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All is not as it seems. Contrary to what you might have read on nearly every news website, Oxford scientists have not just solved the dark matter mystery.

Oxford astrophysicist Jamie Farnes published an academic paper in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics plus an article detailing his idea that a “dark fluid” with negative mass might explain what makes up our universe. His theory caused a Twitter storm in the astrophysics community. But the problem is not so much the science in Farnes’ paper, although it’s being questioned by some astrophysicists. Rather, the fundamental issue is how we – the media and the scientists – communicate science to the public.


In this case, many reporters based their – frankly misleading – coverage on a press release that was greatly overhyped. When this happens, scientists are quick to point the finger at the media. But actually, many scientists should blame themselves just as much.

First, the science. There is a lot we don’t know about the universe. For instance, there just seems to be not enough visible matter around to explain the way galaxies rotate. When scientists add up all the mass in stars in a galaxy they can see with their telescopes, it ends up to be much less than the mass they calculate using Newton's laws. To account for the discrepancy, they have to assume there is also some weird matter out there that we can't see (although we can observe its gravitational effects, for instance the way it distorts the image of a faraway galaxy akin to a giant lens) – the notorious dark matter.

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But so far – despite our best efforts and numerous experiments – we have not been able to get even a glimpse of what dark matter might be. Also, dark matter alone still doesn’t explain the universe fully. The universe is expanding, and this expansion is accelerating. To explain this accelerated expansion, scientists have to resort to an even more enigmatic substance: dark energy. Just like dark matter, it hasn’t been observed and we have no idea what it might be. But the general scientific consensus is that it must be there.

So how does our universe fit together? Researchers think that the balance is about 72 per cent dark energy, 23 per cent dark matter and only five per cent atomic matter (stuff like you, your neighbour’s cat, the Earth, the stars, interstellar dust and gas).


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Granted, that’s two very large unknowns. No wonder many researchers have been plugging away to explain our universe without resorting to dark matter and/or dark energy. Enter alternative theories of gravity, where scientists tweak certain parameters to make it work.

However, more often than not, not everything in these alternative theories quite adds up, and as we constantly find out more about the universe, whenever there is some new observational evidence, many of these alternative gravity theories die a quick death. A number of them got knocked out with one mighty punch after the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and its Italy-based counterpart Virgo detected a merger of two neutron stars last year.

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Farnes’ new theory is another alternative gravity theory. He modifies the equations of the most widely accepted theory of gravity - Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Most researchers use them, as well as accepting the existence of dark matter and dark energy, to explain the way the universe works. Farnes says that instead there could be a dark fluid with negative mass. His paper makes a number of assumptions, such as: a universe with different expansion rates in different directions, the existence of negative masses, and the notion that something can spontaneously self-create.


Farnes does away with dark matter and dark energy and replaces them with a negative mass fluid that permeates the universe. Not only does it modify Einstein's theory of gravity, “it also postulates this new type of exotic matter, and postulates that it spontaneously self-creates,” says Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science communicator.

On Twitter, astrophysicists piled in on Farnes, some dismissing his ideas, as he struggled to fend off his critics. But a number were supportive, saying that the scientific community had to be open to new theories.

But his theory isn’t the issue. It’s how Oxford University and Farnes himself communicated it to the wider public. The headline of the press release announcing the paper made a very bold statement: “Bringing balance to the universe: New theory could explain missing 95 percent of the cosmos”. It went on to confidently state that now we might not need dark matter at all. Little wonder that many journalists reported this science theory as science fact. They didn’t even notice that Farnes’ theory wasn’t that new. It had been published more than a year ago, on a science “pre-print” server called Arxiv.

And while it's easy to say that the media misinterpreted the original paper (with Farnes himself saying so on Twitter), it’s not just the journalists who are to blame for shoddy scientific reporting. Rather, all-too-often, universities and the scientists themselves overhype their findings in press releases. Normally, the scientists sign these press releases off before the press office sends them out.

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The debate about the quality of science journalism is not new. Neither are accusations that scientists are over-egging the pudding, Will Kinney, a cosmologist at the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics at Stockholm University, writes on Twitter. He feels for Farnes: “if this is @Astro_Jamie's first shot at doing a press release, cut the guy a little slack. We all fuck up once in a while. The important thing is you learn from it.”

True, but the sensationalist press release was no accident. Farnes also wrote an article for The Conversation – a news outlet publishing stories written by scientists. And here Farnes yet again oversells his theory by a wide margin. “Yeah if @Astro_Jamie had anything to do with the absurd text of that press release, that's totally on him…,” admits Kinney.

“The evidence is very much that he did,” argues Richard Easther, an astrophysicist at Auckland University. What he means by the evidence is that he was surprised when he realised that the piece in The Conversation had been written by the scientist himself, “and not a journo”.

Farnes seems undeterred though. He did not reply to a request for comment for this story, but he wrote on Twitter: “While I understand it is tempting to attack new ideas, this makes academia a hostile atmosphere with no diversity of thought,” he tweeted. “This is part of the problem with the scientific working environment & conditions we all face as a whole. Good science requires impersonal evidence alone.”

Farnes has a point, but what good science also needs is good communication that’s neither hyped nor misleading. And if questions arise, scientists have to make themselves available to the media. All too often they neither answer calls or emails, but then protest loudly when journalists are getting their facts wrong.

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That’s how science and the scientific process get a bad name. “We can’t control how people perceive and write about our work, but we don’t need to go out of our way to feed the beast... It is mostly bs that we are just passive victims when journalists overhype our work,” says Easther. So don’t just blame lazy messengers. Yes, journalists should try harder - but scientists have to accept responsibility too.

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