Monthly Archives: November 2011
Dark Energy: What Is It?
Image via Wikipedia
The universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, a discovery made in the 1990s using observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope of distant galaxies.
Why?
We don’t know exactly, though we call the source of the acceleration ‘dark energy,’ a term coined by University of Chicago cosmologist Michael Turner in a paper he wrote with Saul Perlmutter of Berkeley Lab and Martin White of the University of Illinois in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Simply put, we see too much energy at work than we can detectably account for, and since we can’t see it directly or fully explain what it is or how it works, we call it ‘dark.’
It appears to operate on a scale where galaxies are mere smears of light in the void, acting opposite to gravity, repelling galaxy clusters from each other ever faster.
Though we can’t see dark energy directly, we can measure its effect on the cosmos by looking at the redshifted light of extragalactic Type 1a supernovae, billions of light-years away, and what we see indicates that it takes up roughly 70% of the mass-energy content of the universe, with dark matter taking up about 25% and what we laughably refer to as ‘normal’ matter not even 5%.
But is it a new force? Is there some other way to account for what we see? Are there any alternatives?
One idea that saw the rounds in 2008 was what I’ll call the Giant Cosmic Void hypothesis. It doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere lately, but we’ll get to that shortly…
This idea has been looked at, and basically amounts to a proposal to that the Copernican principle is, at least in this instance, wrong, that our galaxy lies at the center of a gigantic cosmic bubble of low mass-density, an extremely rarefied region of space equal in apparent size to the observable universe, in which the low amount of mass would affect the geometry of space-time and produce the observed effects on supernova light without the need to invoke a new force.
It’s an idea that doesn’t seem to have gotten off the ground, much less flown anywhere…
The Cosmic Void hypothesis, for one thing, does not account for the data supporting dark energy from studies of the cosmic microwave background. It also, in supposing the existence of a void as huge as is speculated, does not agree with the standard model of cosmology, and any hard data indicating that we do live in a void of that sort is lacking.
While these things alone are not reasons to dismiss it outright, they should give us pause before we reflexively discard ideas, that though older and established, work very well in the predictions they make.
Though no idea in science, even the Copernican principle, should be an inviolate dogma — indeed, all ideas in science should be open to scrutiny when reasons present themselves — even postmodern philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn held that it’s good to hold on to whatever the current thinking of the time is instead of tossing it out over the most trivial anomalies, for it’s the accumulation of anomalies over time that drives revolutions in science.
The most important part of any explanatory framework is that it do more than explain the data, so not just any framework will do: It also must fit the data to be of use, and it must do both better than rival frameworks.
What of other ideas?
Dark energy could well have to do with the properties of space-time itself…
…The fabric of the universe could well possess energy of its own, and as it expands and increases its volume, so too without dilution would its energy, as per Einstein’s concept of the cosmological constant.
We’ve no clue why the observed phenomenon has the exact value it does or why it exists.
Another idea, involving vacuum energy and virtual particles has been proposed. Derived from quantum mechanics, this hypothesis has the glaring problem of predicting a value for the energies we should observe that is far off the mark from that which we do see, about 10^120 — a ginormously wrong figure.
Could it perhaps be a new form of dynamic energy field filling the universe, a sort of ‘quintessence’ or ‘fifth element’ working in opposition to ordinary matter and known forms of energy?
But this, and Einstein’s cosmological constant raise the questions of why they have the values they do, or why they would even exist, much less what they are, why they have the values they seem to, and what they interact with…
Finally, does dark energy hint at a flaw in General relativity, requiring a new theory of gravity to account for what we observe?
Even now, we’re looking for a theory of quantum gravity, the current holy grail of physics.
That thought doesn’t bother me that much, for science thrives on revolutions, on advancing our ideas, whether in overturning, refining, or amending our understanding of the universe.
There’s nothing at all wrong in science with saying, “Oops! We mis-described things! Let’s reformulate our ideas to fit the facts.”
I’d love to see a major overturning of older ideas happen in my lifetime, and it’s too bad I never hear that phrase coming from either politics or religion.
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2008/07/are-we-living-in-giant-cosmic-void.html
http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/dark-energy.html
http://www.stsci.edu/~ariess/darkEnergy.htm
Related articles
- Scientists Narrow Down Dark Matter’s Mass (space.com)
- Michio Kaku: The Energy of the Future (bigthink.com)
- COLD DARK MATTER MODEL WITH DARK ENERGY scienceisbeauty: The… (lesstraveledby.tumblr.com)
- Mysterious Dark Energy Played No More Than Bit Part in Early Universe (space.com)
Midweek Fractal: Emergent Construals
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? Greta Christina Skepticon 4
Why?
Greta expresses it far better than I, laying out both real and straw-person motivations for many of us in the atheist community, and the whys for those motivations.
Why NOT be angry?
Note that everyone is an atheist for somebody’s god or gods, no matter which one they say they follow…
Preparations for the 3rd Blogoversary
Hey, people. There have been a few changes to the site over the last few days, with more to come in preparation for the Call’s 3rd anniversary and my first giveaway celebration for you, my amazing subscribers, whether by mailing lists, RSS feeds, newsreaders, and those direct visitors from locales elsewhere in the silicon data-hives of the web.
This blog’s been online since December 28, 2008, though the archives have been shifted forward in time a bit, and it’s gotten over 91,900 page views, 1,300 posts and 1,105 comments since I’ve started it.
And it couldn’t have happened without all of you.
As an evolving experiment in free-form writing and learning experience, and to promote science and reason, posting on this site has been an absolute joy for me, and so have all of you.
Thanks to those of you who actually take the time to read my stuff and comment on it, whether videos, text, links or on-site images.
I hope to keep things interesting, and to continue to refine the quality of presentation of both this site and its posts.
Again, thank you. I’m humbled (such as that sometimes is) by you all.
MNQ | Monday’s Noontide Query: Martian Life
Only this Caturday, the new Mars rover Curiosity lifted off on its way to the Red Planet, carrying with it the hope of finding some form of life, past or present, on the world of Edgar Rice Borough’s Barsoom, the planet of the pareidolia-evoking “Face,” and the setting of part of the 1970s Doctor Who episode, “Pyramids of Mars,” one of my favorites of the old series, BTW.
We humans have imagined all sorts of forms hypothetical life on Mars might take, from H.G. Wells‘ octopoid invaders, to the creatures of scads and scads of movies in the 1950s around the height of the UFO flap, then Doctor Who’s Ice Warriors, to possible bacteria-like organisms, perhaps living under the sterile surface of Mars.
My own first exposure to ideas of Martian life was during the late 1960s and the 1970s, when the true nature of Mars was being discovered by our robot emissaries, the Mariner and Viking probes.
Those were times of discovery and hopeful anticipation…
Though the results of the Viking missions were disappointing, the results honed our ideas on what forms life might take, life NOT as we knew it, and set the stage for further discoveries made, and those yet to come.
I even checked in on the Phoenix mission now and then, and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, to see how they were progressing, what new wonders they would uncover, and illuminate our understanding.
What tales will Curiosity have to tell us?
And so:
When was your earliest exposure to the concept of life on Mars?
How were the Martians depicted upon your first hearing of them?
What do you think about the possibility of finding life there?
MNQ is a question that I pose to you, my readers, and is posted each Monday at 12:00 PM. Do feel free to comment, and don’t worry yerselves overmuch… I’m not an ogre and I don’t bite…much.
APW | Astronomy Pix of the Week: November 20 – 26, 2011
APW is a weekly installment, published each Saturday between 7:31 and 8:30 am EDT, of links to each daily entry on NASA’s website Astronomy Picture of the Day. I hope you enjoy looking at these often breathtaking images as much as I do.
Fractal of the Week: Voice’s Edge
This goes out to speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison, the inspiration for both this post’s image and title, and who with Sagan, Asimov, and Gardner led me to seek out the truth about myself and the way the world really is.
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
xkcd: The Economic Argument vs Woo [Repost]
Image via XKCD.com
I thought that this would rather nicely sum up why purveyors of nonsense only make scads of money off people who believe in what they peddle, and not mainstream science or business. Note that only two of the wacky ideas above see any use apart from just those who believe in them, and for very good reasons; They’re science, not wishful thinking… I know–that’s mean–but I am Troythulu, not the Carebears.
Oh. My. Ceiling Cat. Take a Look at These!
This is a couple of vids of the evolving detail on 3-D animated fractals. Science and math together rendered into art!
A Psychic Flubs Psychology Again
A couple of years back, I ran into a self-styled psychic who holds a number of interesting but erroneous views on the nature of reality and on the process and findings of science.
He has before attempted to get into the heads of skeptics with his amazing X-gene - er, I mean “psychic” – abilities, but alas, those evil vibration-killing skepto-shields of ours prevent such nonsense.
I’ve critiqued his psychoanalysis of skeptics before, but he’s at it once again, so I’m going to play the role of the evil, closed-minded, fanatically materialistic skeptic, and try at a detailed but comprehensive deconstruction of one of his often convoluted arguments to see just where he errs in his reasoning.
In many instances, his resentment and tendency to attribute his own thinking and biases to others shows in his use of factual misconceptions and fallacies common in the fringe-community, in this case, about skeptics, using only the reliably inexpert testimony of his fellow paranormal proponents.
I’ll include excerpts from his post here is as much context as possible, and will attempt to avoid misrepresenting his arguments — They’re bad enough on their own without any effort on my part — posting his claims verbatim in block quotes followed by my rebuttals.
Psi skeptics tend to believe in evolution and climate change and favor liberal economic policies, much like many psychics and believers do. It is rare for me to meet skeptics in real life, but when I do, these people are almost always polite, pleasant and courteous, much in contrast to the lunacy that I see on line.
So what causes these people to check their brains at the door whenever they discuss the topic of psychic ability? There seem to be some personality characteristics that fit skeptics and explain why understanding psychic ability is so difficult for them.
One thing that I have heard several times from skeptics is that they are very hesitant to trust their instincts. It is perhaps the single most important difference between skeptics and psychics. Psychics and believers in contrast, normally trust their instincts.
From this one significant difference, all of the other pieces fall into place. One of the most consistent traits that I have noticed from a wide variety of skeptics is that they don’t trust me. Why should they? Because I know more about this subject than they do. The skeptics that I encounter rarely ask questions or wish to know anything about me at all despite the fact that I tell them that I am psychic. (I can’t remember any skeptic asking me even the most basic question: How do I know that I am psychic?) They are, however, eager to tell me what they think that they know and then defend their position.
Have his psychic abilities never hinted at the possibility that his reluctance to substantiate his claims are perhaps the real reason skeptics think he is not genuine?
Has he even met any real skeptics? His universal generalizations on what skeptics believe, think, and know don’t show that he has.
Militant skeptics think that I am a fraud and moderate skeptics think that I merely have a mistaken belief based on the assumption that I am not very good at calculating probabilities or chance.
And who, pray tell, ascended to higher consciousness and made HIM the special center of the paranormal universe?
Maybe all those ‘skeptics’ who disbelieve him don’t self-identify as skeptics at all, they’re just smart-thinking people who don’t buy into what he says.
‘Militant’ skeptics would be imprisoning, torturing, lynching, tarring & feathering, censoring, burning at the stake, or coming after paranormalists with torches & pitchforks like angry villagers in 1950s schlock monster movies.
Given the lack of this actually happening, he has no business pulling the militancy card.
Next…
This lack of trust extends to ridiculous extremes. After all, about ¾ of the world population believes in psi.[3] Skeptics are sitting on a rock in an ocean of believers and they do not trust any of them to be telling the truth about their experiences.
This is a simple ad populum fallacy, since no matter how many believe a thing true, they can still be dead wrong.
This applies to everyone, including 50 million Frenchmen, and every alleged psychic and believer on the planet.
Even if everyone in the universe believed that Xulleus the rabbit-god existed, it would still be fantasy, and an unshakeable belief in it a delusion.
Despite pronouncements to the contrary for millennia, belief doesn’t make it so, nor does it mean it is.
5 billion people must be deluded or liars according to them.
He’s arguing against a claim no one is making. Straw-person much?
The only way that a person can maintain such an enormous conceit is if they do not trust themselves. They see their own inability to trust their instincts and they have concluded that instincts are not to be trusted.
A corollary to this is that skeptics have more trouble relating to their own feelings. This leaves them blind to situations where their emotions are controlling their logic and they are far more vulnerable to cognitive dissonance and less able to cope with it than those who are more aware of their own feelings.
If a person does not trust their instincts, then they must find something else to trust and it is understandable that they will not be particularly flexible about it. Unsurprisingly, skeptics favor the status quo. Science is the rock that they typically sit on, clinging to whatever the mainstream scientific establishment favors at the moment and even twisting it if it does not meet their internal image of what it is supposed to be.
For a person that does not trust the world inside of themselves, the world on the outside is all there is, which is how we get illogical and fanatical defenses of a materialistic view of the world even though science is pretty clear on the point that reality does not fit that description.
Trust is a right brain feature. You have to grasp the essence of things in order to trust and you cannot get bogged down in details. However, this is exactly what happens to skeptics. Even in discussions with moderate skeptics, I have seen time and again that they do very well when involved in details. When asked to consider things as a whole, however, they fail miserably.
Little more than a cheap ad hominem dismissal — “skeptics are wrong because they’re dogmatic, illogical and fanatical materialists who don’t trust themselves…”
It’s the oldest fallacy in the book — don’t attack the argument, attack the one making it — which to some extent is one of his main lines of argument in this, as well as the hasty generalization.
It’s typical of the sort who whine the loudest about personal attacks when they perceive themselves to be on the receiving end…
Frankly I’m at a loss at how to react to his claims, except perhaps to respond with a good old-fashioned Picard facepalm.
Methinks he doth project upon his perceived persecutors critics far too much.
Of the rare moderate skeptics who actually know something about the science of parapsychology this is a consistent feature of their evaluations. They can pick at just about any single study and come to the conclusion that something is wrong with it, but entirely miss the fact that they always do the same thing. For instance: a skeptic will find nothing wrong with this incomplete chart of parapsychological lab research and the skeptical conclusions:
Overview of Scientific Parapsychology Skepticism
Experiment Positive Outcome? Skepticism Autoganzfeld*† Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Psychokinesis*† Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Staring Studies*† Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Dog telepathy Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Parrot telepathy Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Dice studies* Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Remote Viewing* Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Precognition* Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Zener Cards* Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher The Afterlife Experiments Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Global Consciousness Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Retropsychokinesis Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Plant and single cell organism telepathy*†† Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher Distant Healing† (Braud) Yes Flawed methodology and/or Biased Researcher *Studies replicated by other scientists
allegedly replicated — never successfully when studies are performed by non-believers in psi
†Meta analyses have been done.
Meta-analyses are only used for suggesting promising new avenues of research — formulating hypotheses, not testing them for a conclusion, as is implied here. Meta analyses are not magic proof techniques.
†† Cleve Backster, (retired) who performed the original experiments was not a research scientist, he was, however, one of the premiere polygraph experts in the world.
This is an obvious argument from authority — it’s irrelevant how great a polygraph expert Backster was, since he’s not a research scientist. Period. So his claims on plant perception by themselves mean nothing and without substantiation are of no value to science.
A skeptic will not be able to perceive this as a repetitive pattern of dogmatic denial, but will instead, want to focus on the specifics of each individual case to point out the perceived flaws. It is almost impossible for a skeptic to grasp that the individual studies can have flaws AND there can also be a pattern of dogmatic skepticism. The skepticism as a whole has a flaw that cannot be seen in individual cases.
Do you notice something missing in the above table? I do.
There are flaws in parapsychology studies which he’s conveniently ignored. Biased Researcher is actually the root of the problem, for it leads to Flawed Methodology and at least three others:
- flawed reasoning, particularly such common fallacies as special pleading, begging the question, affirming the consequent, the appeal to ignorance, and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, all supporting the use of the following…
- Inappropriate use of statistics, such as scoring systems not suited for the research protocol used, after-the-fact use of statistical methods on research data, or the misuse of meta-analyses; and lastly, least commonly…
- …fraud, most often pious fraud — actual fraud is rare, but it happens just often enough to taint the entire field of parapsychology with ill repute, which I think is unfortunate.
Also, his last statement is not coherent; focusing on the specifics of each case is just fair criticism and good science. Frankly, if accused of any crime, I’d rather the jury focus on the specifics of the evidence for my case and not dismissively ignore it regardless of the facts.
It’s nice to say that the universe is one big, wonderful, scary, unified whole, but it does one little good to dismiss a closely approaching asteroid that could kill everyone on Earth as an insignificant portion.
The author’s claim makes no sense, since the mere fact that a study, in any field, is shown to be seriously flawed is a good reason indeed to question it.
The only dogma lies in ignoring the flawed nature of these studies and ignoring that because of those flaws, none of them have ever successfully been replicated using an unbiased research protocol, then continuing to argue that taken as a whole, that they prove anything at all…
…when they prove nothing.
The rest of his article is just a summary of his previous claims, with his sources, such as they are, listed just above the post’s comments section.
Conclusion:
I found this article condescending and downright insulting in tone, like the very worst of skeptical criticism, and little more than an opportunity by the author to vent his evident dislike of skeptics by rehearsing his prejudices instead of actually asking skeptics what we think, feel, believe and imagine, and truly inform his readers instead of mislead them with such absolute garbage.
Not claiming to be psychic, and thus not claiming to know what’s going on in the author’s head, I must wonder how much of this nonsense he actually believes himself.
I think a little humility on his part would have helped the tone in his writing, but unfortunately that was not in evidence.
He assumes and presumes much that is simply not the case, not applying to any skeptic I’ve ever heard of. I can only say that despite the last couple of years or so, the factual and logical content of his writing still leaves much to be desired.
TED – Robin Ince: Science versus wonder?
An amusingly curmudgeonly but compelling argument that science in no way takes the magic out of life.
TED – Phil Plait: How to defend Earth from asteroids
How rocks six miles wide can end civilization, and what we can do about them.
