Dark Matter and Science III
The dark matter god chapter is really interesting. At the beginning of the chapter the dark matter god looks pretty boring. He starts out as mostly ordinary "MACHO" matter but over time he morphs himself into something called "cold dark matter" that is entirely exotic. CDM can pass through walls and ordinary matter without working up a sweat. It can emit gamma rays for dinner. It picks up all sorts of exotic and unseen superpowers by the end of the chapter.
This is an excellent example of the heavy bias that makes the purely religious and totally unscientific nature of Mozina's rambling's painfully obvious. Clearly Mozina worships ignorance above all other things, and hopes that the reader will share his disdain for actual knowledge. Personally, I prefer to actually know real things about the real universe, and let it be what it is, rather then go Mozina's route of forcing the universe, very much against its will, to conform with my own strange prejudice. Let us consider the argument from knowledge for a moment, rather than the argument from ignorance.
Dark matter, as we now use the term, did not exist in the scientists lexicon until it was brought forth and into the light by the famous astronomer
Fritz Zwicky. He was observing clusters of galaxies, back in the early days of our modern understanding of galaxies as stellar systems. By interpreting the redshift of galaxy spectra as a Doppler shift indicating relative motion, he derived the radial velocities of the individual galaxies in the cluster (that's the velocity along the line of sight to the galaxy). At the same time, he derived an estimate of the masses of the individual galaxies by virtue of their luminosity and his knowledge of the mass-luminosity relationship for stars. His conclusion was that the galaxies were moving so fast that the clusters would have flown apart already, unless there were about ten times more mass than he could see. Thus was
dark matter born, although he called it by a more appropriate term for the time: "missing mass". It was
Edwin Hubble who proved that galaxies are stellar systems, by using the
100-inch Hooker telescope at
Mt. Wilson Observatory, which was the largest in the world at the time, and the first large enough to resolve stars that far away (
Hubble, 1925,
Hubble, 1926,
Hubble, 1929). It was only a few years later that Zwicky published his determination of the "missing mass problem", as it came to be called (
Zwicky, 1933,
Zwicky, 1937).
Of course, Zwicky and his contemporaries and those who followed knew quite well that there could be any number of massive things that they would not expect to see; dim low mass stars, dark clouds of gas & dust in the interstellar medium, planets & etc., in the galaxies, or spread out in the space between them. So naturally, they did not think of looking for any exotic kind of matter. They simply made the natural assumption that there was mass floating around out there that escaped the limited vision of their technology. I fail to see anything spectacularly wrong with that line of reasoning.
In the intervening years, it became evident that a similar problem was visible in the rotation curves of spiral galaxies (e.g.,
Volders, 1959,
Rubin & Ford, 1970; a problem actually anticipated in
Oort, 1932).
Until fairly recently, astronomers had continued along the same course as set by Zwicky. They went looking for the missing mass as ordinary matter that has simply escaped their view. But there has been a huge advance in astronomical technology since Zwicky's time, and "simply" has become "not so simply". Infrared astronomers today can see the dust & gas in galaxies that was invisible to Zwicky and we now know that there is not enough to make up the missing mass. Infrared & optical astronomers today can see the low mass stars that Zwicky could not see and we now know that there is not enough to make up the missing mass. X-ray astronomers today can see the gas between galaxies that was invisible to Zwicky and we now know that there is not enough to make up the missing mass. In fact, we now know that all of the mass we can see is still about a factor of 10 too small to make up the missing mass. Our own Milky Way halo has been searched far & wide for low mass red dwarf stars with the Hubble Space Telescope, and searched far & wide for
any compact objects, made of either ordinary or exotic matter, and in all cases the missing mass is simply not there (e.g.,
HST, 1994,
Bahcall, et al., 1994,
Alcock, et al., 2001,
Yoo, Chanamé & Gould, 2004). After decades of exhaustive searches for ordinary matter objects as a source of the missing mass, it is time to face the possibly uncomfortable truth: The missing mass is not missing "simply" because we don't have the technology to see it, but even more "simply" because
it simply is not there. What, exactly, does Mozina propose that we should look for, that we have not already looked for exhaustively, without finding?
Meanwhile, parallel to all this, we have finally built the technology required to see the small variations in temperature across the sky in the cosmic microwave background (the
COBE &
WMAP missions). Those small temperature differences, which we call
anisotropies, when interpreted in the context of big bang cosmology, allow a determination of a difference between normal baryonic dark matter and exotic, non baryonic dark matter. The CMB interpretation agreed with the observational results from the conventional astronomers, that the bulk of dark matter must be an exotic, non baryonic form of matter (see
Hu, 2001 and
Wayne Hu's webpages, particularly the CMB pages).
Now, Mozina ignores all of this, and chooses instead to speak derisively of dark matter "morphing" itself from one thing to another. The attentive reader should note that this is very common; given the choice between discussion real science, and demonstrating real knowledge, Mozina commonly (and almost exclusively) chooses to appeal to derision & insult instead, belittling the long careers of others as if they never existed, and demanding that his own purely religious bias should always triumph over knowledge. So, exactly how is one excepted to argue with such a person, and remain a "gentleman"?
Oh no, the mainstream ruled them out too. They aren't "cold" enough. More importantly we know where *that* kind of mass comes from and how to detect it so it's definitely not the exotic super-duper invisible dark matter god we're looking for.
It is true that we have ruled out neutrinos specifically as the primary object of non--baryonic dark matter. However, look back to my comments above about Zwicky and his contemporaries: "
They simply made the natural assumption that there was mass floating around out there that escaped the limited vision of their technology. I fail to see anything spectacularly wrong with that line of reasoning." That line of reasoning applies to non-baryonic dark matter with equal fidelity. While neutrinos may not be
the non-baryonic dark matter, there is absolutely no doubt that they are
a non-baryonic dark matter. So we find ourselves in much the same position as Zwicky, just in a different context of science & technology. We already have non-baryonic dark matter in hand: Neutrinos. So we simply assume that there is another form of non-baryonic dark matter out there that we simply have not yet detected.
The assumption that dark matter is non-baryonic is not the huge leap of faith that Mozina tries to claim it is (primarily to hide his own huge leaps of faith, which really are just that). It is in fact no more exotic than assuming there is more of the same class of matter which we already have in hand, but is known to be elusive and hard to detect. I fail to see anything spectacularly wrong with that line of reasoning.
There is the difference between the reasoned and scientific approach vs. the religious approach. My approach, and that of the mainstream is reasoned and scientific. This does not mean that it is inerrant, or even necessarily correct. It means only what it says,
reasoned & scientific. The Mozina approach, on the other hand, is based on a foundation of bias that comes from the purely religious view, which values ignorance over knowledge and prejudice over reason.
. That's a pretty epic failure of peer review.
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