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Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

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Re: Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean sure nature has no obligation to not have a unfalsifable particle, but you wind up in weird places, like, there exists a distribution of dark matter that explains the poltergeist that knocked over your coffee cup last week.

If there would be a distribution of dark matter that explains the poltergeist, we could measure that distribution of dark matter. We can measure the mass distribution on astronomical scales. We "see" the dark matter. Just not with light.

We don't measure dark matter, we measure some anomaly and then we say "it must've been dark matter".

It's not crazy different from saying the same about that poltergeist.

Re: Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed. Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.

> Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Historically, science has predicted lots of true things about the universe that could not be observed at the time.

> Historically, science has predicted lots of true things about the universe that could not be observed at the time.

Just some examples I could think of:

The neutrino[1], predicted in 1930 due to missing mass in beta decays, discovered in 1956.

Gravitational waves[2], predicted by Einstein in 1916, indirectly detected via pulsars in 1974 and directly by LIGO in 2015.

Higgs boson[3], predicted in 1964 to solve the problem of the Standard Model at the time requiring particles to be massless, which we knew they weren't. Hints from LEP at the turn of the millennium, detection by the LHC in 2012.

Cosmic microwave background[4], predicted in 1948 as a consequence of the expanding universe on the early radiation. Detected by accident in 1964.

Gravitational lensing[5] was first proposed in 1801 as a consequence of Newtonian corpuscular theory of light. Einstein realized in 1915 that GR predicted a larger value. Weak lensing by the sun was observed in 1919. Strong lensing by a distant galaxy of an object behind the galaxy was was predicted in 1937, and first observed in 1979.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Pauli's_proposal

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave#History

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#History

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background#Hi...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens#History

Re: Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

#93
It's bizarre that Newton's law passes this test, when the linearization of general relativity predicts a gravitational equivalent of a magnetic analog for gravity.

Gravity Probe B.

There exists an even simpler derivation for a magnetic term, but its in my file drawer... (simpler in that it just relies on observations from special relativity)

Re: Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

#94
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, as aether. It's a scientific theory. It's the best that we have right now to model the real world and be able to do prediction on its behavior. Does it seems to be kept together by duct tape? Maybe. Is it yet useful? Yep. Will it be discarded if anything more fitting will came up? You can be sure of it.

Yeah, pretty much, which is why this adherence to dark matter seems even more puzzling: we already had a mysterious substance with nonsensical mechanical properties (perfectly solid, but has zero collision) that turned out to be completely superfluous; the actual answer was the different shape of the physical laws. Now we again have a mysterious substance with nonsensical properties (has gravitational pull, doesn't i…

Of course, it could be that dark matter does not exist. In a very real way, nothing in physics “exists” because like all natural sciences physics does not make statements of objective truth, it makes testable predictions.

Dark matter, string theory, aether, etc., those are models that we, at some point in time, think may help us get better predictions and design further experiments. All models turn out to be wrong in the end, but they can be helpful until we come up with better ones.

If you drop the dark matter model, then you would want to have some other model as for why we observe what we observe. Some people find that other available models are even worse than the dark matter one, but if you don’t think so you can take your pick.

Re: Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple independent observations pointing toward dark matter: 1. Galaxy rotation curves. 2. Galaxy cluster mass measurements from gravitational lenses and infrared. 3. Cosmic Microwave Background models (mass measurements from inhomogeneities that correspond to acoustic waves, for eg). MOND only explains 1. Dark matter accounts for all 3. Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed.

> Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed. Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.

> Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.

One scientist says "We don't know, really, it's a head scratcher" and the others say something cool like "Dark energy", which ones will get more attention and publicity?

Re: Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple independent observations pointing toward dark matter: 1. Galaxy rotation curves. 2. Galaxy cluster mass measurements from gravitational lenses and infrared. 3. Cosmic Microwave Background models (mass measurements from inhomogeneities that correspond to acoustic waves, for eg). MOND only explains 1. Dark matter accounts for all 3. Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed.

> Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed. Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.

> Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.

For some general misunderstanding to explain what we see, ie something which is not dark matter, it means our equations of gravity must be wrong.

People have tried hard to tweak the equations to fix the observations. One such proposal is indeed MOND that the submission is about.

The problem with tweaking the equations is that we have a lot of observations of very different circumstances and scales, and it's so far proved impossible to tweak the equations in a given way so they explain all of the observations. What happens is that you can tweak them so they fit one set of observations, like MOND fitting galaxy rotation curves, but then not fit other sets of observations, like MOND with the motion of galaxies in galaxy clusters as discussed in the submission.

Meanwhile, adding dark matter seems to work much better at explaining all the observations at once. I say much better because there is still some tension, but it's way less than any modifications of gravity.

Having dark matter particle(s) is also not that strange. As far as we know there's no requirement that a particle interacts with any of the known forces beyond gravity. And while the early particle candidates seem to be getting ruled out, axion-like particles, originally proposed to solve entirely different problems, are still a good dark matter candidate.

That said, it's not settled. People are proposing alternatives. One example I know of is Alexandre Deur[1], a QCD physicist which has taken his QCD knowledge into the realm of GR and proposed that perhaps graviton-graviton self-interaction can explain a lot of the dark matter phenomena. It's not mainstream, but he's getting published in peer-reviewed journals.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/search/gr-qc?searchtype=author&query=Deur,...

Re: Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there would be a distribution of dark matter that explains the poltergeist, we could measure that distribution of dark matter. We can measure the mass distribution on astronomical scales. We "see" the dark matter. Just not with light.

We don't measure dark matter, we measure some anomaly and then we say "it must've been dark matter". It's not crazy different from saying the same about that poltergeist.

We measure the matter distribution by its affect on light (strong/weak lensing). We also measure the matter distribution by the amount of light coming from it. The results are not the same. The simplest explanation is that there is matter which does not produce or reflect light via e/m, i.e. it is dark. Dark Matter.

We know of particles which behave the same way. Neutrinos for example.

Re: Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed. Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.

Because stuff like the Bullet Cluster exists. Dark matter is in fact the simplest answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster

Angry gods used to be the simplest answer for a lot of things. Inevitably we find a better model

Re: Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test

#100
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed. Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.

> Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause. One scientist says "We don't know, really, it's a head scratcher" and the others say something cool like "Dark energy", which ones will get more attention and publicity?

But it really isn't a head scratcher, and it's not a wild guess, and also, dark matter is not the same as dark energy.

Think about some random person born in the 1950s. It will be impossible for you to directly prove that that person has two parents, but with all your knowledge about biology, and your knowledge that humans could not be cloned in the 1950s, it's not a head scratcher, unless our understanding of biology is completely off, it's not just speculation there were two parents. That's the comparable situation with dark matter. It's not a head scratcher. Every indication shows there is a lot of mass around that doesn't interact with light.

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