Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003

Dec. 26 — The funny thing about discoveries is that they often produce new mysteries, too. This year was no exception, as many remarkable space science findings generated puzzling problems for astronomers to look into.

IN SOME CASES the puzzles are brand new. Other times a discovery merely confirms how little we knew. Either way, there’s plenty for astronomers to do.

Here then are the Top 10 Space Mysteries that astronomers will be pondering in the New Year and beyond:

Nobody knows what the heck it is, but it is officially repulsive. And man, is it powerful! More powerful than gravity, even.

While gravity holds things together at the local level (and by local I mean within galaxies and even between them, forming galactic clusters), some unknown force is working behind the scenes and across the universe to pull everything apart. Scientists have only come to realize this dark force in recent years, by discovering that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing pace.

The past year was a good one for proving that dark energy is at work. Calculations have been refined: The repulsive force dominates the universe, comprising 65 percent of its makeup.

(Similarly unseen and exotic dark matter makes up 30 percent of the universe, leaving us with a universe that contains just 5 percent normal matter and energy.)

Two curious ideas related to the accelerating expansion, both of which emerged in 2002: All galaxies are destined to become frozen in time or, perhaps, time never ends.

Mars simply will not give up its most coveted secrets. Ultimately, the big quest for NASA and all the Mars scientists is about whether there is life, but before that’s answered, there is the question of liquid water, a requirement for life as we know it.

Despite two major discoveries of water ice in 2002, nobody can figure out yet whether any of it might exist in the melted state.

Meanwhile, clues mount. In one compelling study released in December, dark streaks on the surface were attributed to salty, running water. But many experts remain unconvinced. NASA’s Odyssey spacecraft is circling Mars as you read this, hunting for more evidence.

Something is eating at the black hole at the center of our galaxy. And whatever is bugging the gravity monster manifests as an utter lack of appetite.

In October, astronomers announced they’d watched a star zip around the black hole that anchors the Milky Way, all but proving the impossible-to-see object is actually there. Meanwhile, the region around the black hole is an active place, as the Chandra X-ray Observatory showed early this year.

However, the black hole is not devouring enough matter to generate the tremendous X-ray output seen with other supermassive black holes. Scientists are so far unable to fully explain the stark contrasts they’ve seen, this tremendous diversity in black hole behavior.

Hints emerged this year, however. A study in January suggested mergers between two black holes might serve as an on-off switch for the activity. Then observations announced in November showed two black holes involved in a pending merger. Astronomers now need to tie all this to a firm explanation of the differences between the mediocre output of our black hole and the brilliant illumination surrounding others in many distant galaxies.

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you try to run from a monster and you’re legs go round and round but you don’t get anywhere? The quest to understand the origin of life isn’t much different.

In fairness, it must be pointed out that there is little data to work with. Earth does not retain a record of what went on billions of years ago, when life got going.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of wild ideas. Scientists now generally agree that life could survive a trip to Earth from Mars, in the belly of a rock kicked up by an asteroid impact. A study in November revealed why a Mars rock lands on Earth once a month, on average. A wilder idea, that bugs simply rain down from space inside comet dust, gained support from a second scientist in December, who claimed to have found some of these space bugs in Earth’s atmosphere.

Most mainstream scientists, however, figure there’s a good chance that life on Earth was cooked up in a soup of pre-biotic chemicals right here on the planet. The ingredients — water and organic chemicals — may well have come from space, but Earth likely acted as the incubator.

The answer (and a lot of well-funded researchers are asking the question and debating the possibilities) bears on how likely it is that life might have begun elsewhere, on Mars or around another star.

Is this Objectivist pseudo science?

Apparently, the Objectivists seem to think otherwise.

From this web site:

http://home.earthlink.net/~marklin/

We have:

"To summarize: what is relative about the theory of
relativity is the standards of measurement. This makes it
incompatible with Objectivism as well as counter-intuitive to the
average non-philosophical observer."

and:

"Many people seem to think that experiments prove that the speed
of light is constant. They do not."

and:

"The Lorentz ether theory (LET) starts out by assuming that
the ether exists and that Maxwell's equations hold in the ether
frame, but not necessarily in any other frame. This implies that
the speed of light is only constant relative to the ether, and is
different if the ether is in motion - just like any other wave
phenomena. Integration is built right in at the very beginning.
The Lorentz contraction and time dilation can be derived as a
consequence of assuming that the structure and mechanism of
ordinary rulers and clocks is determined by electromagnetic
interactions which are affected by motion through the ether. This
leads to the Lorentz transformation formulas and the apparent
constancy of the speed of light (and for experts - the apparent
invariance of Maxwell's equations)."

Well, if the total amount of ether is constant (conserved) and the universe is expanding, the ether density would become less and hence light would slow.

What is your opinion?

When economist Julian Simon died last month, The Washington Post described him as an “iconoclast economist.” The New York Times labeled him an “optimistic economist.” Op/ed writer Stephen Rosenfeld of The Washington Post honored him as a “leading light in the battle against popular environmental doomsday thinking.” The Associated Press identified him simply as a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland.

He was all of the above. He was also well known for his 1980 wager with Stanford University ecologist Paul Erlich that the prices of natural resources would fall because resources would not be depleted, and because any higher costs would lead to alternatives or searches for new supplies. Erlich bet that the cost of the resources would increase because they would become more scarce. In 1990, Erlich paid Simon $576.07, the amount the prices of five resources had fallen in 10 years.

Excerpts from Simon’s obituaries painted a portrait of a complex, unconventional, and controversial thinker.

Associated Press: “Simon believed that human beings, with their imagination and spirit, are the ultimate resource. His writings challenge more widely held beliefs about scarcity of energy and natural resources, pollution, and the effects of overpopulation.”

The Washington Post: “... an iconoclast population economist who challenged conventional thinking with his predictions that world populations and standards of living could increase simultaneously and infinitely. ... He insisted there is no conclusive proof of serious ozone depletion, acid rain, or greenhouse warming or that extinction of species is increasing.

“‘The doomsayers have been wrong for 25 years,’ he wrote in a 1995 essay. ‘Every measure of material human welfare in the world has improved rather than deteriorated.’ ...

“To many environmentalists and ecologists, Dr. Simon’s arguments were worse than nonsense. They fostered complacency in the face of impending crises of overpopulation and dwindling natural resources.”

The New York Times: “His views, generally optimistic about the benefits humans bring to the planet and about man’s prospects for the future, were widely debated. ... He argued that mankind would rise to any challenges and problems by devising new technologies to not only cope, but thrive. ... Mr. Simon’s views were widely contested by a large coterie of the academic and scientific community, many of whose members believe that more people create more problems, straining the earth and its resources in the process. ...

“‘Fortunately for this planet,’ Mr. Simon said in response to the Global 2000 Report, ‘these gloomy assertions about resources and environment are baseless.’”

Stephen Rosenfeld, The Washington Post: “He felt there was a cultural conspiracy to protect and praise the theoreticians of early resource exhaustion, explosive population growth, imminent mass starvation and choking chemical pollution. Meanwhile, fact-oriented scholars, as he considered himself, were widely dismissed as agents of a mindless, profit-driven right wing. ...

“Due to people like Julian Simon, a noticeable dent has been made in a largely unspoken assumption that underlines one tendency of environmental appreciation, namely, that man in general and perhaps capitalist man in particular are flawed creatures who lack full respect for their precious natural inheritance. ...

“The bitterness of the battle between doomsayers and doomslayers has alternately amused and turned off the public. Many people come to the Malthusian question looking not to enlist in a cultural war but simply to understand things better. Julian Simon had a certainty to his judgments — the family obituary declared that his 30 years of forecasts had been ‘completely borne out by events’ — that did not exactly encourage discussion.”

Erlich- Simon Bet on the price of five non-renewable resources

One of the reasons that ZPG has received a tarnished reputation is due to some of the doomsday predictions of Paul Erlich, founder of ZPG and author of "The Population Bomb." Among other things, Erlich predicted world-wide famine and rising prices of energy and metals before the turn of the century. Julian Simon (author of "Population Matters" and "The Ultimate Resource") made a $1,000 bet with Erlich that the real price of non-renewable resources (five metals) would fall between 1970 and 1980. Simon won the bet and challenged Erlich to another bet. Erlich did not renew the bet (this indicates his own confidence in predictions had declined). Simon's predictions about human welfare for the year 2000 appear more accurate that Erlich's predictions. For instance, we now have more known oil reserves than we did in 1970! In part due to winning the bet, Julian Simon earned the nickname "doomslayer."

South- Simon Bet on the price of one renewable resource

Julian Simon believed population growth benefits the human race and that there is no inherent "carrying capacity" for humans on this earth. He believed that human ability to solve problems would cause the price of all resources to decline in real dollars (thus improving the welfare of all humans). Before his death in February of this year, Simon said the real price of ALL natural resources has declined over time. Since this statement was not true for sawtimber, I challenged Simon to a $1,000 bet. We bet on the future price of pine sawtimber stumpage in south Alabama (details of the bet can be found at: www.forestry.auburn.edu/sfnmc/web/bet.html

Soon after we made the bet, Simon began to doubt that he would win. Historical data from Simon's own book indicated a real increase in sawtimber price over the last century. He decided that to protect his reputation, he should withdraw from the bet. After a little more than a year into the bet, Simon sent me a check for $1,000. While this bet does not prove anything about future price trends, it does show that nobody has 20/20 vision when it comes to predicting the future. Not even the "doomslayer" has a perfect record when it comes to betting against doomsayers.

There isn't observed quantization of redshift, no matter how much Tifft can massage the data. Why hasn't he released a new catalog in the past 11 years?

There has been observed quantization of quasar redshift for well over 15 years. That is, it has been recognized as such. Looking through older data reveals the same.

So unmistakable that none of the associations have ever definitively been shown to actually be anything more than line of sight projections.

Yes, they've definitively been shown to be more than (especially other than) line of sight projections. Not only are they near galaxies more often than could be predicted based on random distribution (which would have to be the case if the quasars were way out on the edge of the visible universe as they had been described, unless you'd like to posit something to explain their clustering around (relatively) nearby galaxies), but they are 1. found in association with particular types of galaxies, 2. are aligned across those galaxies, often in pairs and in pairs of pairs, and 3. the nearer the quasar to the galaxy, the higher the redshift. These repeated and different types of observations occurring again and again in concert defy chance association in any way that it is commonly used in astronomy.

Not only that, the number density of "associations" aren't indistinguishable from the number density of "associations" that are generated from an isotropic and homogeneous population of quasars and galaxies. Strange, eh?

Ha ha. Nice try, but no winner. If you divide the total number of cities over 1,000,000 in the U.S. by the total number of counties and then describe the yearly number of murders in those 1,000,000+ cities by the average distribution of the total population throughout the total number of counties, you'd end up saying that there was no association between city size and number of murders: they're all spread out equally. But this happened because of what you did by averaging the total number of murders in a small number of counties throughout all the counties of which most had no or few murders. This is a misuse of statistics.

If, on the other hand, you're saying that there are so many different types of associations that exist that one type of association is negligible in comparison to the total number of relationships that actually exist and so is rather meaningless, we could just as easily say that the relationship of a robber to his victim is just one of many thousands of different types of relationships that exist between human beings and, being such a small fraction of all such relationships, is rather inconsequential and of no great significance. However, explain that to the victim as well as to sociologists who know that the relationship is a significant one both in terms of what it actually is and in terms of its association with larger population centers and what that can tell us about the nature of human relationships.

Maybe because the findings are not good science, and never will be good science?

It's not merely the interpretations that are being suppressed, but the observations themselves, as well as the attempt to make more such observations, are being suppressed.

Having worked within the current paradigm (MA, astronomy), I can say that the BB interpretation has a lot going for it.

Having obtained a Ph.D. in an experimental versus a relatively observational science such as astronomy, I know how much stock to put in current paradigms.* Compared to the biological sciences, the relative paucity in astronomy of experimental data (and the correspondingly greater power of contradictory data to undermine paradigms and careers) combined with the relative scarcity of researchers and instruments and research money goes a long way toward explaining the relatively great emphasis placed on "paradigms" in astronomy and the extraordinary lengths to which people will go--including their extremely tight control over the instruments necessary for doing the observation--toward protecting their turf from competing paradigms and the observational data that would support them.

I always wonder how Arp etal would interpret the findings of the Gunn-Peterson trough, a prediction of the BB paradigm that was found to exist in a distant quasar recently. Unfortunately, they appear to be silent on the issue...

Or else you appear to have been sufficiently unmotivated to look (Apeiron , Vol. 9, No. 2, April 2002).

Even a small amount of diffuse neutral hydrogen would produce a smooth absorbing trough shortward of a QSO's Lyman-alpha emission line. This is called the Gunn-Peterson effect, and is rarely seen, implying that most hydrogen in the universe has been re-ionized. A hydrogen Gunn-Peterson trough is now predicted to be present at a redshift z ~ 6.1. [45] Observations of high-redshift quasars near z = 6 briefly appeared to confirm this prediction. However, a galaxy lensed by a foreground cluster has now been observed at z = 6.56, prior to the supposed reionization epoch and at a time when the Big Bang expects no galaxies to be visible yet. Moreover, if only a few galaxies had turned on by this early point, their emission would have been absorbed by the surrounding hydrogen gas, making these early galaxies invisible. [34] So the lensed galaxy observation falsifies this prediction and the theory it was based on. Another problem example: Quasar PG 0052+251 is at the core of a normal spiral galaxy. The host galaxy appears undisturbed by the quasar radiation, which, in the Big Bang, is supposed to be strong enough to ionize the intergalactic medium. [46]

[34] (2002), http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~cowie/z6/z6.html
[45] Astrophysics J. 530, 1-16.
[46] (2002), http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/96/35/A.html

In addition, although an observation of an example of the Gunn-Peterson effect does not inevitably lead to the conclusion that it had occurred only because there had occurred the Big Bang, a single unambiguous instance of interaction between a high redshift quasar and low or lower redshift objects would seriously damage the foundation upon which the Big Bang "paradigm" rests. There has been observed more than one such interaction. The reaction by Big Bangers? Ignore it or ridicule it or just whistle by the graveyard.

*I know this because the lab in which I work has solid experimental evidence that runs directly counter to a current paradigm in our field. At conferences, other researchers in the same field have gotten up and screamed at our P.I. or stomped out of the presentation. However, graduate students from this lab have been offered post-doc positions at some of the very best labs in the field.

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