Bankrupting Physics
How Today's Top Scientists are Gambling Away Their Credibility
Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones, Central, 530 U63b 2013
"With four parameters, I can fit an elephant, and with five parameters I can wiggle his trunk" - John von Neumann
"If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me" --- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
A curmudgeon physicist lambasts mainstream cosmology. Some misses, a few hits worth exploring. Pages of putdowns. This book disparages physical theories without measurable consequences, or theories with so many free variables they can be adjusted to any measurable consequences.
Unzicker seems more trusting of raw observational data, untrusting of the analysis and theoretical work based on the meager data collected so far. Me, I am far more worried about situationally constrained and time-limited observation, instrument noise, observer bias, bad luck, and the unidentified-but-no-doubt-present biases in the data we choose to collect and keep. Theoreticians should build instruments first, and discouraged from theorizing until their instruments stop failing.
p46 Unfortunately, Einstein is one of those founding fathers like Freud or Einstein, who magically attract peeing dogs.
- p74 "Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities." -- Bertrand Russell
- p77 "If an idea is not dangerous, it is not worth calling it an idea" -- Oscar Wilde
p78 Dark matter manifests at tiny c/T_u accelerations (speed of light divided by age of universe)
- p78 'The dark-matter hypothesis is preferred mostly because the only other possibility -- that we are wrong about Newton's laws, and by extension general relativity -- is too scary to contemplate." -- Lee Smolin
p81 ΛCDM -> Λ dark energy, cold dark matter
p81 Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies. U.Oregon Gregory Bothun discovered a spiral galaxy 20x larger than the Milky Way in hydrogen 21 cm microwaves, no visible light.
- ... LSB galaxies could also emit some of the radiation we currently believe to originate from the cosmic microwave background.
- p88 ... and bought lots of vegetables for the healthy lunch the Swiss are so famously fond of ...
- p91 "What is wanted is not the will-to-believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite" -- Bertrand Russell
- p99 primordial density fluctuations ... baryonic acoustic oscillations. Sloan Sky Survey completed in 2008, Labini no longer found 2005 acoustic peak
- p100 ... putting the raw data and the computer code online, and opening it up to public evaluation.
- p100 nodal line in WMAP data is in ecliptic plane, not galaxy. Octupole anomaly
- p100 Ohio State radiologist Robitaille criticized methods used to subtract foreground noise from Earth, the solar system, and the Milky Way, 1000 times stronger than the CMB signal.
p101 Li and Liu 2013 found CMB quadripole -3.2+-3.5 uK2, not ~1000 uK2 expected from the standard cosmological model LCDM
- p103 light of the background radiation was exposed to many highwaymen on its 14-billion-year journey
- p103 the universe's opacity for the first 380,000 years is an insurmountable barrier