High Priests and their Sycophants

A surprising and ultimately career-altering result that I encountered while in my first postdoc was that low surface brightness galaxies fell precisely on the Tully-Fisher relation. This surprising result led me to test the limits of the relation in every conceivable way. Are there galaxies that fall off it? How far is it applicable?

I read somewhere – I don’t think it was Kuhn himself, but someone analyzing Kuhn – that there came a point in the history of science where there was a divergence between scientists, with different scientists disagreeing about what counts as a theory, what counts as a test of a theory, what even counts as evidence. We have reached that point with the mass discrepancy problem.

Last time, I expressed despondency about the lack of progress due to attitudes that in many ways remain firmly entrenched in the 1980s. Recently a nice result has appeared, so maybe there is some hope.

I have become despondent for the progress of science. Despite enormous progress both observational and computational, we have made little progress in solving the missing mass problem. The issue is not one of technical progress. It is psychological. Words matter. We are hung up on missing mass as literal dark matter.

It often happens that data are ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. The evidence for dark matter is an obvious example. I frequently hear permutations on the statement This is said in all earnestness by serious scientists who clearly believe what they say.

Reality check Before we can agree on the interpretation of a set of facts, we have to agree on what those facts are. Even if we agree on the facts, we can differ about their interpretation. It is OK to disagree, and anyone who practices astrophysics is going to be wrong from time to time. It is the inevitable risk we take in trying to understand a universe that is vast beyond human comprehension.

This post simply announces that I will be giving a Golden Webinar at 3pm EST Friday 15 January 2021 courtesy of the Instituto de Astrofisica of the Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile. The seminar is free and open to all but you need to register in advance if you want to hear it. There are many excellent speakers in previous episodes of this series that you can hear on Youtube.

People seem to like to do retrospectives at year’s end. I take a longer view, but the end of 2020 seems like a fitting time to do that. Below is the text of a paper I wrote in 1995 with collaborators at the Kapteyn Institute of the University of Groningen. The last edit date is from December of that year, so this text (in plain TeX, not LaTeX!) is now a quarter century old. I am just going to cut & paste it as-was;

This post is a recent conversation with David Garofalo for his blog. Today we talk to Dr. Stacy McGaugh, Chair of the Astronomy Department at Case Western Reserve University. David : Hi Stacy. You had set out to disprove MOND and instead found evidence to support it. That sounds like the poster child for how science works. Was praise forthcoming?