Re: Why Editors must dare to be dumb


John Edser wrote:
"whitesickle@xxxxxxx" whitesickle@xxxxxxx wrote:-

Voices
Weird Science
Why editors must dare to be dumb
By K.C. Cole
snip<
I was discussing this problem recently with a colleague who had been
beating his head against the wall for months trying to get a story
about a mysterious "dark force" in cosmology past editors at The
New Yorker: "They kept saying they didn't understand it!" he
complained. Well, of course they didn't understand it. Nobody
understands it. That's precisely what makes it so interesting.

JE:-
Dark matter and dark energy remain mythical fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-
cosmological-garden reminiscent of the dark age because they cannot even be
verified let alone refuted. These non detectable myths have been invalidly
employed to save Newton's gravitational constant from refutation. Unlike
such people, Newton was actually a scientist and not just a mathematician so
he only ever put forward EMPIRICALLY refutable ideas, as did Darwin and
Mendel. The trendy disease of adding endless "ad hoc" plasters to save
Newton's gravitational constant is simply not epistemologically valid.

Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

There is alot of speculation. Some studies say dark matter/dark energy
doesn't exist. Some, such as the one below, says it does.

Michael Ragland



Scientists: Dark matter exists
By Robert Roy Britt
SPACE.com


Wednesday, August 23, 2006; Posted: 4:56 p.m. EDT (20:56 GMT)


Scientists found proof of dark matter in galaxy cluster 1E0657-556.
RELATED
· SPACE.com: Understanding dark matter
· SPACE.com: Dark matter exposed
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Astronomy
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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Manage Alerts | What Is This? (SPACE.com) -- New observations of a
great big cosmic collision provide the best evidence yet that invisible
and mysterious dark matter really does exist.

The collision, between two huge clusters of galaxies, is the "most
energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, that we know about," said
Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The impact split normal matter and dark matter apart, rendering the
dark matter's gravitational presence observable.

Scientists announced the discovery today in a teleconference with
reporters.

The normal matter in the cosmos -- atoms that make up stars, planets,
air and life -- accounts for only a small fraction of what must exist,
based on the fact that without an additional source of gravity,
galaxies would fly apart and galaxy clusters could not hold together as
they do.

Nobody knows where all that gravity comes from, so scientists say there
must be some invisible stuff out there, which they call dark matter.
Its presence is indirectly supported by many observations. Given what's
known, this is the makeup of the universe:


5 percent normal matter


25 percent dark matter


70 percent dark energy

Dark energy is an even more mysterious phenomenon, a force of some sort
that beats out gravity and is causing the universe to expand at an
ever-faster pace.

Some theorists have suggested that rather than invoking dark matter,
perhaps existing ideas about gravity might be wrong. Maybe gravity is
stronger on intergalactic scales than what is predicted by Newton and
Einstein.

And all astronomers agree that dark matter is such an exotic idea as to
border on the crazy.

"A universe that's dominated by dark stuff seems preposterous, so we
wanted to test whether there were any basic flaws in our thinking,"
said Doug Clowe of the University of Arizona at Tucson, and leader of
the study. "These results are direct proof that dark matter exists."

Splitting matter
Clowe and colleagues used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the
galaxy cluster 1E0657-556, which contains a bullet-shaped cloud of
superheated gas. X-rays show the shape was produced by cosmic winds
created in a high-speed collision of two clusters of galaxies.

Other telescopes were used to locate and quantify the mass in the
clusters. They actually measured the effect of gravitational lensing,
in which gravity from the clusters distorts light from thousands of
background galaxies, as predicted by Einstein's theory of general
relativity.

The dark matter is not seen, but its gravity has a predictable effect
on the observations. The resulting blue color in a new image represents
the gravity fields observed by noting how the light from each
background galaxy is distorted.

Here's what the image reveals:

The hot gas -- normal matter -- was slowed by a drag force described as
the cosmic equivalent of air resistance. But the dark matter was not
slowed by this effect, presumably because it does not interact with
normal matter, as theory had predicted.

So the normal matter and dark matter became separated.

"This proves in a simple and direct way that dark matter exists."
Markevitch said in the teleconference.

Other theories must cope
The finding provides further evidence that standard Newtonian gravity,
which keeps planets in orbit around the sun, is the glue that makes
things stick on the largest scales, too.

It is still possible there is some modification of gravity going on,
but these findings make it less necessary to have such theories, said
Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago who was not
involved with the study. "No matter what you do [in devising new
theories] you're going to have to believe in dark matter."

"We've closed this loophole about gravity, and we've come closer than
ever to seeing this invisible matter," Clowe said. "This is the first
time we've had a direct detection of dark matter" in which you can't
explain the results with any altered-gravity theory, he said.

The findings will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical
Journal Letters.



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