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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> Is he implying that other cosmologists have proceeded as if dark energy is well evidenced?

As a non-cosmologist just reading HN I would say yes. Not quite as extensively as Dark matter though. I personally think that's a mistake too based on my limited research on the topic. If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility in the eyes of the public. That's how invested they are.

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> If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility

This is nonsense. Scientists have been wrong in several occasions, it is just part of the profession. For example, in the years leading to the discovery of relativity, many physicists believed there was something called "ether" that worked to fix the speed of light that they had evidence to be the same in all directions.

Generally called aether, believe that ether is a misspelling which has lingered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

I believe it's just a regional spelling issue (like paediatriction/pediatriction or encylopaedia/encyclopedia)

If you care what sort of ether you're on about, you say "luminiferous ether".

Yeah but that was in an age before clickbait and "In this house, we believe science is real" yard signs.

People are too bought into science as a source for truth instead of being a messy, difficult method of discovery.

When chemists were asked, at the end of the 19th century, whether the the atoms in their molecular diagrams were real, they always said, "No, that's just a model we use." It wasn't until Brownian motion needed actual atoms that they began to say atoms had objective reality.

Cosmologists could learn a lot from 19th-century chemists.

It might be cultural. I think it is. Being unsure or humble is not valued as much as it should be.

It is valued more in more consequential fields. What cosmologists believe never has any legitimate effect on public policy, except to the degree that they command budgets for telescopes, accelerators, and detector arrays.

I think there were a lot of chemists at that time who were confident that atoms are real, but an influential group of philosophically-minded physicists (Mach, for one) objected to the claim on the basis that the evidence was circumstantial. They gave Boltzmann a good deal of unnecessary grief over the matter (no pun intended).

Yes, all chemists suspected atoms were real, but they were mostly careful not to claim to have evidence for it that they did not, in fact, have -- yet! Nobody but nobody was surprised when we turned out to really have atoms. It was all a relief, but it didn't change much about how chemistry was conducted. It made catalysis easier to understand, and ultimately DNA as a physical basis for life that made biologists generally very uneasy. Many had thought of themselves as studying something divine, and had to get used to being chemists.

You know what they say. Or at least what Lev Landau supposedly said: "Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt."

Scientist have no idea what dark matter or dark energy is so it’s not like our world would be overturned. If it turns out to be wrong assumptions, that’s fine. Although it would be embarrassing.

The problem is that these topics get enough press that the general public has heard of them. It's nice that there are no obvious consequences if dark matter or dark energy turn out to be fiction. But the public will hear that "scientists" were wrong about these things they've been talking about for 50 years. Then the public will get another report on a topic like climate change which is also proven by "scientists" albeit different ones. That's an area where the truth of if has real consequences. What are people supposed to think then?

Our only recourse will be, "Well, you know, cosmologists. They don't behave like real scientists." That will sound suspiciously like "no true Scotsman", but there really is a difference between science with and without consequences.

People were forced to take particle physics seriously, and cosmology slipped in on its coattails.

Cosmologists are behaving like real scientists. There is a gap in our knowledge of physics which appears to be dark matter and dark energy. That's something that needs to be resolved, one way or the other. Currently they are expending a lot of effort looking for dark matter and energy. If it ends up being wasted effort, that would be embarrassing, but it wouldn't have been wrong to look.

Announcing far and wide that the Universe is certainly 96 percent invisible stuff that has never been identified in any way is not what a real scientist would do, if it mattered in any way.

All we really know is that the equations we have don't match the universe we see. Dark-this and dark-that are no better than guesses that seem to bring things back in line with our favored theories, until some actual mechanism is identified.

The answer is to properly educate the public on how science works. Science is a series of hypotheses, tested extensively and built upon given the evidence.

It is the fault of our education system and pop culture that people are so terrified of scientists being wrong. People should be thrilled when scientists are shown to be wrong, as it means they are one step closer to understanding what is right.

It would only be embarrassing if science wasn't so damn hard.

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