LAUSR

Deconstructing Cosmology touches a bit on this social issue, giving examples of the hypes created by false claims that are of little scientific values, but not that of social apparently as many believe that the dark matter has been detected! This notion is by all means not true but media – mostly digital – publicity has somewhat helped perpetuate and disseminate what can be considered as fake news to the wider, unsuspecting audience. And this double-edged sword also helps propagate iconoclastic views that lead to doubt and pessimism about scientific achievements. Aside aside, there is more to this book. It is a light but advanced reading addressing the discrepancies in the standard Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmological paradigm that supports dark matter (duh, obviously) and compares it to an alternative outlook. The dark matter theory was first proposed by Zwicky back in 1933 to explain the large velocity dispersion in Coma Cluster [1].2 Today, it is taken for granted that the rotational curves of spiral galaxies can be explained by non-luminous matter. Indirectly, this proves the dark matter exists. However, without conjuring matter of the invisible kind, in his modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), Milgrom instead proposed that rotational curves can also be explained by introducing a new acceleration constant a0 [2]. ΛCDM has been confirmed by observations of cosmic microwave background anisotropies and supernova cosmology. On the one hand, it works really well at scales larger than the galaxies. On another, it fails at precisely galaxy scale. As for MOND, it just the opposite but unlike ΛCDM, MOND is not really accepted since it still fails to deal with the missing mass problem in clusters of galaxies. It looks like the ideas complement each other but why is it many a cosmologist disregards MOND entirely? Again, as argued here, social factor plays a role. Scientists are being selective, opting to boost the dark matter argument (for employment purpose?) rather than disputing it. Some even think it sacrilegious to contradict Newton, never mind that Einstein has already done it; but, of course, he is Einstein, so he is allowed. As mentioned above, this is an advanced book. Thus, although it is of general interest, it gears towards those with some background in cosmology and astrophysics. There is a little bit of philosophy thrown in but overall the discussions are all physics sans the mathematics. That said it is assumed that the readers will know already some if not all the materials and might consider it a leisure reading. Others will need to make a bit of an effort.