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Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

bigthink.com

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Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#161
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single variable being different for each galaxy isn't a problem per se. If a bunch of other factors work out with just that one adjustment, that's pretty good validation that that one adjustment is meaningful. If, on the other hand, your theory could be adjusted to allow for any possible combination of observations, that's when there's a problem. From what I've read, DM theories do a pretty good job of correlating…

> A single variable being different for each galaxy isn't a problem per se. If a bunch of other factors work out with just that one adjustment, that's pretty good validation that that one adjustment is meaningful. I agree, but isn't that basically what MOND does too? It made one small tweak to gravity, and all of a sudden we can successfully predict a range of galaxy properties with a pretty tight margin for all gala…

> It made one small tweak to gravity, and all of a sudden we can successfully predict a range of galaxy properties

MOND gets one or two properties of galaxies correct, at the cost of messing up huge numbers of other observed facts about the universe (such as the abundances of chemical elements or the CMB power spectrum).

Also, you should realize that MOND in itself is not actually a theory of nature. You can't just "hack" Newton's 2nd law, because that law is a consequence of other, more fundamental principles. If you want to modify gravity, you have to modify General Relativity. There have been many attempts to modify GR in order to create a MOND-like theory, but they tend to fail in various ways (again, by predicting things that are empirically false). So far, GR passes every empirical test of gravity physicists have come up with.

Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would make DM collapse in a black hole. I don't think that DM black holes are considered impossible, just not likely.

The key weakness in your comment's parent comment was, "occupy the exact same point". One might ask why shining a flashlight during broad daylight (or say while doing work around the international space station) doesn't produce black holes. Or why there aren't black holes in the first image at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_(optics) >. Particle DM is still quantum particles, with Compton and de Broglie wavelen…

Thanks, the comparison with light was illuminating (eh!).

I was going to say something about how we don't really know how gravity works at the infinitesimal distance level as we do not have a quantum gravity theory, but IANAP.

Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No cosmological theory tries to explain why each star is in its exact observed location. Nice strawman. > Note that this is not the case for Milgromian theories. So far, no one has managed to create a theory without dark matter that can achieve this. LCDM also fails at this (see Dwarf galaxy problem, for one example), so this is not a point in your favour. > It's just that dark matter is a very simple paradigm that…

> see Dwarf galaxy problem, for one example I assume you're referring to the "missing satellites problem." This problem is already essentially solved: 1. Newer, more sensitive surveys have detected more Milky Way satellite galaxies. 2. Reionization and supernova feedback quench star formation in small dark matter halos, meaning that the smallest dark matter halos never form galaxies. > See the review I linked. I thin…

> This problem is already essentially solved:

"Essentially solved" is at best a euphemism for "we speculate that this will solve it". Hardly conclusive.

> I think we've talked about this elsewhere on HN before, and I pointed out that the paper you're linking to gets a lot of things wrong and is published in an obscure journal (presumably because it wouldn't survive peer review at any of the major journals).

A random HN comment claiming that a paper "gets a lot of things wrong" is not more convincing than the published paper itself. If you have an actual published paper or other review that addresses those points, then please point that out.

Speculating as to why they published in an "obscure journal" can be explained by poor quality of the work, but it can also be explained by rampant disinterest in challenging orthodoxy, which also has a documented history of happening.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not agreeing with the authors that MOND should be favoured given the evidence, but I disagree with your apparent position that MOND should be disfavoured and that LCDM is largely unproblematic.

Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key weakness in your comment's parent comment was, "occupy the exact same point". One might ask why shining a flashlight during broad daylight (or say while doing work around the international space station) doesn't produce black holes. Or why there aren't black holes in the first image at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_(optics) >. Particle DM is still quantum particles, with Compton and de Broglie wavelen…

Thanks, the comparison with light was illuminating (eh!). I was going to say something about how we don't really know how gravity works at the infinitesimal distance level as we do not have a quantum gravity theory, but IANAP.

Not sure what you mean at "infinitesimal distance level".

With the caveat to follow, as one takes the wavelength of a photon towards zero (i.e., ultra high energy gammas), its contribution to the stress-energy tensor's expectation value at a point climbs. In turn the average radius of curvature around that point becomes smaller than the gamma's wavelength.

When we are in that regime measuring distances by wavenumber and measuring times by photon frequency gives useless results. Likewise, infrared photons with wavelengths comparable to the diameter of a black hole and finding themselves lurking around black holes, that is hard to understand too.

Now we introduce the foreshadowed clarification.

We can always find some ultraboosted observer who would (in its rest frame) measure that a photon emitted from your computer screen as an ultra high energy gamma ray. This doesn't mean your computer screen is creating small black holes. After all we can always find some other observer who sees a photon from your screen as having a wavelength of thousands of light-seconds.

So let's consider instead a photon scattering inelastically off a charged particle. The incoming photon momentum need not equal the outgoing photon momentum. Some of the momentum can be transferred to the charged particle ("recoil"), but some of the momentum can be absorbed into a composite charged particle's internal degrees of freedom. That might lead to, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photodisintegration>.

But as we take the incoming photon energy ever higher, and deposit more of it into the charged particle, we start growing the stress-energy tensor's expectation value in the region of the scattering as above. The radius of curvature shrinks, and in extremis may keep daughter products (low energy outgoing radiation ranging from the outgoing scattered photon to the results of photonuclear and photosubnuclear processes; we can also get pair production from a high-energy charged particle inverse-compton-scattering a photon to sufficient energy) from leaving the immediate region.

What happens then? Semiclassical gravity, which is quantum field theory for matter on a classical curved spacetime background, gives us confusing results because the excitations in the quantum fields don't localize like a classical theory, and our averaging procedure (to obtain the expectation value) gives us a smeared stress-energy that less and less resembles the quantum mechanical system (and consequently the generated curvature looks unphysical).

The radius of curvature and the Compton wavelengths of the particles in the strongly curved region are small, but not infinitesmial.

"Possible Connection Between Gravitation and Fundamental Length ", Mead 1964 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.135.B849>, which you can access by pasting a Swedish scy hob prefix in front, takes the priority in the development of this line of argument. He finds that the characteristic length scale is on the order of 10^-35 metres. (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units>).

But we can have two 10^-35 m gammas pass right through each other without engaging this argument. The gammas do indeed generate stress-energy, but as noted before one can always find observers who will see these gammas as infrared, and their sky won't be full of black holes in one direction and devoid of any photonuclear interactions in the other. (We can even have extreme accelerators ("Unruh observers") who count multiple gammas where non-accelerated observers see just one -- in principle acceleration can make the observer's particle count climb arbitrarily high, but that doesn't result in the observed system becoming heavy, much less a black hole).

The wavelength (and particle number) in some appropriate inertial frame of reference for the scattering detailed above is what we want when analysing this type of interaction. This is usually the "COM" frame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-of-momentum_frame#Speci...>, which can be calculated by arbitrary observers of our charged particle + photon (even ones who want to count more particles than an inertial observer, or redshift everything to very low energies).

tl;dr: What we're doing above is building a COM frame with a small spatial volume and high energy and asking what is the calculated curvature in that part of spacetime. That gets messy long before we have to bring in infinitesimals or start to worry about making a small black hole.

Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A single variable being different for each galaxy isn't a problem per se. If a bunch of other factors work out with just that one adjustment, that's pretty good validation that that one adjustment is meaningful. I agree, but isn't that basically what MOND does too? It made one small tweak to gravity, and all of a sudden we can successfully predict a range of galaxy properties with a pretty tight margin for all gala…

> It made one small tweak to gravity, and all of a sudden we can successfully predict a range of galaxy properties MOND gets one or two properties of galaxies correct, at the cost of messing up huge numbers of other observed facts about the universe (such as the abundances of chemical elements or the CMB power spectrum). Also, you should realize that MOND in itself is not actually a theory of nature. You can't just "…

> Also, you should realize that MOND in itself is not actually a theory of nature. You can't just "hack" Newton's 2nd law, because that law is a consequence of other, more fundamental principles.

That's not how science works. You absolutely can write a formula that matches observations without justifying it or deriving it from first principles, ie. "hacking" Newton's second law is totally fine if it works. If an argument from principles reaches different conclusions that don't match observations, then the argument is flawed or your understanding of the principles is wrong.

If such a hack is empirically successful for gravity, then it suggests there's likely some kind of underlying property missing from your model that yields this emergent order. For instance, superfluid dark matter models reproduced MOND at galactic scales from a dark matter model. That's the novel kind of thinking we need, not this stubborn protectionism.

> So far, GR passes every empirical test of gravity physicists have come up with.

Don't pretend there aren't huge gaping holes you could drive a dump truck through [1]. GR is well-tested and well-motivated at solar system scales, but there are many open problems at larger scales that ultimately stem from assuming GR continues to hold at those scales.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01808-7

Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't seem to quite understand the current cosmological models. You don't need special cases for every galaxy. No, he's correct that each galaxy does need tuning. Specifically, the amount of DM and it's specific distribution is tuned to match each observation, which is what the OP said. > but it is also true that anything that has to do with galaxy/star formation is immensely complicated as it involves a lot of…

> No, he's correct that each galaxy does need tuning. Specifically, the amount of DM and it's specific distribution is tuned to match each observation, which is what the OP said. Not true. The LCDM predicts the DM distribution with a typical DM profiles, and then the amount of baryons is heavily dependent on star formation, etc. Therefore each galaxy of the same luminosity will have somewhat different dark matter hal…

> Those are not tuning parameters at all.

Then explain how MOND is able to make predictions that don't need such considerations. This suggests either that dark matter is superfluous, or that dark matter has some underlying order that reproduces MOND in some limit, thus eliminating the tuning needed. This is the approach taken by some superfluid dark matter models, which at least is not ignoring the problem.

> Regarding the linked article, it an article written by proponents of MOND and is not objective

Right, because anti-MOND or dark matter reviews are totally objective?

> Just the fact that MOND still requires dark matter anyway to reproduce CMB is major problem for it

It's not at all a problem to say we need DM like sterile neutrinos, since DM alone is insufficient to adequately explain all observations anyway.

Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#167
post #61
post #27

The author is implying that other solutions like Modified Gravity are dead in the water, I don't think they are.

The interested reader might find Roscoe's work on MOND worth a browse: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Roscoe-3

Why did my comment get multiple downvotes, I can't work it out?

Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#168

Isn't there a modified MOND which fits all the observation data?

I don't believe so. If it did exist, it would be more complex than LCDM.

Some people like Sabine Hossenfelder disagree. They think MOND could be a better fit for observations than Dark Matter.

Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#169
post #114
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If DM interacts purely gravitationally If it's purely gravitational then that implies infinite density and infinite force for any matter that occupies the exact same space.

Also, if there's 5x as much dark matter in the universe why is our solar system so devoid of it? We should be able to detect the equivalent of dark matter suns or planets around us.

All of the below is according to theory, not claiming it to be true.

Because DM passes right through itself it doesn't clump like the stuff that made our planets do. Instead it remains spread out bound by gravity but not clumping. That makes it incredibly diffuse. But space is also quite big, so it can still contribute a lot of mass.

Re: Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It made one small tweak to gravity, and all of a sudden we can successfully predict a range of galaxy properties MOND gets one or two properties of galaxies correct, at the cost of messing up huge numbers of other observed facts about the universe (such as the abundances of chemical elements or the CMB power spectrum). Also, you should realize that MOND in itself is not actually a theory of nature. You can't just "…

> Also, you should realize that MOND in itself is not actually a theory of nature. You can't just "hack" Newton's 2nd law, because that law is a consequence of other, more fundamental principles. That's not how science works. You absolutely can write a formula that matches observations without justifying it or deriving it from first principles, ie. "hacking" Newton's second law is totally fine if it works. If an argu…

> You absolutely can write a formula that matches observations without justifying it or deriving it from first principles, ie. "hacking" Newton's second law is totally fine if it works.

Physics is an interconnected whole. You cannot simply hack whatever formula you want. Newton's 2nd law is a consequence of Relativity, in the low-velocity limit. You cannot hack Newton's 2nd law without changing Relativity, which means changing basically everything in physics, including extremely precisely measured quantities like the energy levels of the hydrogen atom.

That's why MOND itself isn't a theory of nature. You have to modify General Relativity to produce MOND-like effects. It's very difficult to do that without messing up other parts of the theory.

> Don't pretend there aren't huge gaping holes you could drive a dump truck through

Every precision test of gravity produces results that match GR to within experimental precision. No, these are not just tests within the Solar system. To give you one example, gravitational waves have now been verified to travel at light speed, which rules out large classes of modified GR theories.

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