Religious Scientists IV
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/science/space/17univ.html
Remember the OP ...
Science is not a religion, but some scientists ARE religious about their science. The topic of the is intended to be the messenger more than it is the message. Mozina goes somewhat farther than just being religious about his science. He has chosen to abandon science altogether and replace it with religion, which he then tries to pass off as science to the unsuspecting. In this case, however, he is trying to pass his religion off as science on people who can tell the difference, and so he has become the vociferous failure. Here we see Mozina posting a link from the New York Times in 2008, as if that's all that's needed to defeat the opposition. But this is only a symptom of Mozina's complete unwillingness ever to deal with science directly at any level.
The NY Times story is a reference to the paper
The Energy Output of the Universe from 0.1 to 1000 μm; Driver,
et al., The Astrophysical Journal 678(2): L101-L104, May 2008. One should note with interest that Mozina chooses to present the newspaper article rather than the journal paper. One might readily assume that Mozina was not aware of the journal paper, never saw or read the journal paper, and has in fact no knowledge of the actual science involved at all. We are expected to bow to his superior intellect and the New York Times. For somebody who so readily complains about the perceived arrogance of others, Mozina certainly brings no lack of his own arrogance to the floor of debate.
Consider the abstract for this paper: "
The dominant source of electromagnetic energy in the universe today (over ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared wavelengths) is starlight. However, quantifying the amount of starlight produced has proved difficult due to interstellar dust grains that attenuate some unknown fraction of the light. Combining a recently calibrated galactic dust model with observations of 10,000 nearby galaxies, we find that (integrated over all galaxy types and orientations) only 11% +/- 2% of the 0.1 μm photons escape their host galaxies; this value rises linearly (with logλ) to 87% +/- 3% at 2.1 μm. We deduce that the energy output from stars in the nearby universe is (1.6+/-0.2)×1035 W Mpc-3, of which (0.9+/-0.1)×1035 W Mpc-3 escapes directly into the intergalactic medium. Some further ramifications of dust attenuation are discussed, and equations that correct individual galaxy flux measurements for its effect are provided."
Mozina simply provides a link with no words at all, as to how this is supposed to affect the estimate of the mass of a galaxy from its visible light. If Mozina had ever bothered to understand the science involved, he would have realized that it has no affect at all. It is a meaningless link. The human eye responds to light roughly between 0.4 - 0.7 μm. The 0.1 μm light referenced in the abstract is ultraviolet (UV) light, far too short in wavelength for us to see. Main sequence stars like our Sun emit most of their energy in the visible light range. Only the relatively few, very massive stars, emit most of their light as UV. The mass-luminosity relation for stars is derived using visible light, and is
L = M3.5 for main sequence stars, where luminosity (L) and mass (M) are both in units of solar luminosity and mass. This relationship is not dependent on 0.1 μm light. Besides, the energy of UV light which does not get out of the galaxy does disappear. Rather, it is reprocessed into infrared (IR) emission by the dust, from which dust temperature is derived, and from the temperature the hidden stars are made known, a very common tool in IR astronomy to detect hidden sources. Since massive stars are only a small fraction of the mass of a galaxy, one would not expect this to affect the derived galaxy mass by more than a few percent. Reading beyond the abstract into the paper does not provide any reason to believe otherwise. Furthermore,
Graham & Worley, 2008 demonstrate that the more important implication of this study is to affect the presumed stellar mass distribution between the disc & bulge of a galaxy, and thus alters galaxy structure & evolution models. However, there remains no reason to believe this has any significant effect on the issue of dark matter.
This is a clear symptom of Mozina's attempt to replace science with religion
in toto. He cannot comment in the actual science, so all he can do is provide a bare link, without comment. And even his choice of sources to link is suspect, choosing a newspaper article over a science paper. Mozina is clearly a pseudoscientist unable to attack the real science at issue in any case. He is even worse than implied by the OP; not religious about his science, but religious without science at all.