I have had the misfortune to encounter many terms for psychological dysfunction in many venues. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect – I have witnessed them all, all too often, both in the context of science and elsewhere. Those of us who are trained as scientists are still human: though we fancy ourselves immune, we are still subject to the same cognitive foibles as everyone else.

It has been proposal season for the Hubble Space Telescope, so many astronomers have been busy with that. I am no exception. Talking to others, it is clear that there remain many more excellent Hubble projects than available observing time. So I haven’t written here for a bit, and I have other tasks to get on with. I did get requests for a report on the last conference I went to, Beyond WIMPs: from Theory to Detection.

There is a new article in Science on the expansion rate of the universe, very much along the lines of my recent post. It is a good read that I recommend. It includes some of the human elements that influence the science. When I started this blog, I recalled my experience in the ’80s moving from a theory-infused institution to a more observationally and empirically oriented one.

Vera Rubin passed away a few weeks ago. This was not surprising: she had lived a long, positive, and fruitful life, but had faced the usual health problems of those of us who make it to the upper 80s. Though news of her death was not surprising , it was deeply saddening. It affected me more than I had anticipated, even armed with the intellectual awareness that the inevitable must be approaching.

Vincent: Want to talk about MOND? Jules: No man, I don’t consider MOND. Vincent: Are you biased? Jules: Nah, I ain’t biased, I just don’t dig MOND, that’s all. Vincent: Why not? Jules: MOND is an ugly theory. I don’t consider ugly theories. Vincent: MOND makes predictions that come true. Fits galaxy data gooood.

So the always humorous, unabashedly nerdy xkcd recently published this comic: This hits close to home for me, in many ways. First, this is an every day experience for me. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t get an email, or worse, a phone call, from some wanna-be who has the next theory of everything. I try to be polite. I even read some of what I get sent.

There has already been one very quick attempt to match ΛCDM galaxy formation simulations to the radial acceleration relation (RAR). Another rapid preprint by the Durham group has appeared. It doesn’t do everything I ask for from simulations, but it does do a respectable number of them. So how does it do? First, there is some eye-rolling language in the title and the abstract.

To continue… we had been discussing the baryon content of the universe, and the missing baryon problem. The problem exists because of a mismatch between the census of baryons locally and the density of baryons estimated from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). How well do we know the latter? Either extremely well, or perhaps not so well, depending on which data we query. At the outset let me say I do not doubt the basic BBN picture.

People often ask for a straight up comparison between ΛCDM and MOND. This is rarely possible because the two theories are largely incommensurable. When one is eloquent the other is mute, and vice-versa. It is possible to attempt a comparison about how bad the missing baryon problem is in each.

or why Vera Rubin and Albert Bosma deserve a Nobel Prize Natural Law: a concise statement describing some aspect of Nature. In the sciences, we teach about Natural Law all the time. We take them for granted. But we rarely stop and think what we mean by the term. Usually Natural Laws are items of textbook knowledge.