I haven’t been writing as many posts of late. Part of this is due to the usual time constraints of work and family, and part of it is due to a new large project that’s been ramping up recently. But part of it is due to the limitations of my own writing. 

I can’t say too much about the new project, but one of its central goals is to convey some of the emotions behind scientific discovery.  The sublime beauty of a theory, or the numinous sense of cosmic scale. It’s hard to do, particularly if you want to move beyond the trite passages that are used far too often. So I’m having to learn new ways of expressing ideas, which is a challenge. It’s so much easier to fall into the old pattern of simply explaining ideas and reasoning.

As we’ve all seen recently, our emotional reaction to facts and ideas is often more powerful than the facts and ideas themselves. We are not just thinking creatures but feeling ones, and sometimes we need to plant emotional hooks before we can convey scientific understanding. We also have to be careful not to overuse an emotional ploy, we fall into the trap of equating feelings and facts. There’s a balance that can be reached where scientific knowledge and emotional connections can reinforce each other. Some science writers achieve that balance masterfully, while others such as myself only aspire to find a balance of their own.

Long story short, I’m focusing a bit more on learning and a bit less on writing at the moment, so I beg your patience as I strive to overcome the tyranny of words.

The post The Tyranny Of Words appeared first on One Universe at a Time.

Something is amiss in the universe. There appears to be an enormous deficit of ultraviolet light in the cosmic budget.

Or, so I’m told. I was asked by a few readers about a new study showing there is less light in the universe than expected. They heard of this from various articles showing up on the web. Like this one on Phys Org, or this one from the University of Colorado Boulder, or the original press release from the Carnegie Institute for Science. That single phrase appears on more than 4,000 pages according to Google. Mostly copied from the original press release, and most of them making no reference to the actual research article.

In researching the work, I also learned “It’s as if you’re in a big, brightly lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt lightbulbs” as one of the authors was quoted.  That quote shows up on nearly 400 websites, including Popular Mechanics, IFLScience, Forbes Magazine and The Daily Mail. Over and over, the same tweaked variations of the press release. Copy pasta after copy pasta.

I realize this is how much of science journalism is done. Websites are funded by page views, and for that you need lots of content. Press releases are an easy source of content, and can be used either outright, or tweaked to fit your needs. Unfortunately press releases are designed to put the work in the best possible light, and often over state the impact of the research. Those who have been following me also know this can lead to lots and lots of misconceptions.

Honestly, any website that is interested in actually communicating science can do better. Several do. Any website that thinks otherwise should talk to me or any other scientist who writes about their research field.  There’s no need to resort to copy pasta journalism.

By the way, the actual journal article is cited below.  It is behind a paywall, but you can read the arxiv version here. I’ll probably write about it in the near future, but not today.

Paper: Juna A. Kollmeier et al. The Photon Underproduction Crisis ApJ 789 L32 (2014)

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Let me begin by saying there is no evidence that dark matter killed the dinosaurs.  None whatsoever.  Unfortunately the idea was posted on Nature’s blog, and from there it went to Scientific American and elsewhere.  The various social media took the story and it has spread like a prairie wildfire.  The actual preprint is much less sensational (and doesn’t mention dinosaurs) but it is still very speculative.  

Illustration of the Sun’s motion through the galaxy. Credit: Nature/C. Carreau-ESA.

The idea comes from the fact that the Sun does not follow a flat orbit around the galaxy.  Instead, its motion wobbles above and below the galactic plane, crossing the galactic plane every 35 million years.  This isn’t unusual, as lots of stars follow similar paths, but it has led some to speculate that perhaps this periodicity could explain periodic mass extinctions in the geologic record.

The problem is, there isn’t any strong evidence for cyclic mass extinctions.  Some analysis of the data has hinted at a pattern, but the correlation isn’t very strong.  Of course that hasn’t stopped people from proposing everything from companion stars to Nibiru to explain these periodic extinctions.  There been similar proposals that every time the Sun crosses the galactic plane the Oort cloud would be disrupted, causing comets to sweep into the inner solar system and bombard the Earth.

What’s new here is that the authors propose that dark matter within the plane of the galaxy is doing the disrupting.  As I wrote about last week, there is a hint of dark matter seen in gamma ray observations of the center of our galaxy.  One model that could account for these gamma rays is type of dark matter that would lie within the galactic plane.  So if this type of dark matter exists, and if it disrupts the Oort cloud when the Sun crosses the galactic plane, and if that caused comets to fling into the inner solar system and bombard the Earth, and if that bombardment caused periodic mass extinctions, then you should see some evidence in the geologic record.

So what evidence is there?  None.  Well, not quite none.  If you assume the model is true, and then look for a periodicity in the cratering record of Earth, you find that the cratering record agrees with the model about three times better that it agrees with random cratering.  Scientifically, that isn’t very convincing data.  It makes for a mildly interesting paper, but it’s mostly speculation at this point.

But Nature and several other websites have decided to take this speculative idea, add the word dinosaurs to the title, and imply that scientists are proposing dark matter killed the dinosaurs.  No one is proposing that.  It’s link-bait noise that makes the job of communicating real science all that more difficult.  So if you see one of these sensationalized titles, don’t share it on social media.  Tell your friends that share the articles that it’s speculative nonsense.  Hopefully we can drown this noise and get back to real science.

Because honestly, science is interesting enough without the hype.

Paper:  Lisa Randall, Matthew Reece. Dark Matter as a Trigger for Periodic Comet Impacts. arXiv:1403.0576 [astro-ph.GA] (2014).

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