tend to be masked by the heavier stars. But it doesn't say anything about the total mass in stars, does it?

Doesn't it? How about taking a look at the first link again, and focusing specifically on the fact that galaxies are twice as bright as we first ASSUMED and the small stars are 4 times as numerous as we first thought. Why wouldn't those revelations result in ANY modification of your baryonic mass estimates?

 

[sol invictus]

Doesn't it? How about taking a look at the first link again, and focusing specifically on the fact that galaxies are twice as bright

That's some kind of average statement that applies to a huge survey of 10,000 galaxies, most of which are necessarily very distant and very faint. Forget those for a moment, and focus on our own galaxy (the Milky Way). I don't think dust dimming within our own galaxy is a problem for counting the stars in it. But the rotation curve of the Milky Way is already enough to show that we need extra matter.

Similarly, there are some nearby galaxies (like Andromeda) that are imaged pretty clearly, and also show the need for dark matter.

the small stars are 4 times as numerous as we first thought

Small stars being more numerous might be a relative statement or an absolute statement. If it's relative - that small stars make up a larger fraction of the total stellar population than previously thought - I think that would mean that the total mass of stars was less than previously thought (because small stars are more luminous per unit mass).

Why wouldn't those revelations result in ANY modification of your baryonic mass estimates?

They probably do. But it's just nowhere near enough.

Let me try an analogy. Suppose you see a guy carrying a canvas sack. The sack is bulging, and you can see he's straining to hold it. You can't see inside, but you can see the outlines of different objects inside - some are small, some are big - and you can even try to estimate how much of the stuff in the bag is small and how much is big.

Then you notice a couple of other nearby guys. Each carries a very similar bulging sack, and they're all straining to hold it. You can make out a few details about the sizes of objects inside for them too.

Off in the distance there's a big crowd, each person holding a bag. It's hard to see the details, but you can get some information by averaging over what you can see. Of course they might all be faking, maybe the sacks are actually full of cotton.

Fortunately the whole crowd is standing on a scale, which you know is very accurate. You know pretty much how much each person weighs, but when you multiply that weight by the number of people, it's short of what the scale reads by a factor of 6. In other words each person - they're all normal sized men, say - would have to weigh 1,200 pounds on average instead of 200 to account for the weight on the scale - unless they are in fact carrying heavy bags, just as it looks.

With all that info, isn't it pretty reasonable to conclude that even though you can't see inside, and even though you don't know the exact weight of each man, those sacks probably contain some really heavy stuff?

And in astro there's tons more evidence than that. The bullet cluster observation, for instance, is all by itself very strong evidence.

 

[Reality Check]

Why wouldn't those revelations result in ANY modification of your baryonic mass estimates?

These scientific measurments will modify the rough estimates of baryonic mass (the ones that are have error bars of 50%).

For example: In a typical galaxy cluster

• 1% of the mass is in galaxies.
• The ICM is 9%.
• Dark matter is 90%.

This will change to 1.2% of the mass is in galaxies and either

• The ICM is 8.8%, dark matter is 90%.
• The ICM is 9%, dark matter is 89.8%.
• or some other combination.

The technique of estimating baryonic mass through counting visible matter is decades old and has been superseded by more accurate methods, i.e. analysis of the CMB.

A good explanation of how astronomers determine the amount to normal matter (easily understandable to people with your level of knowledge of physics, MM) is at the Starts with a Bang! blog:
Dark Matter Part II: How much Normal Matter is there?

• Gas fraction of clusters is 13-15% with 2% in stars.
• Cosmological clustering of galaxies does not match reality if all we have is normal matter.
• Nucleosynthesis: " We do our measurements, and then our calculations, and we find that no more than about 4-5% of the total energy in the Universe can be baryons, otherwise the abundances of these elements would be off by too much."
• The Cosmic Microwave Background cannot be fitted with a model that just has normal matter.

 

[Tim Thompson]

How about taking a look at the first link again, and focusing specifically on the fact that galaxies are twice as bright as we first ASSUMED and the small stars are 4 times as numerous as we first thought. Why wouldn't those revelations result in ANY modification of your baryonic mass estimates?

It does make a difference in the baryonic mass estimates, as the paper explicitly states (Driver, et al., 2008). However, the translation in our understanding of stellar luminosity to a change in our understanding of stellar mass is not simple, which is probably why Driver, et al., talk about it but don't do it. But just looking at the standard main sequence mass (M) - luminosity (L) relationship (L = M^3.5) I would guess that increasing the brightness by a factor of 2 would increase the implied mass by a smaller factor, about 1.2 (i.e., new stellar mass estimate = 1.2 x old stellar mass estimate).

Now, only about 10% of the baryonic mass of a galaxy cluster is in the form of stars (Clowe, et al., 2004; Bell, et al., 2004) and 10% x 1.2 = 12%. Huzzah, now instead of 10% stars it's 12% stars. But dark matter out-masses baryonic matter by a factor of 1000% (i.e., roughly a factor of 10). The effect of this work on the stellar mass estimate is miniscule by comparison.

However, we might now ask, is that also a 2% change in the overall baryonic mass estimate? I think not, I think much less. Look at what (Driver, et al., 2008) say in their abstract: at 0.1 microns only 11 +/- 2 percent of the photons escape the galaxy, while that number increases to 87 +/- 3 percent at 2.1 microns. Also note that they are talking about starlight, that is light directly produced by stars. Astronomers already knew long before this 2008 study that starlight is absorbed by dust and the energy re-radiated in longer wavelength infrared photons. So astronomers have long used the infrared luminosity of a galaxy as a tracer for star formation rates. The photons do not directly escape the galaxy as starlight, but the energy does escape, as longer wavelength infrared photons produced by the dust in response to absorbing starlight (the photons that did not escape). So that baryonic mass is in fact already accounted for in the form of a star formation rate, rather than in the form of existing stars. So in fact the study you refer to should have essentially no effect at all on the baryonic mass estimate because the mass represented by those photons was already in the books, just in a different form.

I will also note your exercise in upper case letters for "ASSUMED". That is a misrepresentation of the facts. The brightness of the galaxies was OBSERVED, it was not ASSUMED. The observations were taken as-is rather than interpreted to imply the presence of stars not actually seen. Now, in the "light" of new knowledge, we know that we need to re-interpret the observations and ASSUME that stars are present, even though they cannot be seen. So what we have actually done is not to replace an ASSUMPTION with and OBSERVATION, but quite the reverse; we now substitute an ASSUMPTION in place of our OBSERVATION.

Someday you should try to move beyond the crude level of understanding science by the press release, the whole press release, and nothing but the press release.

 

[ben m]

Thanks for the post Tim. I recommend you save a link to it; you'll need it again in two months when Mozina reads yet another stellar astronomy article and has this "realization", exact in every detail, that "astronomers are slowly discovering the dark matter and won't admit it" for the Nth time.

 

[Michael Mozina]

It does make a difference in the baryonic mass estimates, as the paper explicitly states (Driver, et al., 2008). However, the translation in our understanding of stellar luminosity to a change in our understanding of stellar mass is not simple, which is probably why Driver, et al., talk about it but don't do it. But just looking at the standard main sequence mass (M) - luminosity (L) relationship (L = M^3.5) I would guess that increasing the brightness by a factor of 2 would increase the implied mass by a smaller factor, about 1.2 (i.e., new stellar mass estimate = 1.2 x old stellar mass estimate).

But already there's a serious problem from my perspective Tim. From a skeptics perspective you've already gone out of your way to 'minimize' the amount of baryonic material that you might hope to identify from such information. If the galaxies are twice as bright, you could just as easily double the number of large stars in a galaxy. If we look at the second paper, we can also throw in some more mass due to our underestimation of the number of small stars that we can't see as compared to the number of larger stars that we can observe. That 1.2 number seems like a blatant attempt 'minimize' the number you might come up with vs. "maximizing" the number. Why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110210075726.htm

IMO it's bad enough that science in general tends to minimize the number of published papers that refute current theory. It's even worse if every assumption we make attempts to minimize the problem or promote what I would call 'damage control' thinking rather than an attitude of "lets solve the problem".

Care to explain why you picked the 1.2 number in the first place rather than simply doubling the number of larger stars and adding more mass from all those smaller stars? Why didn't you pick 2.2 rather than 1.2?

 

[Michael Mozina]

FYI, the star count problem is only half (probably less) of the issue. Why did we underestimate the brightness number in the first place? Does that mean that the universe is also twice as "dusty" as we first believed?