After having spent some time penetrating the papers, I now believe that Korzynski’s criticism is correct. A critical point is that C&T construct a non-zero solution to the Laplace equation which vanishes at infinity. Since the solution to the Laplace equation is unique, and zero is the solution with zero boundary conditions, C&T must in fact be making an error. As Korzynski points out, they deal in fact with the Poisson equation with a delta-function source delta(z).

I guess I have learnt (again) not to trust the popular press, not even Cern Courier.

http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/10/10/1052224.shtml?tid=160&tid=14

forget about extra dimensions…most people don’t have a notion of space/time!

There had to be a fundamental shift in perspective from flat euclidean thinking, to gravitational understandings.

If you did not include “bubble technologies” as I relate in my site linked in 57, then how would any geometrical valution have ever made sense in geometrodynamical views. You need models for this (Reimann), and a shift in “tonal perspectives” in relation? Webber comes to mind here and gravitational perspective, and roads leading to better ways from historical standpoint in which to percieve Kip Thorne’s LIGO monitors, and future roads leading to comprehension.

This “bubble creation” would account for the “missing energy” from a theoretical standpoint, as temperature increase(CFT relation?)? One would thus look for such signs in the early cosmos? I was looking for geometrical consistancies, and any evidnece of this was from my poor layman views, that were trying to mature.

Still waiting for JoAnne to write her blog entry on this.

I want a predator from space.

Short of that.. yeah.. warp drives,

Or a freak high energy accident, or a graviton.

That the point arun and you have to be careful if you don’t want to end up on ‘t Hoofts bad list page.

How do you match up bubble technologies with current day ideas about roads leading through GR to have it understood in cosmological situations? It raised all kinds of question for me about origination and leading geometric indications, from “gravitational collapse” to set the fuse for new bubbles out of this supersymmetrical sea.

You had to define how you got there in the beginning, and in this cyclical process nature seems to have assign no singularities, but smooth topological processes of unfoldment?

I’m no expert in GR either. The Geometrodynamists, however, have a very systematic expansion around flat space-time for GR and most other metric theories of gravity (e.g, see Chapter 39 of Misner, Thorne, Wheeler, on the Parametrized Post-Newtonian formalism), and that formalism would indicate that GR is irrelevant on the galactic scale, barring singular sources and so on.

So I’m extremely dubious, though I do keep checking for citations of the Cooperstock paper to see if anything further can be made of it.

BTW, the Cooperstock & Tieu paper has been discussed before, briefly, on another cosmicvariance.com thread. See comment 63 onwards of
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2005/08/02/how-are-we-to-make-progress-with-w/

I am no expert in GR so I can only judge this matter second hand, but Cern Courier is usually a reliable source. It seems like Korzynski’s criticism is that Cooperstock and Tieu has made an ansatz which involves the non-analytical function exp(-k |z|). Perhaps the analysis can be repeated using exp(-k z^2) instead. That should remove the disk at z=0; whether it also removes the conclusion remains to be seen.

More important is the observation that the evidence for dark matter is based on Newtonian gravity. Instinctively is seems very dangerous to rely on the Newtonian approximation when dealing with galactic objects. If it hadn’t been for Cooperstock and Tieu, I wouldn’t have known about this, but would assume that people had made relativistic calculations.

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508377

Recently a new model of galactic gravitational field, based on ordinary General Relativity, has been proposed by Cooperstock and Tieu in which no exotic dark matter is needed to fit the observed rotation curve to a reasonable ordinary matter distribution. We argue that in this model the gravitational field is generated not only by the galaxy matter, but by a thin, singular disk as well. The model should therefore be considered unphysical.

Uh, wait, maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps people just thought so because they used Newtonian gravity rather than general relativity, see this article.