TheSkySearchers

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-nobel-pri ... tists.html

Peebles gets half. His book Physical Cosmology was a strong influence for me.

Peebles is a giant.

Another article here, in the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/scie ... d=78520389

Thanks for posting this notFritz.

Here's a background piece on the exoplanet part

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-exoplanet ... solar.html

Peebles is a Canadian, and was born in my town. In fact in St. Boniface, the largely French sector of Winnipeg. I work in this part of the city, too.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/201 ... -year.html

My first post here, hope I will not immediately categorized as a troll (edit: actually did happen !)

Queloz and Mayor are a fairly safe choice even if they were very lucky that such exotic planets as 51 Pegasi b do exist (at all) and actually present so close to the earth. And they were smart in the way they ran their analysis real-time. Didn’t really come up with some science breakthrough but smart, lucky and at the right place at the right time. Certainly good enough for me.

Pebble I have no problem with the CMB which was clearly measured by multiple experiments (CODE, WMAP and Planck). I am more conflicted about the whole black matter/black energy mention. Yes, we know that observation doesn’t match (by far) current theories and yes this is a way to make current theories work again… except that, unless I am mistaken, we have exactly zero experimental proof that those actually exist. Do we have examples of Nobel awarded to completely "unproven" theories?

godzilla wrote: ↑Mon Oct 14, 2019 6:56 am My first post here, hope I will not immediately categorized as a troll (edit: actually did happen !)

Queloz and Mayor are a fairly safe choice even if they were very lucky that such exotic planets as 51 Pegasi b do exist (at all) and actually present so close to the earth. And they were smart in the way they ran their analysis real-time. Didn’t really come up with some science breakthrough but smart, lucky and at the right place at the right time. Certainly good enough for me.

Pebble I have no problem with the CMB which was clearly measured by multiple experiments (CODE, WMAP and Planck). I am more conflicted about the whole black matter/black energy mention. Yes, we know that observation doesn’t match (by far) current theories and yes this is a way to make current theories work again… except that, unless I am mistaken, we have exactly zero experimental proof that those actually exist. Do we have examples of Nobel awarded to completely "unproven" theories?

All theories are unproven. Theories cannot be proven, they can only be falsified. All cosmologies without dark matter and dark energy have been falsified.

Since dark matter and dark energy are detected astrophysically by multiple independent observations which require a universe and not a laboratory tabletop, demanding a laboratory detection is unreasonable. The Sun hasn't been replicated in a lab either.

We know that dark matter exists because galaxies hold together, some galaxies are almost entirely dark matter, gravitational lensing of distant background objects show its presence in foreground galaxy clusters and that its distribution differs from normal matter, the abundance of light elements from the Big Bang and the CMB itself cannot be quantitatively reconciled with observation without dark matter.

We should remember that the neutrino was predicted only from energy and momentum conservation in beta decays. It took decades to detect in a lab. Furthermore the neutrino is a fine example of hot dark matter (mass less than temperature). The other evidence referred to above requires cold dark matter (mass greater than temperature).

It's much the same story with dark energy. The formation of structures, the CMB observations, acceleration of the universal expansion demand it.

Denial of these ideas DM and DE is falsified.

awesome post nFA.
I was just telling a friend last night about Popper, falsifiability and category errors mixing physics with metaphysics.

notFritzArgelander wrote: ↑Mon Oct 14, 2019 9:39 am We should remember that the neutrino was predicted only from energy and momentum conservation in beta decays. It took decades to detect in a lab. Furthermore the neutrino is a fine example of hot dark matter (mass less than temperature). The other evidence referred to above requires cold dark matter (mass greater than temperature).

That's a very good point. And as soon as we can reliably detect something that can qualify for dark matter in a lab I would be much more at ease in attributing a Nobel for it (both for the person doing the detection and the one who came up with the idea).

I guess time will tell.

chasmanian wrote: ↑Tue Oct 15, 2019 4:17 am awesome post nFA.
I was just telling a friend last night about Popper, falsifiability and category errors mixing physics with metaphysics.

The point is that several theories can give the same results (until one fails and is falsified). The category error, getting seduced by the idea of a truth that doesn't have to be struggled over, is the main indicator of a mind that is asleep.

godzilla wrote: ↑Tue Oct 15, 2019 4:29 am

notFritzArgelander wrote: ↑Mon Oct 14, 2019 9:39 am We should remember that the neutrino was predicted only from energy and momentum conservation in beta decays. It took decades to detect in a lab. Furthermore the neutrino is a fine example of hot dark matter (mass less than temperature). The other evidence referred to above requires cold dark matter (mass greater than temperature).

That's a very good point. And as soon as we can reliably detect something that can qualify for dark matter in a lab I would be much more at ease in attributing a Nobel for it (both for the person doing the detection and the one who came up with the idea).

I guess time will tell.

I'm not in agreement. I think history shows that Nobel prizes need not be lab confirmed. For instance Hans Bethe won the 1967 Nobel for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. That's not been achieved in a lab. Eddington had the notion but Bethe worked a detailed theory for hydrogen fusion reaction networks theoretically. (Nuclear weapons work involves different reactions btw.)

Chandrasekhar won the prize in 1983 for work on stellar structure and evolution done in the 1930s which has no laboratory correlate either. Penzias and Wilson got it 1978 for the CMB.

The 1993 prize for discovering a new kind of pulsar to Hulse and Taylor has no laboratory element to it. Neither does Giacconi's 2002 award on cosmic XRay sources nor the 2006 prize for cosmic background radiation anisotropy nor the 2011 prize for accelerated expansion of the universe (hence dark energy).

If you demand lab detections, none of these Nobels should have been awarded. There would be no astrophysics Nobels if lab confirmation was required.

The existence and reality of dark matter and dark energy is accepted. Lab confirmaction would be nice to have, but there are too many independent lines of evidence for folks to doubt their existence.

We do know that there are fringe folks and pseudoscience devotees who are pushing a "conspiracy theory" that if it can't be seen in a terrestrial lab it cannot be real. As if physics on Earth must somehow be different from astrophysics. DM and DE have been detected by astrophysical means. In that, they are just like the Sun, the stars.

Thanks for the feedback - interesting read.

Personally I think that X years from now we will see this whole DM/DE thing as a complete mischaracterisation of much better, consistent and elegant theory. But I might not be here to witness it, unfortunately.

godzilla wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2019 9:47 am Thanks for the feedback - interesting read.

Personally I think that X years from now we will see this whole DM/DE thing as a complete mischaracterisation of much better, consistent and elegant theory. But I might not be here to witness it, unfortunately.

I am certain that's not going to happen. So you are unlikely to be missing anything. All the attempts to modify gravity to do away with DM and DE have been roundly falsified by observations. My favorite falsification is of a relativistic version of MOND. Folks objected to plain MOND because it failed to correctly predict the classic tests of General Relativity, precession of Mercury's perihelion, gravitational lensing, and gravitational redshift. So various relativistic MOND theories were proposed.

These ran into a glaring fatal flaw. Spherical gravitating masses like the Sun became unstable on a timescale of ~ two weeks! So if you can remember a time longer than that when there was a Sun, you've refuted those theories.

The LIGO neutron star merger observations rule out other alternative gravity theories.

I kept a "scorecard" over at AF.net on the observational status of alternative gravity theories versus General Relativity plus DM and DE. I should probably import that here and update it. It shows that alternatives to DM and DE are nonexistent: Nature doesn't care about human preferences.