I was bored at the Marseille astrophysics conference
(June 2001)
Searching desperately for dark matter.
The scientists are very pleased with the observations made in the X-ray range using the XMM and Chandra telescopes. Below is an artist's impression of the XMM X-ray telescope:
I refer here to an already old article, from January 2001, published in the magazine Ciel et Espace, written by Azar Khalatbari. Here are some excerpts:
Page 25:
"Between galaxy clusters, matter concentrates to form long, filamentary structures. All this beautiful network remains connected, at each scale, by the force of gravity. For a long time, cosmologists have wondered how matter's organization evolved to produce these filaments, and whether these currently visible structures had existed in the past."
I wonder the same, because this structure—certainly at the level of observations—exists only in Mr. Khalatbari’s imagination. A few lines later, he writes:
"Without observations of the early universe, cosmologists have relied on their dark matter (...) and their processors to develop numerical simulations. Result: if, in distant times, matter formed tiny clumps (in astronomical jargon, if the universe experienced density fluctuations), these primordial fluctuations could only have amplified over time, under gravity’s influence. The result is the current picture."
What picture is he talking about, this good fellow? The article remains silent on this point. In June 2001, I attended an international conference on astrophysics and astronomy held in Marseille. The general theme was "Where is the matter?" (Where is matter?). At such gatherings, people are entrusted with preparing "surveys" or "reviews of questions" on various topics. I recall that an Italian, whose name I’ve forgotten, was assigned to summarize what was known about the VLS, the "very large structure," the large-scale structure of the universe. Well, nowadays people have ever more powerful telescopes—eight-meter diameters are practically standard. Add the benefits of adaptive optics, space astronomy, and all the rest. In short, observations are becoming increasingly precise. The Italian therefore showed us slices of the cosmos extending to distances of several hundred million light-years. Frankly, my memory hasn’t failed me yet. I saw countless images showing that this large-scale, bubble-like structure of the cosmos, discovered in the early 1970s, seemed definitively confirmed. No matter which direction you looked, at whatever angle, however you sliced the universe into sections, you always found the same "jointed bubbles" structure. Then the chairman presented results from arachnoid simulations:
I remained, I admit, naively perplexed. When a man raised a microphone asking if anyone had a question for the speaker, I raised my hand. I was handed the mic, and before an audience of some two hundred participants from various countries, I asked whether the fact that these computer simulations and the beautiful images of the lacunar cosmos we’d just seen—only a quarter of an hour earlier—seemed to have no obvious connection with observations, didn’t pose a problem.
There was then twenty to thirty seconds of silence. A total, thick, knife-cut silence. I looked around, strained to listen: nothing. After this half-minute of complete silence, I had no choice but to sit down. Had I been "off-topic"? Probably. Perhaps the era when "theoretical results" were expected to match observations is now over.
All this recalls Galileo’s misfortunes. When he held his famous telescope in hand, he discovered that some stars were actually binary systems. Since his contemporaries were skeptical, he invited them to look through his instrument’s eyepiece, which they did. Do you believe that changed anything? Not at all. These people told him it was only because the stars appeared double in his device—directly forged by the devil—that they could be so. It seems to be the same situation in astronomy today. You may know that for thirty years, no one has ever managed to explain this lacunar structure of the cosmos. Zel'dovich’s "crêpe theory" didn’t last long. In fact, every time researchers tried to create "plates" of matter, the heating dissipated these structures too quickly. Oh, by the way, I hadn’t told you with what our theoretical simulators had built their filamentary structure. With CDM (cold dark matter, or "cold dark matter"). In fact, earlier I didn’t tell you the whole story. I don’t know why I omitted this part. To be honest, just as the Italian was about to give his talk, I had positioned myself in the second row, right next to the overhead projector. After asking about the pronounced gap seemingly separating "theory" and "observations," and receiving twenty good seconds of silence, I added:
"In 1993, this lacunar structure was obtained by simulation, starting from a twin-model."
Then I placed the following transparency on the projector.
Everyone could therefore see this image, and also notice that it bore a striking resemblance to the previously shown images referring to observations. But no one said a word, and I was left standing like an idiot beside the projector. Everyone clearly expected me to remove this unplanned slide and sit down. That’s what I eventually did. Complete failure...
This image was published in 1995 in Astrophysics and Space Science and was also part of my presentation at this conference (I’d only been granted a "poster," which no one looked at). Incidentally, it was also reproduced in my book On We Lost Half the Universe (Albin Michel, 1997; Hachette, 2000, paperback).
Coming to this conference (the first I’d attended in 17 years, since 1983, when I stopped receiving a single franc from CNRS for mission credits or any credits at all), I wondered if there would be any dialogue. My wife had told me, "Just make photocopies of your paper and leave them on the tables before Tuesday’s session begins." I did. I made 70 photocopies of the "long version" of my paper (64 pages), and before Tuesday’s first session at 9 a.m., I placed all these copies on the tables. Everything was removed. I found no copies in the conference waste bins, nor scattered under a table. At the end of this document were my contact details, my email.
Six months later: nothing. Total silence. Not even a single question, not the faintest curiosity...
It’s like a science fiction story: a scientist suddenly becomes invisible, unaware of it, and slips into a parallel universe. Yet during this conference, I was treated very well, damn it.