Engineering student cracks major riddle of the universe

If you believe this, you probably thought the world would end last Saturday

As seems inevitable in articles penned by Mr. Page about subjects of which he is ill-informed, it is not true that "[b]offins know from observing the universe that it must have a certain amount of mass...." Some boffins conjecture (quite different from "know") that a hitherto unknown kind of mass exists and is distributed such that seeming anomalies in galactic rotatations can be explained. Because this conjectured mass is undetectable, it is described as "dark." Some of these same boffins conjecture that "dark matter" is made up of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), particles which have never been detected, let alone described, in any experiment to date. (To physicists, "massive" means a particle has some mass, unlike photons, which are thought to have no mass.)

Mr. Page fails to note that other, well-respected boffins have conjectured that the seemingly anomalous observations can be explained theoretically, without having to concoct new forms of undetectable matter. The two most popular theoretical conjectures at the moment are MOND (modified newtonian dynamics) and (TeVeS) tensor-vector-scalar gravity.A number of other theoretical conjectures have also been advanced, most of which don't require an assumption that the universe must contain more mass than is observable.

Mr. Page further fails to note that the vast majority of the allegedly missing mass is called "dark energy," currently conjectured to represent approximately 75% of the total mass of the Universe. (Physicists regard mass and energy as interchangeable, so much so that the mass of particles in accelerators is measured in "electron-volts.") The most popular current speculation is that 5% of the Universe's mass is observable matter, 20% is "dark matter," and 75% is "dark energy."

Finally, Mr. Page seems unaware of the WiggleZ project, which just last week announced results whose implications are strikingly different than those reported in this article. The project is a group of researchers at NASA and the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, which spent five years using a U.S. satellite and a large Australian telescope to track the movements of 200,000 galaxies. The group's study asserts (conclusively, in their minds) that "dark energy" controls the movement of celestial bodies.

Why has everyone of note...

..got a double-barrel name? If you haven't - or aren't called 'Quentin', Crispin, Rudyard, Damien or anything similarly 'different', you simply won't get anywhere*.

Two double-barrels in the same team. I ask you!

* Onslow is the exception that proves the rule.

Not Bad

"She has managed to get a refereed publication accepted by one of the highest ranking astronomy journals in the world as a result of her endeavours. I cannot underscore enough what a terrific achievement this is,"

Not bad for an Engineering Student.

It is 2011....

Where is my flying car?

The most exceptional part of all this

is that she was given full credit on the paper. Sad but true. So pleased to see that credit was volunteered where it was deserved.

It's always in the last place you look

that is all.