I should perhaps explain a little about the title of the last post. It is perfectly obvious to me. But probably not to anyone else. Our brains work in subtly different ways. One thing that mine does, whether I like it or not, is memorize lines and make obscure links between them.
I’m just back from the World Science Festival where I participated in the discussion shaking up the dark universe. It was an interesting experience, and mostly positive despite some offstage diva behavior. One thing it drove home to me was how hard it is to communicate across a gulf of different training and experience. Not just from scientists to the public, but between scientists.
I said I would occasionally talk about scientific papers. Today’s post is about the new paper Testing Feedback-Modified Dark Matter Haloes with Galaxy Rotation Curves: Estimation of Halo Parameters and Consistency with ΛCDM by Harley Katz et al. I’ve spent a fair portion of my career fitting dark matter halos to rotation curves, and trying to make sense of the results.
With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk. – John von Neumann The simple and elegant cosmology encapsulated by the search for two numbers has been replaced by ΛCDM. This is neither simple nor elegant. In addition to the Hubble constant and density parameter, we now also require distinct density parameters for baryonic mass, non-baryonic cold dark matter, and dark energy.
Cosmology used to be called the hunt for two numbers. It was simple and elegant. Nowadays we need at least six. It is neither simple nor elegant. So how did we get here? The two Big Numbers are, or at least up till the early-90s were, the Hubble constant H 0 and the density parameter Ω. These told us Everything. Or so we thought. The Hubble constant is the expansion rate of the universe.
There has been some debate of late over the role of falsifiability in science. Falsifiability is the philosophical notion advocated by Popper as an acid test to distinguish between ideas that are scientific and those that are not. In short, for a theory to be scientific, it has to be subject to falsification.
So I’m back from this small, convivial meeting. Many thanks to hosts Priya Natarajan and Doug Finkbeiner for putting the program together. I find it especially useful when scientists working on the same problem from different fields come together in this fashion. It provides fresh perspective. I had wondered whether we were capable of genuine rethinking.
I travel to Cambridge, MA tomorrow to participate in the workshop Rethinking the Dark Matter Paradigm (I had nothing to do with the choice of title). I went to college at MIT in the ’80s, so is a bit back to the future for me in space as well as time. There is a lot to rethink, or nothing at all, depending on who you ask.
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. … take care that you first place him in his time… And take the most special care that you locate [him] in his place… – Princess Irulan ( Dune ) A human being is complex beyond the knowledge of any other individual. Identifying oneself is not a simple matter. Professionally, I am a scientist.
Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious scientist who travelled far and wide after he had falsified the famous cosmology of Ptolemy. Many paradigms did he visit, and many were the theories with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much from the two body problem while trying to save the soul of science and raise his family safely at home.
