http://fora.tv/2010/11/03/More_Perfect_Than_We_Imagined_A_Physicists_View

Bialek has been one of most influential people discussing physics principles (e.g. stochastic physics and quantum mechanics) in living systems. If you liked Berg and Purcell, or P. Nelson, you’ll most likely enjoy his work too.

So, in an attempt to be objective, let me mention some of the points that Low Math, Meekly Interacting brings up.

1. The CMB data shows that there exists some sort of dark matter. To most cosmologists, this shows that MOND by itself is falsified. End of story.

2. The regularity seen at the galactic scale strongly disfavors CDM. To MONDians, CDM has been falsified at the galactic scale. See http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0009074, specially the problems noted in Section 3.

So, there is some amount of tension and disconnect here. It seems sometimes, that DMists and MONDians are speaking past each other, neither comprehending the valid point the other is making. Concerning 1., MONDians would say okay, there exists some form of HDM (e.g., sterile neutrinos) which would solve the large scale problems of MOND. CDMists would say there exists a much simpler solution. One particle, WIMPS, that solves both issues on the large and small scales.

But MONDians would then say that CDM fails (see point 2). In order to explain what we see at the galactic scale, CDM would have to be self-interacting. But once you have that, there’s goes the explanation for the Bullet Cluster. Not only that, CDM would probably have to interact with baryons in order to explain what is seen on the galactic level, that when the baryon density is high, DM density is low. When baryon density is low, DM density is high. So then, CDMians could say there are two types of DM particles, one is HDM and the other is a self-interacting CDM in order to explain both scales. This may be the case, but then CDM’s simplicity argument is somewhat spoiled. And if CDM interacts with baryons strongly, wouldn’t we have detected them by now?

Maybe the issues pointed out in the paper I linked have been resolved (the paper is from 2000 after all), but I haven’t been able to find anything (could be due to my incompetence).

But this could be (to paraphrase slightly) a “Who the Hell ordered that?!” moment. The data could be telling us that there is more than one type of DM or that something like MOND+HDM is correct. Ugly facts killing beautiful theories once again.

In summary, physicists are content with understanding nature and its principles, symmetries, etc, which tell us that gravity looks like GR at large scales, while astrophysicists just want to see random nonsensical garbage in the sky.

Why can’t scientists avoid mistakes like these the first time??? Making wrong assumptions about velocity around the sun is like a surgeon making assumptions on you before going to work. It just creates a nasty mess and takes away other people’s time trying to fix/find your mistake.

Also, people are eager to turn over dark matter because it is still theoretical, it hasn’t been thoroughly discovered/detected.

I find it more probable that Gravity and Newton and Einstein are good and usable. The “adjustment”, I think should come in the presumption of force that initiated the expansion of the universe. The presumption is that a huge release of energy cooled to form matter. If that presumption is false, then there is no set standard of how much matter there should be or a preclusion to it being arranged as it is without that addition of any invisible, undetected particle.

Clearly our initial view of the nature of the origin of the universe is flawed. Sure, patch it up by adding a constant that keeps the works flowing but do not fail by not addressing the real issue: We need a new view…

To be clear, the “inequity” comes from an assumption that gravity should be overcoming a certain amount of force from the Big Bang. I believe it is that presumed amount of force that is in need of revision and not all of observed physics…

This dichotomy is not entirely new in the history of physics. Astronomers already attributed to a new kind of unseen matter the discrepancies between the Newtonian predictions for the motion of Mercury and its observed motion. A new planet was supposed to exist orbiting near the Sun. The confidence on the universal validity of Newtonian gravitational theory was so high that to “the people of the late 19th century, Vulcan was real. It was a planet. It had theoretical credibility and had actually been seen. Even textbooks accorded it a chapter.”

The first discovery of Vulcan was announced on 2 January 1860 during a meeting of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Several rediscoveries and confirmations were done in posterior decades, somehow as discoveries of the hypothetical Dark Matter are announced in our days. All of us know now that Vulcan does not exist and that the motion of Mercury includes gravitational effects which cannot be accounted by Newtonian gravity alone. In a striking parallelism with the Vulcan case, the hypothetical Dark Matter has never been directly detected despite much experimental and observational effort during several decades. The situation has not changed in recent years, with Xenon10 excluding previously unexplored parameter space and Fermi finishing with another null detection of any sign of the existence of the hypothetical Dark Matter.

If however you seek to proffer properties and distribution of an unknown particle called dark matter, I will ask for proof, as any scientist should.

There are no direct observations currently available…

As for the computer models that generate the universe when certain corrections for dark matter are inputted, I asked a man who programmed one such model to replace the dark matter in the calculations with an equal amount of powdered Oreo cookies. Sure enough, his model produced the universe. Are we to then presume that dark matter is made up of powdered Oreo cookies?