Reading Merritt’s paper on the philosophy of cosmology, I was struck by a particular quote from Lakatos: A research programme is said to be progressing as long as its theoretical growth anticipates its empirical growth, that is as long as it keeps predicting novel facts with some success (“progressive problemshift”); it is stagnating if its theoretical growth lags behind its empirical growth, that is as long as it gives only post-hoc

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.

In 1984, I heard Hans Bethe give a talk in which he suggested the dark matter might be neutrinos. This sounded outlandish – from what I had just been taught about the Standard Model, neutrinos were massless. Worse, I had been given the clear impression that it would screw everything up if they did have mass. This was the pervasive attitude, even though the solar neutrino problem was known at the time. This did not compute!

David Merritt recently published the article “Cosmology and convention” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science . This article is remarkable in many respects. For starters, it is rare that a practicing scientist reads a paper on the philosophy of science, much less publishes one in a philosophy journal.

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.

Recently I have been complaining about the low standards to which science has sunk. It has become normal to be surprised by an observation, express doubt about the data, blame the observers, slowly let it sink in, bicker and argue for a while, construct an unsatisfactory model that sort-of, kind-of explains the surprising data but not really, call it natural, then pretend like that’s what we expected all along.

There has been another attempt to explain away the radial acceleration relation as being fine in ΛCDM. That’s good; I’m glad people are finally starting to address this issue. But lets be clear: this is a beginning, not a solution. Indeed, it seems more like a rush to create truth by assertion than an honest scientific investigation.

Sam: This looks strangely familiar. Frodo: That’s because we’ve been here before. We’re going in circles! Last year, Oman et al. published a paper entitled “The unexpected diversity of dwarf galaxy rotation curves”. This term, diversity, has gained some traction among the community of scientists who simulate the formation of galaxies.

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: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-2940 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“2940” permalink=“http://tritonstation.com/2016/11/12/xkcdd/astrophysics/” orig-file=“https://tritonstation.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/astrophysics.png” orig-size=“579,314” comments-opened=“1”