Disregard, for a second, that the APS will accept anything, but does this abstract seem obviously quacktacular to you? (compare it to the first link)

As someone who does not keep current with the study of dark matter, I can tell that there are still some obvious glaring problems here, but maybe to the casual glance.. it seems like it could be valid?

But...

This guy tried to get a poster in at the conference I'm currently at and was denied a spot after peer review of his abstract. Instead, he purchased space in the exhibition hall and set up his poster there. In effect, he's paying extra money to bypass peer review and get his poster into the conference, even though it's set up in a completely different area than everyone else's. I feel kind bad for the guy, since the legitimate exhibitors were all making jokes at his expense, and everyone who saw him there pieced together immediately why his poster wasn't in with the rest...

The gist of the poster is that you can demonstrate the existence of cold dark matter in space by looking at light traveling in the red shift direction of the cosmic microwave background versus light traveling in some other direction and infer the presence of a resistive medium (insert segue here) and that must be cold dark matter. If this sounds familiar and conjures up words like phlogiston or luminiferous aether, it's because this idea was proven false conclusively long long ago in one of the most famous paradigm shifts in physics. Essentially, this guy is a slightly more complicated and modern version of turtles all the way down.

Just to be safe, I brought Laura with me to see the poster. She's a postdoc at LANL studying dark matter via the detection of neutrinos. She knows the field, and immediately pronounced this guy's work complete crack-pottery.

Just for kicks, I had a look at the poster in depth. I was so blown away by how bad it was that I had to take pictures of it. Here's what I assume is a diagram of his apparatus:

click to embiggen

I love that he lists the Radio Shack part numbers for everything.

And just in case you were wondering, he did remember to separate the water tanks by "130cm in both channels to de-calibrate the AdS time metric tensors." Furthermore, "the critical points are dilation conformal anomalies causing the sidereal data to exist." Yes.

Confused? Here, this plot will clear things up for you.

OMGWTFBBQ

Maybe it's a joke? It's like some weird game of Physics Buzzword Bingo. Every time he says sidereal, you have to drink.