Here is a link to an article titled "Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale?" by Michael J. Disney who is emeritus professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University...
http://www.americanscientist.org/tem...d/55839/page/1

The article is highly critical of the way cosmology has been practiced arguing that the number of theoretical entities has outstripped the number of observations supporting them, as the author points out:

"Cosmological theories have grown increasingly complex.... The number of independent observations relevant to cosmology has also grown over time, but it has always been less than the number of free parameters in the reigning theory."

The author uses dark energy, dark matter, and inflation as examples of these folktale-like theoretical entities upon which the concordance model is based. This article, in my opinion, illustrates the fragility of certain aspects of modern cosmology. The longer these entities continue to exist without direct evidence for their existence the less scientists should continue to accept them as taken for granted and established. My unofficial thesis, however, is that the discovery of dark matter particles, if they are found, will go a long way, longer then the discovery of the CMB, toward debunking skeptics such as the author of this article. Cosmologists will be able to say, hey, this was not a folktale-like theoretical entity afterall, it has more or less the properties we were inferring using a variety of observations and it provided the seeds for galaxy formation.

In any case, the tone and content of the article bear an uncanny resemblence to the tone and content of Jerry's arguments. The parameters in theory versus independent observation graph sums up Jerry's argument quite well. So, I thought he would like the article and I thought I'd put it out here for he and others to comment on criticize, etc.

I like this guy's take on the Disney article....

He [Disney] starts with a sequence of hostile comments about the money flowing to cosmology. The subtitle expresses one of the main assertions of the article: current cosmological theory rests on a disturbingly small number of independent observations.

The similarity with the proclamations by people like Woit can't be more obvious. Let us first look at some of his opinions and terminology.

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In the text, cosmic inflation is called a "vague conceptual solution", the Lambda CDM theory is "the currently fashionable concordance model of cosmology". Big Bang cosmology "is not a single theory" while dark matter and dark energy are "insubstantial notions". Also, "modern cosmology has at best very flimsy observational support". He even says that "cosmology has always had such a negative significance, in the sense that it has always had fewer observations than free parameters, though cosmologists are strangely reluctant to admit it."

An expanding Einstein model was elegant but "it has since run into serious difficulties". He ends up with the thesis that "Acceptance of the current myth, if myth it is, could likewise hold up progress in cosmology for generations to come".

Are these statements based on actual science? Maybe the kind of science used in Disneyland but certainly not the science used by serious researchers.

Populism

You may read it yourself: you will see long kilobytes of vitriolic and untrue statements that are clearly not addressed to people who have any idea about the field. Disney says very openly that "his approach should be appealing to nonspecialists, who otherwise would have little option but to believe experts who may be far too committed to supply objective advice." Why doesn't he try to convince experts? Because he must know very well that every expert knows why his text is complete junk. But what should the laymen do? Indeed, I think that if people can't learn the technology themselves, they should better believe experts rather than loud non-experts with a personal agenda. I wonder when "supply of objective advice" exactly became an insult.

What he wants to do is to brainwash uninformed people who are unable to figure out why his conclusions are completely absurd, without any need to offer any technical evidence for these statements whatsoever. What a convenient strategy.

Progress in cosmology

Cosmology, the science about the gross structure and history of the whole Universe, has been exciting and mysterious for millenia. A long time ago, the boundaries between science, myths, and religion were somewhat fuzzy. The situation started to change in the 20th century, especially because of Einstein's discovery of general relativity. Because of many observational breakthroughs in the last decade, cosmology has recently become a precision science analogous to particle physics. Many quantities, including the age of the Universe, are measured at one-percent level. Huge amounts of data agree with a simple theory.

How much data do we have?

Disney's statement that the amount of data we have to check the cosmological statement is lower than the number of parameters in the theory is absurd. But how absurd is it? For example, look at this picture from WMAP. It has more than one million pixels of data that can be processed in many ways to obtain hundreds of overall, qualitative numbers such as the spherical harmonics. Each of these numbers must agree with the right cosmological model and the error can't be too high. They do agree.

WMAP is not the only source of the data and constraints that the cosmologists use. They observe billions of stars and other celestial bodies to check the model and deduce that something like dark matter must exist. They observe billions of other galaxies and their relative motion to deduce that something like dark energy must exist, too. Theorists tell them that the cosmological constant is the only known plausible model for dark energy with the right equation of state and most cosmologists simply accept it: it doesn't influence their work too much anyway.

Some of their observations are made during collisions or explosions that offer a huge amount of additional information that constrains the theory. The same conclusion may be deduced from a very large number of these stars and galaxies. The Universe is huge and rich and it offers a diverse spectrum of objects and events to study. Many of them can be measured and have been measured.

Whoever really thinks that the amount of data we can extract from the Universe is small or even smaller than the number of parameters of the state-of-the-art cosmological model (roughly 17 parameters) is senile beyond imagination.

Emphasis added.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

I believe the Cougar's link should be: http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/08/co...ttack-too.html

Unfortunately, the blog guy acts exactly like Disney when it comes to global warming. Ah, well.

This is basically "The Case Against Cosmology" part 2. Mike Disney is a distinguished astronomer with a long history of being deliberately provocative, which sometimes has the salutory effect of making the rest of us ask very carefully how well we know what we think we know.

(This was also exhibited when a controversy came up about the dustiness of spiral galaxies - he coauthored a paper pointing out that data often interpreted as showing that spirals like ours are fairly transparent could also be interpreted as meaning they're so dusty that we don't see very deep into some of them at all. It took a whole new round of multiwavelength observations and analysis to satisfy pretty much everybody that we now understand when and where they're in one limit or the other. At least in today's Universe. Then he helped organize a meeting on the topic, at which he presented some of us with plates of a dish he swore was crow.)[1]







[1] For non-Anglophones: "eat crow" is a phrase meaning, more or less, to publicly admit to one's having been wrong. This is the only time I've seen it used so literally.

Thanks, Kid. Yes, that's a better link. I forgot to mention one has to string-search "Disney" in the link I provided to find the start of the article that your link isolates.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Actually it is more like 26, according to Neried's sources. WMAP cosmology claims 6 free parameters. I think it was Fermi who said with five free parameters, he could make an elephant. I would be happy if anyone would come up with a reasonable description of what Titan is made of, without using made-up words.

Meanwhile:

arXiv:0708.2579 [ps, pdf, other]
Title: Direction-sensitive dark matter search results in a surface laboratory
Authors: Kentaro Miuchi, Kaori Hattori, Shigeto Kabuki, Hidetoshi Kubo, Shunsuke Kurosawa, Hironobu Nishimura, Yoko Okada, Atsushi Takada, Toru Tanimori, Ken'ichi Tsuchiya, Kazuki Ueno, Hiroyuki Sekiya, Atsushi Takeda
Comments: 9 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Lett. B
Subjects: Astrophysics (astro-ph)
Limits are good. It means there are not enough WIMPs around to blame a poor dart on.

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jwj

If you always believe what you already know, you can't learn anything - Liz

Disney's attitude is not new. I disagree with him, and with his idea of what cosmology is & should be doing. I think cosmology has been extremely successful, and is as valid as any other science. This does not mean that I think modern cosmologists are infallible, or bound to be right. But I strongly disagree with Disney's implicit assumption that cosmologists are morons.

1. The Case Against Cosmology, M.J. Disney, General Relativity and Gravitation 32(6): 1125-1134, June 2000
   Abstract: It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant phenomena are difficult to make and harder to interpret. It is suggested that cosmological inferences should be tentatively made and sceptically received.
   
2. Laudatores Temporis Acti, or Why Cosmology is Alive and Well -- A Reply to Disney Milan M. Cirkovic, General Relativity and Gravitation 34: 119-130, February 2002
   Abstract: A recent criticism of cosmological methodology and achievements by Disney (2000) is assessed. Some historical and epistemological fallacies in the said article have been highlighted. It is shown that -- both empirically and epistemologically -- modern cosmology lies on sounder foundations than it is portrayed. A brief historical account demonstrates that this form of unsatisfaction with cosmology has had a long tradition, and rather meagre results in the course of the XX century.
   
3. A Sober Assessment of Cosmology at the New Millennium, Michael S. Turner, The Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 113(784): 653-657, June 2001
   Extract: Before I begin my sober assessment of cosmology, let me discuss the mission statement for the enterprise. As one might expect, this is where the divergence of views often begins. By my definition, cosmology is the scientific quest to understand the most salient features of the universe in which we live. Since most of the history of the universe is uninteresting thermal equilibrium, the interesting moments, those rare departures from thermal boringness which lead to notable features today, are a manageable set.
   
   Others take a much different view. As an extreme example consider Disney (2000), who defines cosmology as the quest to understand the entire spacetime history of the universe (in response to Disney, see Peebles 2000). Not surprisingly, he concludes that the achievements of cosmologists have been minimal and that cosmology may not be a science at all. While more than two decades ago the relativist Ellis (1975) educated us all on the impossibility of Disney's goal — we are absolutely limited in our knowledge of the universe by our past light cone — that has not prevented significant progress toward understanding how the basic features of our portion of the universe came about as well as their implications for the universe as a whole.
   
4. The Mathematical Universe, Max Tegmark, eprint arXiv:0704.0646
   Abstract: I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. I argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. I discuss various implications of the ERH and MUH, ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like consciousness, parallel universes and Godel incompleteness. I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Godel's sense) structures exist, which alleviates the cosmological measure problem and help explain why our physical laws appear so simple. I also comment on the intimate relation between mathematical structures, computations, simulations and physical systems.

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Don't try this at home - We're what you call "professionals" - MythBusters.

The Disney paper presents an image of cosmology that is the same as Jerry’s and as Tim Thompson has observe, Disney applies the same root reasoning. It is a much more succinct read than Jerry's tyrates.

But there is a fundamental difference: Disney claims the parametric extensions known as cosmology include assumptions not legitimately grounded in first principles. Jerry, as Neried and others have pointed out, lodges the same complaint, and then turns around and argues first principles are also incorrect. The absurdity of this position (that the Newtonian equivalence principle is incorrect) is mitigated by his claim that this extraordinary hypothesis is readily testable: If it is true, the rather terrestrial looking surface of Titan must indeed be terrestrial: Silicate sand, sulfur, magna, carbonates, limestones and a heavy lacing of iron and other metals which are much too heavy to construct the skin of Titan, given Newtonian constraints of Titan’s density.

http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/Bil301/Titan2008.html

We may have to wait for another venture to the outer planets with a wider array of instrumentation to fully resolve the issue.

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jwj

If you always believe what you already know, you can't learn anything - Liz

Is this paper for real? Data? Analysis? Do adjectives count for debate points? What is the point of this paper?

A Sober Assessment of Cosmology at the New Millennium
By: Michael S. Turner


http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0102057

Compare M. Turner’s paper to M. Bell and D.McDiarmid's paper:

"An Abrupt Upper Envelope Cut-off in the Distribution of Angular Motions in Quasar Jets is compatible in all respects with a Simple Non-Relativistic Ejection Model"

http://aps.arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0701093

This is one of a group of 16 papers by Morley Bell. Each paper has data and analysis (multiple graphs) which support a proposition that is presented as a hypothesis. (Bell presents and discusses competing hypotheses.) I do not understand why postulating “Inflation”, “Dark Energy/Matter", or speculation concerning the first three minutes is considered to be the “boldest of enterprises” as compared to Morley’s hypothesis that is is supported by data and analysis.

Abstract
Is Cosmology a set of puzzles? Follow the facts to solve the puzzles?

One certainly hopes so.

Bell is arguing that the redshift measured in certain types of objects presents a distorted picture of how distant the objects are, and hence their size. There are very few astrophysicists who agree with Bell's interpretation of the data, but I think everyone agrees it is a puzzle that can be arranged in many different ways.

It is also worth mentioning that believing the universe sits on the back of a giant turtle is also a cosmology. In this respect, scientific cosmology is generally granted a little more license than most sciences, but not much. In theory this license ends when observations no longer agree with the cosmology. But it is really hard to prove the universe does not sit on the back of a giant turtle.

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jwj

If you always believe what you already know, you can't learn anything - Liz

Please note I am not defending Disney’s paper or attempting to holistically attack the standard cosmological model. It is an interesting theory.

Does this article defend “cosmology”? It could be a mistake to compare cosmology to string theory. String theory is not a theory.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/08/co...ttack-too.html

P.S. Peter Woit is a physicist who has a blog “Not Even Wrong” that is a critic of String Theory. I do not understand why Peter Woit’s critic of “String Theory” is insane. Disney’s criticism of the “standard cosmological model” may lack teeth, is it “insane”?

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=385

Perhaps one way to assess the debate is to ask, is modern cosmology approaching "closure" or not, where I define "closure" to mean, the point where new independent observations agree with the current deduced parameter set-- they do not require the introduction of new parameters. It was my impression that modern cosmology is indeed approaching closure-- it's true that we got three big kicks in the pants with the need for inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, but more recent observations have not required new interpretations or new parameters. The convergence of the Hubble parameter is kind of a subset of this overall trend, and the other key parameters seem to be coming into focus more and more. For me to think cosmology is really in such a sorry state, I would need to see some new independent cosmological measurement that also requires the introduction of a new free parameter into the model. If I see that, then I'll say "OK, Disney was right", but if new observations just require minor tinkering, I'll conclude the opposite. Perhaps the jury is still out on that.

The theory of inflation predicts a flat universe with omega=1. During the early-to-mid 1990s, it became incresingly obvious that the matter density was not enough to create such conditions. Would it be fair and reasonable to say that inflation required and therefore predicted a nonzero energy density (in other words, dark energy)?

Detections of Gravimetric waves and/or Whimps, would be leading toward closure. Otherwise, we have what was expected, what is being observed, and the parametric changes necessary to mate the two.

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jwj

If you always believe what you already know, you can't learn anything - Liz

It is extremely important to note that Non-Baryonic Dark Matter is entirely different than the first or the last terms...

That is...Non-Baryonic Dark Matter is NOT Big Bang Theory Dependent

Inflation was/is a mathematical "Fix", and Dark Energy/Anti-Gravity is the end game in finding the 74% missing universe (Lambda) once you plug in the HYPOTHESIZED WIMP CDM model to TRY and say what that Non-baryonic Dark Matter is "Doing".

The Non-Baryonic DM is necessary for the rotation curves of the galaxies and the cluster dynamics, and that in and of itself is NOT 'Global'.

IF that Non-baryonic DM is Neutrino-like, then the first and last terms are...

Infact, if that were the case, then it would be reasonable to say that the Non-Baryonic Dark Matter, is the 96%

Then, how that 'gets here' would become part of the initial conditions for how our universe is working.