Subir Sarkar on Dark Energy

Sabine Hossenfelder interviews Dr. Subir Sarkar of Oxford.

Summary of the Dr. Sarkar interview: His team has identified serious errors in the data science that found evidence for cosmic acceleration. Most of the interview is spent going through the various errors in data catalogues and statistical methods. Upon re-analysis, his team finds not evidence for acceleration, but instead a cosmic flow of spacetime in the same direction as the CMB dipole. Our galaxy is moving in the same direction as the dipole but 4x faster. Sarkar gives credit to Singer who found this prior but was discounted. He then moves on to a discussion of the flaws in the concordance model (CMB+SNe+BAO). Bottom line he says “Evidence for isotropic acceleration is non-existent, and it is this that has had a major impact not just on cosmology but also fundamental physics.” So essentially he is calling the concept of dark energy into question. He then goes on to discuss how data science errors are problematic in the calculations of the Hubble values discrepancy. Some supernovas with different redshifts in different catalogues and other problems.

Here are some articles and papers regarding Dr. Sarkar’s findings:

Dr. Sarkar also talks a lot about interpretations, or what I call narrative, and how the field gets locked into certain interpretations. Those interpretations or stories then take on a life of their own and are hard to change when there is new evidence or in this case errors in the data science. It is fascinating how physics and cosmology build up cognitive models or understanding based on stories which are not science themselves, but which are derived from the science. Dark energy, dark matter, one time inflationary big bang, expansion, acceleration of expansion, these are all various stories abstracted from the observations. And some stories are based on other stories, like a story arc of a fiction. It gets very difficult to unweave the tangled tale.

NPQG teaches that the universe is in a steady state configuration with spacetime æther generated intermittently by galaxy-local processes. In particular production of structures destined to become aether is high when AGN SMBH jet Planck plasma. Thus galaxies are expanding in to each other, rather than the ΛCDM narrative of the universe expanding as a whole. It turns out that the NPQG narrative of galaxies expanding into each other is more logical and parsimonious and the effect on a photon is similar. There is no cosmic acceleration outward of the universe in general. Instead, each galaxy, and each cluster of galaxies, and so on are part of a grand recycling loop where galaxies generate photons and neutrinos that eventually redshift to the degree they become massy and drop drastically in speed. This is new spacetime aether. Remember the cosmological constant is vacuum energy and Einstein had great difficulty with the concept of an expanding universe. The trick is to realize that galaxies essentially outgas aether, which loses energy to redshift and expands because that is what all Noether engines do up to a point. So galaxies expand in to one another, but not outward as whole to the degree that distant galaxies are all moving at light speed away from an observer. Dr. Sarkar is on track when he says there may be flows of galaxies and clusters, but that is quite a different thing than expansion and flows are likely largely driven by extremely small gradients in aether energy which causes gravity.

J Mark Morris : San Diego : California

p.s. Here is another more recent video on the subject.