Did we make a mistake? Dark matter alternative now looks like statistical error

This is a rare case in which I talk about some of my own work. It’s about the biggest current controversy in astrophysics, does dark matter exist or do we instead need to change the law of gravity. If you’ve followed me for some while, then you’ll know that my opinion on this has switched back and forth a few times. In this most recent iteration, it’s flipped back to it’s probably dark matter. Then again… it’s complicated. Let’s have a look.

Note that this paper has not yet been peer reviewed.

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#science #sciencenews #physics

[shadeblackwolf]

It is entirely possible to be both. We may not have gravity entirely right as well as there being more mass. The two may even be related.

[JonathanBrown]

Thanks! And thanks for keeping on changing your mind! It makes you trustworthy..

[timgabby]

If a near solution is found by declaring one alternative less wrong than another, it invites speculation that the real answer is to be found in a 3rd as yet unexamined hypothesis.

[XX-esvg]

This is why I watch all of your videos. I truly admire how you're basically saying "I did research, I found new data, it conflicted with my previously held beliefs, so now I'm changing my beliefs to match the new data". I honestly wish more people, both in and outside of STEM fields, would do this. Just admit you've changed your mind, it is not a sign of weakness but one of strength of character.

[preppen]

It could be that the aliens didn't allocate enough computing power to create a coherent simulation. I call it "The cheap alien simulation theory"

[douglaswatt]

This reminds me so much of my own field in which premature certainty about the basis for common clinical entities like depression and the various neurodegenerative disorders has derailed or at least warped and distorted the science. Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder Concepts and that's a fancy way of saying that we have a fundamental ignorance about what's going on. The more we rush to fill that ignorance with ideas that are presented as nearly proven when in fact nothing of the case has been shown the more rabbit holes we jump down. And then have to back out of with some degree of embarrassment. As long as any kind of shoot from the hip scientific theory that has some mathematical support is seen as a completely viable model for filling the void of our ignorance, I think the more mistakes we're going to make. I think it's just better to say we don't know. Instead I think we should gather more observations, and see if we can avoid the temptation to invent new physics from the jump.

[Name-otxw]

Back in Douglas Adams' day they called the concept similar to what we now know as dark matter "missing matter". Douglas Adams postulates that this is mostly composed of discarded packing peanuts.

He also has a proposal for solving the energy crisis; invent time travel and steal energy from the past.

[Unmannedair]

I'm of the opinion that both mond and dark matter are wrong. I see dark matter as equivalent to fudging the data till it works. Mond is more legit in terms of an attempt to explain things, but i believe it's also incorrect. The universe doesn't make exceptions. If it looks like mass is there, but it isn't, then that means that you're looking for the wrong thing in the wrong spot. This is exactly the opposite of "look at the center of gravity's pull and the star you will find". I believe this phenomenon is something that epr predicts. And I believe it's something somewhat akin to a gravitational molecule of stars. In certain situations... attractive forces and repulsive forces are indistinguishable.

[cherubinth]

Why don't we just claim demons do pull at the galaxy in just the right way to get this results?

[jonas]

My knowledge about physics doesn't go too deep so I'm sorry if my question/ take is a bit naive but couldn't you test mond in smaller scales? If it is a "addition" to newtonian physics and only works on small forces thereby acallerations whats about the atomic size? Smaller masses therefore smaller accaleration, shouldn't mond work here too? Or couldn't it because classical physics break down at this scale and qft takes over?

[kylebowles]

It always weirded me out how constant the stars velocity gets, you'd need a very specific distribution of mass to achieve that

[fullyawakened]

It doesn't even make sense to posit that gravity is working the same in a galaxy as it does in a solar system. The galaxy isn't spinning in place held together by the central gravity of Sag A* like the sun holds the planets in place. Gravity is far too weak for that. Gravity just keeps all the immediately neighboring stars and matter bound to each other. The stuff on the outside is completely unaffected by the stuff at the core. It is just bound to its neighbor and dragged along by its neighbor, which in space is inhibited by nothing. When we see galaxies spinning very fast they are throwing stars out left and right creating huge star halos around them. They are not staying in the galaxy and moving at impossible speeds, they eject. So I don't know where that idea comes from in the first place. It's also a little goofy to think we have the spin rate of a galaxy pinned down with any kind of precision. Exactly how many times have we watched a galaxy rotate to figure out it's speed? Zero. We haven't even calculated the tiniest fraction of a spin of a galaxy because galaxies take hundreds of thousands or millions of years to spin and we've only observed about 50 years of that.

[gbcb]

Just give CERN €17bn to get the answer

[Anon]

when we don't understand something, we need more fudge factors to fit our model to the observations - so at this stage I am unsurprised that the model with 2 fudge factors appear to fit better than the model with just one

[ScienceShorts]

It might be true; it might not be.
My issue is that the vitriol people who question it have been met with over the past few decades:
"oh, you science denier!"
I'm sick of the cult of science!

[kostuek]

I could imagine there is more ways to modify gravity than what was proposed in 1983. mond only points out that we need to modify something, but the mond itself is probably not the right modification anyway. just like tweaking newton laws to give better predictions for mercury precession wouldn't give you the general relativity

[teamalpha]

358 years since it's discovery and 2 generational genius working on it yet we haven't got gravity quite right yet, tells us the gravity of the problems

[TheCD]

Just here to show my admiration. I am a biologist but an avid reader of astrophysics. I just read the preprint yesterday and gosh this kind of work needs to be published in Nature (/Nature Astronomy) or Science, I feel this needs a broader readership. Although I understand the extra work on packaging the figure panels and plots to meet the "aesthetics" of those venues, I say the work deserves it.
All that aside, I'm curious about future research to enhance the reliability of rotational curve data in the context of DM and MOND comparisons?

[BigZebraCom]

@04:45 I was going to peer-review this paper...but then I realized I'm not a peer. I don't know beans about the topic and don't have a relevant degree.

[quiteenough]

Sergey Siparov tried to explain rotation curves and suggested in his paper "Metric Dynamics" (aka "Anisotropic Geometrodynamics") that Universe might be anisotropic. Sadly, he passed away in 2021 :(