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I think you might have missed my point. I'm not saying that dark matter skeptics are crackpots because they don't believe in dark matter. I'm saying that if peo
by davidmr 9y ago
I think you might have missed my point. I'm not saying that dark matter skeptics are crackpots because they don't believe in dark matter. I'm saying that if people think they can disprove the existence of dark matter because you can apply some high school arithmetic and claim that Keplerian law is violated, then you are a crackpot.
Someone else unwittingly suggested a parallel to Fermat, which I think hits the nail on the head exactly. If someone thinks they can prove Fermat's last theorem with some high school geometry, odds are pretty good they're a crackpot. If they're a well-regarded mathematician and they can build off new mathematics and make a few very complicated leaps by discovering new mathematics of their own, then people take them more seriously.
Scott Aaronson has a really great take on this here: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304
As an aside that's probably only interesting to me, I went to a Great Books college. It's one of those hippy dippy liberal arts schools where there are no electives, no textbooks, no lectures, just primary sources. You learn mathematics by reading Euclid, Ptolemy, Newton, etc.
At any rate, for first-year "Labratory" class, you trace the atomic theory from the Greeks to roughly Avogadro. Along the way you read papers by and replicate the experiments of many influencial scientists along the way. When I mention that the above crackpots are "wrong", I don't mean it in the sense of the aether or analogous theories along the way to the atomic theory, namely phlogiston or caloric, two previous theories of heat. Those theories did not explain new observations and were rightly discarded along the way. Priestly and Lavoisier were brilliant and tried to make theory match observation, so now even though their theories are discarded, their work still stands on its own for the time. I wouldn't call them wrong. There's a definite difference between them and theories that are just wrong.
Nobody's going to get a Nobel Prize when they just make the world believe that they have obviated the need for dark matter by pulling out some high school math and some Kepler proofs.
Someone will win it if they ever make an observation that proves a MOND theory in a way that shows conclusively that dark matter is not needed to explain all current observations and in fact cannot remain compatible with this new observation.
There's a big difference between the two, I think.
- nonbel 9y ago>"Someone will win it if they ever make an observation that... shows conclusively that dark matter ... cannot remain compatible with this new observation." This requirement is impossible to meet for sufficiently flexible theories. Eg no one will ever "win" over "God did it" according to your metric. Also, if you see how many people in high academic positions are obviously wrong about simple stuff they use every day like p-values, nothing will surprise you any more.
- davidmr 9y agoRegarding your first point, that's not what I meant and you know it. Dark matter is the current theory explaining many different astronomical observations. It explains quite a lot of observations, so something pretty conclusive will need to happen for people to abandon it. Either new observations will disprove it or a new theory will come about that makes some prediction that can be observed that cannot for with current theories. I hope something like that happens! New science would be so much cooler than dark matter, but at the moment it doesn't seem likely. I'm not sure I see how your second point is relevant. You seem to imply that I think that academics are infallible in all areas not even related to their expertise. Do you truly see no difference between non-statistics researchers incorrectly calculating statistical values and dozens of unrelated experiments all leading to the same result?
- nonbel 9y agoFlexibility is a main feature of the dark matter explanation, so it is relevant. It amounts to putting otherwise undetectable halos of mass wherever is needed to explain deviations from the model. There are further constraints people put on it for now, but none are crucial and will be quickly discarded (or more dark matter added) if required. >"I'm not sure I see how your second point is relevant. You seem to imply that I think that academics are infallible in all areas not even related to their expertise. Do you truly see no difference between non-statistics researchers incorrectly calculating statistical values and dozens of unrelated experiments all leading to the same result?" This is series of strawmen... I'm saying widespread confusion can, and currently does, exist on a topic even amongst the experts. Therefore it is not unbelievable that it does on other topics as well. Also, dark matter is an interpretation of a result, not a result itself, so an experiment cannot lead to it directly. Finally, I don't think there are any actual experiments that have supported dark matter, only astronomical observations. Correct me if wrong but I found this after a quick search: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/results-slew-experiments-are-dark-matter-remains-elusive https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/results-slew...
- nonbel 9y ago>"non-statistics researchers incorrectly calculating statistical values" Actually another point is that this is not the issue. The calculations are fine, they are just calculating something other than they think: p(Data | Hypothesis) when they want p(Hypothesis | Data). That is very similar to what the OP claimed about calculating a model that assumes a sphere to describe a disc (no idea if they are correct on that).