Farewell Perfect Cosmological Principle?

In article ,
Robert L. Oldershaw wrote:
Bottom line: How empirical evidence, and the lack thereof, is judged
appears to depend on the answer that is expected on the basis of
prevailing theoretical bias. No surprise there.

Nor should there be. 'Theoretical bias' is a pejorative way of saying
that we interpret individual results in the framework that
successfully incorporates other observations. This is certainly likely
to be more productive than ignoring all other observations and
developing a novel ad hoc explanation for every individual phenomenon
(the standard approach of the internet crackpot). Of course, sometimes
the framework (paradigm) is simply wrong, but new paradigms are
successful only when they can incorporate the old observations as well
as the new ones. In the specific case of dark matter, there is no
direct evidence that dark matter is particles, but particle physics is
one of the great intellectual successes of the last century and it
makes a lot of sense to use the resources and techniques that it makes
available, *in parallel with* other observational tests. Most working
astrophysicists are probably pretty agnostic about the expected outcome.

Martin
--
Martin Hardcastle
School of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Please replace the xxx.xxx.xxx in the header with herts.ac.uk to mail me