F Rosa Rubicondior: Creationism in Crisis - Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

Wednesday 12 April 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At
A view of Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies from the James Webb Telescope.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Creationism in Crisis

Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope

New map of the universe’s cosmic growth supports Einstein’s theory of gravity

Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT)
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), Chile
It has been said that, like the Qur'an, if the Bible were discovered for the first time today, we could date it accurately by the scientific ignorance in it.

There is no hint of knowledge about Germ Theory, electricity, atoms, photosynthesis, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, gravity, or dark matter and dark energy, anywhere in the Bible, unless you stretch the meanings of words beyond breaking point and add things that are not there.

It's as though the authors knew no more than the little that was already known at the time and didn't realise that much of what they thought they knew was fundamentally wrong. But you would expect a creator god who wanted us to believe it knew everything and most importantly, had a vital message for mankind, would have included something new and even something useful - like electricity or antibiotics, for example, but it couldn't even describe the scientific method, let alone a null hypothesis or the need for controls in an experiment.

So, it took until the early part of the 20th century for a scientist to discover that matter and energy are interchangeable because they are different aspects of the same thing, and so why planets orbit suns and Earth has enough gravity to stop us and the atmosphere floating off into space. Einstein’s discovery of Relativity is now a fundamental of cosmology and theoretical astrophysics.

It was that that led cosmologists to realise that there if far more gravity in galaxies than the total mass of visible matter in should produce, which led to the conclusion that there must be something with mass that wasn’t visible - so-called dark matter - a mysterious substance comprised of particles that don't interact with electromagnetic light so neither reflects it nor produces it.
Dark matter and dark energy are two concepts that have revolutionized our understanding of the universe and its composition.

Dark Matter:
Dark matter is a form of matter that cannot be seen or detected directly, but its presence can be inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter. It is estimated to make up about 27% of the total mass-energy content of the universe, while ordinary matter (i.e., everything we can see) accounts for only about 5%. Despite its name, dark matter is not necessarily "dark" in the sense of being invisible. Rather, it is simply not detectable by any known means of observation, including electromagnetic radiation, which is why it is referred to as "dark."

There are several proposed candidates for dark matter, including weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), axions, and sterile neutrinos, among others. However, none of these candidates have been definitively confirmed, and the true nature of dark matter remains a mystery.

For more information on dark matter, see the following references:
  1. Dark Matter: A Primer by Katherine Freese
    (https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.2549)
  2. The Search for Dark Matter by Dan Hooper
    (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23878)
  3. Dark Matter by John Ellis
    (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370157303006111)

Dark Energy:
Dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that is thought to permeate all of space and is responsible for the observed accelerating expansion of the universe. Like dark matter, dark energy cannot be seen or directly detected, but its existence can be inferred from its effects on the expansion of the universe. According to current models, dark energy makes up about 68% of the total mass-energy content of the universe.

The nature of dark energy is even more mysterious than that of dark matter. One possibility is that it is a property of space itself, known as the cosmological constant. Another possibility is that it is a new type of energy field that permeates space, known as quintessence. Like dark matter, there is no direct evidence for the existence of dark energy, and its true nature remains a subject of intense research.

For more information on dark energy, see the following references:
  1. Dark Energy: A Brief Review by Varun Sahni
    (https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.4368)
  2. The Cosmological Constant Problem and the Inflationary Universe by Andrei Linde
    (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370157399000598)
  3. Quintessence: A Review by Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and Nevin Weinberg
    (https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302506)

OpenAI. (2023, April 12). About Dark Matter and Dark Energy, with references, please [Msg 1]. Message posted to https://openaidialogpt.com
Now, researchers from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have succeeded in 'seeing dark matter' using the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as a filter, like the way a silhouette is produced by a dark shape blocking the light from a lighter background, only with texture.

The idea is that the further you look into space, the further back into time you are looking because of the time it takes for the light to reach us. And the further back in time you look, the closer you get to the Big Bang, so what you're seeing is the history of the Universe!
The large team of researchers have submitted a set of papers to The Astrophysical Journalfeaturing a ground-breaking map of dark matter distributed across a quarter of the sky, extending deep into the cosmos, that confirms Einstein’s theory of how massive structures grow and bend light over the 14-billion-year life span of the universe.

The paper also does something that creationists should now be getting used to; it refutes recent claims that the standard model, including Einstein's Relativity, may be a theory in crisis because recent studies using a different methodology seem to give unexpected results, although they only cast doubt on the nature of Dark Matter, not on the established ideas of the origins of the Universe in a big bang and the role Relativity played in the formation of the cosmos.

As the Princeton University news release explains:
The new map uses light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) essentially as a backlight to silhouette all the matter between us and the Big Bang.
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, ancient light emitted when the universe was in its infancy, has travelled billions of years, witnessing the formation of stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters. The gravitational fields of these massive objects have influenced the path of CMB light. At the left is the Big Bang; the wavy lines illustrate the distortion caused by the dark matter and regular matter of galaxies; at the right is an image of the warped light received by the Atacama Cosmological Telescope (ACT). At the lower left is the new map of the dark matter made by the ACT team, a visualization of all the matter in the path of the CMB light. The orange regions show where there is more mass; purple where there is less.

Image by Lucy Reading-Ikkanda / Simons Foundation and the ACT Collaboration

It’s a bit like silhouetting, but instead of just having black in the silhouette, you have texture and lumps of dark matter, as if the light were streaming through a fabric curtain that had lots of knots and bumps in it. The famous blue and yellow CMB image [from 2003] is a snapshot of what the universe was like in a single epoch, about 13 billion years ago, and now this is giving us the information about all the epochs since.

The CMB is famous already for its unparalleled measurements of the primordial state of the universe, so these lensing maps, describing its subsequent evolution, are almost an embarrassment of riches. We now have a second, very primordial map of the universe. Instead of a ‘crisis,’ I think we have an extraordinary opportunity to use these different data sets together. Our map includes all of the dark matter, going back to the Big Bang, and the other maps are looking back about 9 billion years, giving us a layer that is much closer to us. We can compare the two to learn about the growth of structures in the universe. I think is going to turn out to be really interesting. That the two approaches are getting different measurements is fascinating.

Professor Suzanne Staggs
Director of ACT and Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics
Princeton University, USA.

It’s a thrill to be able to see the invisible, to uncover this scaffold of dark matter that holds our visible star-filled galaxies. In this new image, we can see directly the invisible cosmic web of dark matter that surrounds and connects galaxies.

Professor Jo Dunkley, analysis lead for ACT
Professor of physics and astrophysical sciences.

Usually, astronomers can only measure light, so we see how galaxies are distributed across the universe; these observations reveal the distribution of mass, so primarily show how the dark matter is distributed through our universe.

Professor David Spergel, President of the Simons Foundation.
Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation, Emeritus
Princeton University, USA

We have mapped the invisible dark matter distribution across the sky, and it is just as our theories predict. This is stunning evidence that we understand the story of how structure in our universe formed over billions of years, from just after the Big Bang to today.

Remarkably, 80% of the mass in the universe is invisible. By mapping the dark matter distribution across the sky to the largest distances, our ACT lensing measurements allow us to clearly see this invisible world.

Our results also provide new insights into an ongoing debate some have called ‘The Crisis in Cosmology.’

Professor Blake Sherwin, co-author
Professor of cosmology
University of Cambridge.

When we proposed this experiment in 2003, we had no idea the full extent of information that could be extracted from our telescope. We owe this to the cleverness of the theorists, the many people who built new instruments to make our telescope more sensitive, and the new analysis techniques our team came up with. [This includes a sophisticated new model of ACT’s instrument noise by Princeton graduate student Zach Atkins.]

Professor Mark Devlin, deputy director of ACT,
Reese Flower Professor of Astronomy
University of Pennsylvania
Despite making up most of the universe, dark matter has been hard to detect because it doesn’t interact with light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. As far as we know, dark matter only interacts with gravity.

We’ve made a new mass map using distortions of light left over from the Big Bang. Remarkably, it provides measurements that show that both the ‘lumpiness’ of the universe, and the rate at which it is growing after 14 billion years of evolution, are just what you’d expect from our standard model of cosmology based on Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Assistant professor Mathew Madhavacheril, lead author of one of the papers
Assistant professor in physics and astronomy
University of Pennsylvania, USA
To track it down, the more than 160 collaborators who have built and gathered data from the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope in the high Chilean Andes observed light emanating following the dawn of the universe’s formation, the Big Bang — when the universe was only 380,000 years old. Cosmologists often refer to this diffuse CMB light that fills our entire universe as the “baby picture of the universe.
diagram illustrating gravity lensing
To see invisible dark matter, the research team look at how its gravity bends light, just ancient windows of uneven thickness stretch and bend what appears behind them. Here, a simple checkerboard pattern (left) is warped by the purple blobs before the image is picked up by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (right), resulting in the distorted view at the right. Astronomers look for these distortion patterns in distant light to map the distributions of dark matter.

Image by Lucy Reading-Ikkanda / Simons Foundation
The team tracked how the gravitational pull of massive dark matter structures can warp the CMB on its 14-billion-year journey to us, just as antique, lumpy windows bend and distort what we can see through them.

While earlier studies pointed to cracks in the standard cosmological model, our findings provide new reassurance that our fundamental theory of the universe holds true.

Dr Frank Qu, lead author of one of the papers
.
[The 'Cosmology Crisis' referred to by Professor Sherwin] stems from recent measurements that use a different background light, one emitted from stars in galaxies rather than the CMB. These have produced results that suggest the dark matter was not lumpy enough under the standard model of cosmology and led to concerns that the model may be broken. However, the ACT team’s latest results precisely assessed that the vast lumps seen in this image are the exact right size.
Wouldn't it have been something for the authors of Genesis to have included something about gravity, relativity or Dark Matter, instead of filling the gaps in their knowledge with magic and invisible spirits?

But then they were only doing their best with what little knowledge they had despite the poor quality of much of it, hence all the nonsense that science has revealed and keeps on revealing, forcing the Bible's apologists into declaring more and more of it allegorical and/or metaphorical, while parts of it are undoubtedly literally true but you need magical 'holy spirit' to know which is which.

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