Some of us have never been impressed with a dark matter/energy/whatever theory of physics that can’t even define itself. Quite a lot of people, including me, smelled a very large rat with the lack of physical properties definitions.
“We don’t know what it is, we can’t describe it, but it’s the answer to everything and we need billions to research it.”
This is why people in authority need to do STEM sciences.
The bottom line here is that “dark” is clearly on the way out in practical physics.
According to Phys.org, the whole idea simply isn’t surviving modern scrutiny. There are much better ways of explaining an expanding universe than with something inexplicable that just doesn’t work.
The Phys.org link is well worth reading. The University of Canterbury in New Zealand has provided an exhaustive study supporting a coherent timescape as an analysis devoid of dark energies, etc.
The University of Canterbury also deserves due credit for having the guts to slaughter this particularly insufferable smug sacred chicken of scientific PR in so many words.
The universe can get on fine without dark energy. Real functional physics isn’t dependent on “dark” anything. That was also pointed out decades ago, but of course, ignored.
This is after decades of smug blather and billions of dollars that could have been better spent elsewhere on real science, mind you.
The inexplicable turns out not to be inexplicable.
It’s hard to believe that a generational herd of ingenues in white coats have been hunting the physics equivalent of the Jabberwocky, but there it is.
I’ve never been impressed with the sheer sloppiness of “dark everything”. How is this useful? Why was there no insistence on defining the nature of “dark” anything? In corporate business, this would be considered nepotism, funding one’s dear little friends and their useless associates in their trivial pursuits.
You can’t get much more trivial than “nonexistent”.
“Fraud” is such a pejorative word. That’s why I’m not using it. Others might, particularly the ones paying for it.
In cosmological terms, it’s far less excusable. The expansion of the universe and related phenomena are important. Cosmology has been tripping over a few things lately, like missing a huge chunk of the universe.
Measuring things and getting the measurements wrong. That was one of the more innocent causes of the stampede to dark matter. Someone measured the mass of the Andromeda galaxy, got it wrong, and assumed that the “missing” matter must have been dark matter.
It wasn’t. The measurements were simply wrong.
Then there’s using the Cosmic Microwave Background as a sort of universal wall hanging rather than “then what happened?” as science or a crosscheck of all these supposed phenomena.
How can the CMB, of all things, be static? Did anyone look after the updated image? Would the CMB support any theories of missing mass and mysterious energies, perhaps?
Instead of which cosmology has been literally chasing shadows based on theories based on bad measurements.
If you search Google News for “baffled universe”, dark matter inevitably comes up in the search results. Over the last few years, and especially since the JWST, the results have been consistently against the “dark” theories for a couple of years now.
Nothing the JWST is seeing is fitting those theories. Ironically, good old gravity and time distortion seem to be doing the job.
God only knows why any real scientist would expect the universe to just obligingly fit any theory. It never has.
Good work University of Canterbury, and can we now get on with the real cosmology?
