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First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

newscientist.com

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Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#41

Post by mmaunder »

beambot wrote: post #17

> String theorist Lubos Motl savaged Verlinde’s ideas in a recent blog post: “I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper.” I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. There's no justification for this level of nastiness -- not in private, public, peer review, or science as a whole. Seeking out the unknown and creative explanations thereof is the hallmark of good science; ch…

He's engaging in a power fantasy that has a fellow scientist as a student. I'll bet this guy is a lot of fun to have as a professor.

Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#42

Post by Frondo »

bsder wrote: post #24
beambot wrote: post #17

> String theorist Lubos Motl savaged Verlinde’s ideas in a recent blog post: “I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper.” I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. There's no justification for this level of nastiness -- not in private, public, peer review, or science as a whole. Seeking out the unknown and creative explanations thereof is the hallmark of good science; ch…

> I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. So you'd rather people quietly knife you in review? Because that's what happens if you penalize people for public rudeness. Personally, I'd rather have a loud critique to my face than a polite one behind my back or, even worse, no engagement at all. I don't need your politeness or friendship when I'm putting forth some new theory. I need accurate, engaged c…

Accurate, engaged criticism is great, that stuff belongs everywhere.

"I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper" is not accurate, engaged criticism, it's mean-spiritedness under a veneer of toughness.

It's easy and fun to be rude and insulting, and when you can get away with it because of the subculture you're writing within, why not, right? Because being a dick is being a dick no matter who or where you are, that's why, and being a dick doesn't advance anything beyond your own momentary joy.

Every industry, every field, everywhere, will be better off once people get past being dicks just for fun, and give accurate, engaged criticism while maintaining civility.

Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#43

Post by lisper »

beambot wrote: post #17

> String theorist Lubos Motl savaged Verlinde’s ideas in a recent blog post: “I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper.” I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. There's no justification for this level of nastiness -- not in private, public, peer review, or science as a whole. Seeking out the unknown and creative explanations thereof is the hallmark of good science; ch…

Motl is notorious for this sort of thing. He once called me a "category 5 loon" because something I said in a talk was wrong. But the reason it was wrong is because I was advancing it as a straw-man precisely to show it was wrong.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/10/evading-quantum-mechanics-...

Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#44

Post by jayajay »

empath75 wrote: post #2

'Kills off dark matter" is probably overstating the case, but I love this theory because it ties together a lot of big ideas. Verlinde's paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02269

I remember reading about this as an undergraduate and thinking how attractive his ideas were -- I think Verlinde's ideas have been around for some time. Back then it seemed like few people were giving these ideas thought.

I hope more people decide to explore this avenue. It really is a fascinating take on gravity.

Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#45

Post by bmh100 »

Please change the submission title. It is downright misleading. This test did not "kill off" dark matter. To do so would imply overwhelming evidence against the concept of dark matter as a whole. Instead, this theory, which eliminates the need for dark matter in certain situations, has passed its first test. The sentence "... test ... kills off dark matter" is simply false.

Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#46

Post by TTPrograms »

sandworm101 wrote: post #34
DennisP wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like it's pretty easy to make dark matter a good fit, because you can just adjust the presumed distribution of dark matter to fit the data.

It does seem unfair to fault one theory for making up terms but to ok the invention of dark matter and its placement wherever needed. Perhaps dark matter will be like vulcan: a big chunk of mass invented and placed so as to confirm an outdated model. The new model described a new force, mooting the need for the mass.

It's faulting one theory for making up terms to fit one source of data and then those same terms failing on 6+ other experiments. Dark matter's predictions are consistent across totally different experiments with fewer sets of parameters.

Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#47

Post by brilliantcode »

Can someone explain in layman's terms what really is dark matter and why there's so much obsession around it? If we can't observe it and we are only relying on inferences to explain it's effects, that seems like pretty weak set of legs.

Obviously I'm missing the academic discipline to appreciate this topic but nevertheless, I'm curious about our understanding of the very fabric and mechanisms of our reality and the universe.

Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#48

Post by andrewflnr »

fjarlq wrote: post #16
andrewflnr wrote: post #11

“But then if you mathematically factor in the fact that Verlinde’s prediction doesn’t have any free parameters, whereas the dark matter prediction does, then you find Verlinde’s model is actually performing slightly better.” What? How does this work?

From the discussion section of Verlinde's paper[1]: > We have shown that the emergent laws of gravity, when one takes into account the volume law contribution to the entropy, start to deviate from the familiar gravitational laws precisely in those situations where the observations tell us they do. We have only made use of the natural constants of nature, and provided reasonably straightforward arguments and calculati…

That's just Occam's razor, though. The phrasing made it sound like they had a quantitative argument for why fewer free parameters made it "perform" better.

Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#49

Post by yongjik »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #5

I'd be kind of bummed to lose dark matter as a concept. I want to hold onto the idea that it's just as rich as our matter, with its own quantum chromodynamics and an equivalent to the electromagnetic force, leading to a "shadow" universe with their own planets, life, etc. that exists side by side us, trying to figure out why their gravity measurements are just slightly off...

IANAP, but I think the most widely accepted view on dark matter is that it is made of "dark" particles that cannot lose energy by radiation. In other words, it cannot condense and form dark stars or planets. When two lumps of dark matter collide they just pass through each other.

Sorry for ruining your dream. :/

Re: First test of rival to Einstein’s gravity kills off dark matter

#50

Post by conistonwater »

beambot wrote: post #17

> String theorist Lubos Motl savaged Verlinde’s ideas in a recent blog post: “I wouldn’t okay this wrong piece of work as an undergraduate term paper.” I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating. There's no justification for this level of nastiness -- not in private, public, peer review, or science as a whole. Seeking out the unknown and creative explanations thereof is the hallmark of good science; ch…

I'm being pedantic, but I downvoted you because you started with the obvious observation "Motl is really really rude" (yeah, he's a real piece of work, check out the rest of his blog for stuff much worse), and then wrote "I find this rudeness and pedantry in academia infuriating.", which isn't supported by the observation that that one guy is rude. (But the rest of your comment is fine.) Individual people can be really rude with or without it being a cultural problem. There's no need to bring academia up like that—that's a lot of people, decent people, and most of them are really quite nice people and good scientists.
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