The arrogance of ignorance

A colleague points out to me a recent preprint by Bertone & Tait titled A New Era in the Quest for Dark Matter. Most of the narrative is a conventionalist response to the failure of experimental dark matter searches, posing a legitimate question in this context. Where do we take it from here?

There is one brief paragraph mentioning and dismissing the possibility that what we call the dark matter problem might instead be some form of new dynamics. This is completely pro forma, and I wouldn’t have given it a second thought had my colleague not griped to me about it. It contains the following gem:

“The success of these efforts however remained limited at most to rotation curves of galaxies, and it is today clear that the only way these theories can be reconciled with observations is by effectively, and very precisely, mimicking the behavior of cold dark matter on cosmological scales.”

This is enormously revealing about the sociological attitudes in the field. Specifically, the attitude common among  particle physicists who work on dark matter. Now, that’s a lot of people, and there are many individual exceptions to the general attitude I’m about to describe. But these are exceedingly common themes, so lets break it down.

There are two distinct issues packed into this one sentence. The first amounts to the oft-repeated talking point, “MOND fits rotation curves but does nothing else.”

“…these efforts however remained limited at most to rotation curves of galaxies…”

(emphasis added.) This is simply incorrect.

Nevertheless, this sentiment has been asserted so many times by so many otherwise reasonable and eminent scientists that the innocent bystander may be forgiven for thinking there is some truth to this statement. There is not. Indeed, it is a perfect example of the echo chamber effect – someone said it without checking their facts, then someone else repeated it, and so on until everyone knows this to be true. Everyone says so!

To be sure, I shared the same concern initially. Difference is, I did the fact checking. It surprised the bejeepers out of me to find that the vast majority of observations that we usually ascribe to dark matter could just as well be explained by MOND. Often better, and with less effort. This is not to say that MOND is always better, of course. But there is so much more to it that I’m not going to review it yet again here.

If only there were some way for scientists to communicate. In writing. Preserved in archival journals. Reviews, even…

A Tale of Two Paradigms: the Mutual Incommensurability of ΛCDM and MOND

The Third Law of Galactic Rotation

Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND): Observational Phenomenology and Relativistic Extensions

Modified Newtonian Dynamics as an Alternative to Dark Matter

Testing the Hypothesis of Modified Dynamics with Low Surface Brightness Galaxies and Other Evidence

Testing the Dark Matter Hypothesis with Low Surface Brightness Galaxies and Other Evidence

or if those are too intimidating, review talks at conferences

Extended Theories of Gravity

The Trials and Tribulations of Modern Cosmology: The Good, the Bad, and the Just Plain Ugly

Observational Constraints on the Acceleration Discrepancy Problem

Dynamical Constraints on Disk Galaxy Formation

How Galaxies Don’t Form

ETC.

The world has many experts on dark matter. I am one of them. It has rather fewer experts on MOND. I happen to be one of those, because I made the effort to learn about it. Being an expert on dark matter does not make one an expert on MOND – it’s painful to realize you’re at the wrong peak in the Dunning-Kruger curve. Becoming an expert is hard and time consuming, so I appreciate why many people don’t want to invest their time that way – MOND is a fringe idea, after all. Or so I thought, until I bothered to learn about it. The more I learned, the more I realized it could not so easily be dismissed.

But MOND can easily be dismissed if you remain ignorant of it! This attitude is what I call the arrogance of ignorance. Many scientists who are experts on dark matter don’t know what MOND is really, or what all it does and does not do successfully. They don’t need to! (arrogance). It can’t possibly be true! (ignorance).

The result is a profoundly unscientific status quo. If you hear someone assert something to the effect that “MOND fits rotation curves and nothing else” then you know they simply don’t know what they’re talking about.

I haven’t yet broken down the second part of statement above, but I’ve probably outraged enough people for one post. That’s OK – the shoe deserves to be on the other foot. Being outraged is what is to be an astronomer listening to particle physicists opine about dark matter. Their general attitude is that astronomers can’t possibly have anything to teach them about the subject. Never mind that 100% of the evidence is astronomical in nature, and will remain so until we get a laboratory detection. Good luck with that.