Michael V: Dark matter exposes another sort of bias common among scientists. A wide variety of anomalous (or once-anomalous) astronomical phenomena are consistent with plasma fluid-dynamic phenomena at various scales (“geysers” on Enceladus, the Aurora Borealis, solar and galactic jets, too-fast galactic rotation). However, the mathematics of plasma fluid dynamics is fiendishly difficult, and effectively intractable. Progress is possible by performing tricky vacuum chamber experiments, and by simulations on very large supercomputers. Astrophysicists, though, are self-selected from among physicists who don’t care for laboratory work, and who enjoy clean mathematical derivations.
(N.B.: Plasma fluid dynamics involves no exotic science at all; it’s all just time- and space-varying electric and magnetic fields and (sometimes relativistic) particle flows.)
Parsimony demands that electromagnetic effects be shown to be insufficient before trotting out completely new and property-less “dark” particles and forces. Furthermore, anybody invoking exotic forces should still be obliged to account for the asserted lack of effect from the millions or quadrillions of tons of plasma acknowledged to be in motion in the systems observed.
A proper accounting would need astrophysicists to learn a new field, so of course it won’t happen. (One who did would never get papers using it accepted.) Instead, astrophysicists give one another a pass. The rest of us, knowing, may chuckle at their press releases. In the meantime, astrophysicists collect huge masses of detailed data from wonderful new instruments, but remain unable to synthesize it into anything even remotely plausible.
Has this bias exhibited by astrophysicists been named yet? Of course its analog is practically universal outside of science: “to do that I would need to learn, um, math”.
Michael V: Dark matter exposes another sort of bias common among scientists. A wide variety of anomalous (or once-anomalous) astronomical phenomena are consistent with plasma fluid-dynamic phenomena at various scales (“geysers” on Enceladus, the Aurora Borealis, solar and galactic jets, too-fast galactic rotation). However, the mathematics of plasma fluid dynamics is fiendishly difficult, and effectively intractable. Progress is possible by performing tricky vacuum chamber experiments, and by simulations on very large supercomputers. Astrophysicists, though, are self-selected from among physicists who don’t care for laboratory work, and who enjoy clean mathematical derivations.
(N.B.: Plasma fluid dynamics involves no exotic science at all; it’s all just time- and space-varying electric and magnetic fields and (sometimes relativistic) particle flows.)
Parsimony demands that electromagnetic effects be shown to be insufficient before trotting out completely new and property-less “dark” particles and forces. Furthermore, anybody invoking exotic forces should still be obliged to account for the asserted lack of effect from the millions or quadrillions of tons of plasma acknowledged to be in motion in the systems observed.
A proper accounting would need astrophysicists to learn a new field, so of course it won’t happen. (One who did would never get papers using it accepted.) Instead, astrophysicists give one another a pass. The rest of us, knowing, may chuckle at their press releases. In the meantime, astrophysicists collect huge masses of detailed data from wonderful new instruments, but remain unable to synthesize it into anything even remotely plausible.
Has this bias exhibited by astrophysicists been named yet? Of course its analog is practically universal outside of science: “to do that I would need to learn, um, math”.