A few weeks ago, I mentioned a paper by a colleague of mine, Mohamed Rameez, that generated some discussion. Since I wasn’t up for commenting on the paper’s scientific content, I thought it would be good to give Rameez a chance to explain it in his own words, in a guest post. Here’s what he has to say:

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In an earlier post, 4gravitons had contemplated the question of ‘when to trust the contrarians’, in the context of our about-to-be-published paper in which we argue that accounting for the effects of the bulk flow in the local Universe, there is no evidence for any isotropic cosmic acceleration, which would be required to claim some sort of ‘dark energy’.

In the following I would like to emphasize that this is a reasonable view, and not a contrarian one. To do so I will examine the bulk flow of the local Universe and the historical evolution of what appears to be somewhat dodgy supernova data. I will present a trivial solution (from data) to the claimed ‘Hubble tension’.  I will then discuss inhomogeneous cosmology, and the 2011 Nobel prize in Physics. I will proceed to make predictions that can be falsified with future data. I will conclude with some questions that should be frequently asked.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not necessarily shared by my collaborators. 

The bulk flow of the local Universe:

The largest anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background is the dipole, believed to be caused by our motion with respect to the ‘rest frame’ of the CMB with a velocity of ~369 km s^-1. Under this view, all matter in the local Universe appear to be flowing. At least out to ~300 Mpc, this flow continues to be directionally coherent, to within ~40 degrees of the CMB dipole, and the scale at which the average relative motion between matter and radiation converges to zero has so far not been found.

This is one of the most widely accepted results in modern cosmology, to the extent that SN1a data come pre ‘corrected’ for it.

Such a flow has covariant consequences under general relativity and this is what we set out to test.

Supernova data, directions in the sky and dodgyness:

Both Riess et al 1998 and Perlmutter et al 1999 used samples of supernovae down to redshifts of 0.01, in which almost all SNe at redshifts below 0.1 were in the direction of the flow.

Subsequently in Astier et al 2006, Kowalsky et al 2008, Amanullah et al 2010 and Suzuki et al 2011, it is reported that a process of outlier rejection was adopted in which data points >3 from the Hubble diagram were discarded. This was done using a highly questionable statistical method that involves adjusting an intrinsic dispersion term by hand until a of 1 is obtained to the assumed CDM model. The number of outliers rejected is however far in excess of 0.3% – which is the 3 expectation. As the sky coverage became less skewed, supernovae with redshift less than ~0.023 were excluded for being outside the Hubble flow. While the Hubble diagram so far had been inferred from heliocentric redshifts and magnitudes, with the introduction of SDSS supernovae that happened to be in the direction opposite to the flow, peculiar velocity ‘corrections’ were adopted in the JLA catalogue and supernovae down to extremely low redshifts were reintroduced. While the early claims of a cosmological constant were stated as ‘high redshift supernovae were found to be dimmer (15% in flux) than the low redshift supernovae (compared to what would be expected in a universe)’, it is worth noting that the peculiar velocity corrections change the redshifts and fluxes of low redshift supernovae by up to ~20 %.

When it was observed that even with this ‘corrected’ sample of 740 SNe, any evidence for isotropic acceleration using a principled Maximum Likelihood Estimator is less than 3 , it was claimed that by adding 12 additional parameters (to the 10 parameter model) to allow for redshift and sample dependence of the light curve fitting parameters, the evidence was greater than 4 .

As we discuss in Colin et al. 2019, these corrections also appear to be arbitrary, and betray an ignorance of the fundamentals of both basic statistical analysis and relativity. With the Pantheon compilation, heliocentric observables were no longer public and these peculiar velocity corrections initially extended far beyond the range of any known flow model of the Local Universe. When this bug was eventually fixed, both the heliocentric redshifts and magnitudes of the SDSS SNe that filled in the ‘redshift desert’ between low and high redshift SNe were found to be alarmingly discrepant. The authors have so far not offered any clarification of these discrepancies.

Thus it seems to me that the latest generation of ‘publicly available’ supernova data are not aiding either open science or progress in cosmology.

A trivial solution to the ‘Hubble tension’?

The apparent tension between the Hubble parameter as inferred from the Cosmic Microwave Background and low redshift tracers has been widely discussed, and recent studies suggest that redshift errors as low as 0.0001 can have a significant impact. Redshift discrepancies as big as 0.1 have been reported. The shifts reported between JLA and Pantheon appear to be sufficient to lower the Hubble parameter from ~73 km s^-1 Mpc^-1 to ~68 km s^-1 Mpc^-1.

On General Relativity, cosmology, metric expansion and inhomogeneities:

In the maximally symmetric Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker solution to general relativity, there is only one meaningful global notion of distance and it expands at the same rate everywhere. However, the late time Universe has structure on all scales, and one may only hope for statistical (not exact) homogeneity. The Universe is expected to be lumpy. A background FLRW metric is not expected to exist and quantities analogous to the Hubble and deceleration parameters will vary across the sky.  Peculiar velocities may be more precisely thought of as variations in the expansion rate of the Universe. At what rate does a real Universe with structure expand? The problems of defining a meaningful average notion of volume, its dynamical evolution, and connecting it to observations are all conceptually open.

On the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics:

The Fitting Problem in cosmology was written in 1987. In the context of this work and the significant theoretical difficulties involved in inferring fundamental physics from the real Universe, any claims of having measured a cosmological constant from directionally skewed, sparse samples of intrinsically scattered observations should have been taken with a grain of salt.  By honouring this claim with a Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy may have induced runaway prestige bias in favour of some of the least principled analyses in science, strengthening the confirmation bias that seems prevalent in cosmology.

This has resulted in the generation of a large body of misleading literature, while normalizing the practice of ‘massaging’ scientific data. In her recent video about gravitational waves, Sabine Hossenfelder says “We should not hand out Nobel Prizes if we don’t know how the predictions were fitted to the data”. What about when the data was fitted (in 1998-1999) using a method that has been discredited in 1989 to a toy model that has been cautioned against in 1987, leading to a ‘discovery’ of profound significance to fundamental physics?

A prediction with future cosmological data:

With the advent of high statistics cosmological data in the future, such as from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, I predict that the Hubble and deceleration parameters inferred from supernovae in hemispheres towards and away from the CMB dipole will be found to be different in a statistically significant (>5 ) way. Depending upon the criterion for selection and blind analyses of data that can be agreed upon, I would be willing to bet a substantial amount of money on this prediction.

Concluding : on the amusing sociology of ‘Dark Energy’ and manufactured concordance:

Of the two authors of the well-known cosmology textbook ‘The Early Universe’, Edward Kolb writes these interesting papers questioning dark energy while Michael Turner is credited with coining the term ‘Dark Energy’.  Reasonable scientific perspectives have to be presented as ‘Dark Energy without dark energy’. Papers questioning the need to invoke such a mysterious content that makes up ‘68% of the Universe’ are quickly targeted by inane articles by non-experts or perhaps well-meant but still misleading YouTube videos. Much of this is nothing more than a spectacle.

In summary, while the theoretical debate about whether what has been observed as Dark Energy is the effect of inhomogeneities is ongoing, observers appear to have been actively using the most inhomogeneous feature of the local Universe through opaque corrections to data, to continue claiming that this ‘dark energy’ exists.

It is heartening to see that recent works lean toward a breaking of this manufactured concordance and speak of a crisis for cosmology.

Questions that should be frequently asked:

Q. Is there a Hubble frame in the late time Universe?

A. The Hubble frame is a property of the FLRW exact solution, and in the late time Universe in which galaxies and clusters have peculiar motions with respect to each other, an equivalent notion does not exist. While popular inference treats the frame in which the CMB dipole vanishes as the Hubble frame, the scale at which the bulk flow of the local Universe converges to that frame has never been found. We are tilted observers.

Q. I am about to perform blinded analyses on new cosmological data. Should I correct all my redshifts towards the CMB rest frame?

A. No. Correcting all your redshifts towards a frame that has never been found is a good way to end up with ‘dark energy’. It is worth noting that while the CMB dipole has been known since 1994, supernova data have been corrected towards the CMB rest frame only after 2010, for what appear to be independent reasons.

Q. Can I combine new data with existing Supernova data?

A. No. The current generation of publicly available supernova data suffer from the natural biases that are to be expected when data are compiled incrementally through a human mediated process. It would be better to start fresh with a new sample.

Q. Is ‘dark energy’ fundamental or new physics?

A. Given that general relativity is a 100+ year old theory and significant difficulties exist in describing the late time Universe with it, it is unnecessary to invoke new fundamental physics when confronting any apparent acceleration of the real Universe. All signs suggest that what has been ascribed to dark energy are the result of a community that is hell bent on repeating what Einstein supposedly called his greatest mistake.

Digging deeper:

The inquisitive reader may explore the resources on inhomogeneous cosmology, as well as the works of George Ellis, Thomas Buchert and David Wiltshire.