Check Your Sources on Dark Matter

Dr. George O. Abell

When I went to university a very long time ago, the first thing that got drilled into my head was to check my sources, to check all sources of everybody, and to check and double-check any data involved, whether it came from me or from others. So what I don’t get now is how prestigious scientists are staking their scientific reputation on material they haven’t even read. And it is obvious that they haven’t even read material to which they refer since anyone with any scientific acumen would quickly discern that both Fritz Zwicky, regarding the Coma Cluster, and Jan Oort, regarding galaxies flying apart, which he did not state but actually stated the opposite, are being misquoted and there is no basis for the existence of dark matter in their works.

When checking sources, such as Zwicky and Oort, it is vitally important to consider the age and beliefs of the time in which this research was being done. Galaxies themselves were not accepted as a cosmological entity until 1922 as a result of “The Great Debate”. This was a debate over whether or not galaxies existed within or outside what we now call the Milky Way Galaxy. The debate concluded that galaxies exist outside of the Milky Way. So the works of Oort in 1927 and of Zwicky in 1933 are very soon after the acknowledgement of extra-galactic bodies which we now call galaxies.

Dr. Fred Hoyle

At that time, material in the universe was categorized as either luminous material like stars and non-luminous material like interstellar dust and gas. And again, interstellar dust and gas were studied and examined by Fred Hoyle. Before Hoyle’s work, which was about 10 years or so after Zwicky’s 1933 paper, determined that these dark clouds observed in our galaxy are the remnants of supernova explosions and it was Hoyle who determined that stars are luminous as a result of thermonuclear reactions in their cores. There is a great deal of evidence to support Hoyle’s work.

Returning now to the papers of Zwicky and Oort, they were writing at a time before they could have known about thermonuclear reactions and interstellar dust and gas. So stuff, in the eyes or presentations of astronomers at that time was either luminous material or non-luminous material. Stuff was either bright or dark. When Oort mentions that there is 3 times more non-luminous materal in our galaxy than there are stars, he meant that non-luminous material, or interstellar dust and gas, was dark matter. In other words, matter that was dark, or non-luminous. He did not mean or say that there existed some undefined and unknown entity that was keeping the galaxy together and beyond the ken of known physics. Oort was saying that dark matter is just interstellar dust and gas. And this is not at odds with modern scientific thought. In this way Oort is being misrepresented and his work is being manipulated to have people believe there is some, I will term it, “magical” substance which is beyond the understanding of physics and science in general.

The same holds true for Zwicky.

Zwicky used entirely wrong assumptions in examining the Coma Cluster. For example the cluster is much farther away than he assumed because there was an error at that time in measuring distances to galaxies that was later corrected. Also, since it was early in the study of galaxies, they were assumed to consist of only a billions stars, which is a statement from Zwicky in his paper as an assumption. So Zwicky’s estimate of the mass of a galaxy based on the number of stars and interstellar dust and gas is out by two orders of magnitude or a factor of at least 100. Dr. George Abell pf UCLA clarified a lot of guess work as a result of his measurement of the mass of the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. It is now pretty well accepted that galaxies have a mass of about 100 billion solar masses, including non-luminous material. At that time, it looks like Zwicky was talking about material he could not see rather than some magic substance beyond the grasp of physics or science. And I use terms like magical substance to describe the present pursuit of dark matter because dark matter has never been formally or scientifically defined; that is in a way that is self-consistent, non-circular and without using the words “is like”.

So Zwicky was out by a few orders of magnitude in the size and mass of the Coma Cluster. But as one of my university professors used to say, “What’s a couple of orders of magnitude between friends?” I don’t think Zwicky was purposely creating a hoax because he based his calculations on the knowledge of his day. I do, however, have no patience for people who are basing their claims on material they have never read and have never check out.

It is the way of science that our knowledge of the universe keeps growing and changing. If we look at the progress made in the past we find none of this progress has been made without a firm basis on mathematical derivation and direct observation and all are free to redo and check carefully those mathematical derivations to ensure they are correct or that there is not a typographical error in any of this past work. Ad we are all free to observe the workings of the universe to determine if data has been faked. Using known present values for things like the mass of galaxies, the distance to galaxies and the amount of interstellar dust and gas in galaxies, we can know for a certainty that both Zwicky and Oort have proved that there is no such thing as “dark matter” as defined by the visibly present scientific community.