this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Any time you see any science article -- especially cosmology stuff -- claim some law of nature is being "proved wrong" or breaking down or failing or anything like that.... it just means an edge case was found that has some tiny but statistically significant deviation from our models. It means there's a missing piece of the puzzle that until recently was so inconsequential that we didn't even know we were overlooking it, but that the rest of the picture is becoming so sharply focused that its absence can no longer be overlooked. Or it means the observational data simply had errors in it.
"THE SCIENTISTS WERE WRONG" in all of its various forms makes for great clickbait, but it's only clickbait. We're highly, highly unlikely to be finding any new models for cosmology that totally upend our understanding of the universe as we continue to shine light through the fog at the edge of our understanding. There's vanishingly few cases of a scientist being genuinely wrong, and even fewer cases where the theory they were wrong about has any meaningful mass appeal.
Articles like this one set my hackles up. I get it, but "an observed system does not move precisely according to the predictions of our current best models of general relativity" isn't much of a headline, especially when the research was published by a guy who's heavily invested in proving MOND right in spite of compelling evidence that dark matter exists and the modified mechanical formulas aren't needed.
Thought exactly the same before I read the article to the end. But they are very differentiated in interpreting their discovery and clearly point of that their findings only make better predictions for very specific cases. They explicitly also explain what cases stay unaffected. The title is of course totally misleading, gravity is not breaking down. But to anyone with an inkling of physics, the message 'we found phenomena on a stellar scale that defy explanation by general relativity" is not far behind and would actually be true :)
MOND does not describe all observed phenomena, but neither does dark matter and dark energy. We simply don't know the truth in this area. In my opinion too much money in physics is thrown on the needle in a haystack search for dark matter.
Does MOND actually address dark energy in any way? I don't think it does or is even particularly intended to do so. As far as I know, MOND does not even pretend to have an explanation for Hubble expansion, but if there's some fringe of it trying to do so I'd be interested to see. There's no particular need to introduce dark energy into this discussion though. It's mostly just a different thing.
Dark matter is an extraordinarily strong theory that has a lot of pretty clear confirming evidence. Euclid is out there right now gathering the exact kind of observational data needed to further advance our understanding, which is very exciting since we know there's fuzzy edges at the fringes that need to be brought into focus.
This paper aside, MOND basically explains the motion of galaxies and little else. Dark Matter explains the motion of galaxies AND a litany of other observable phenomenon. The cutting edge of MOND, as it exists now, still relies on dark matter to explain most of those phenomenon. It has no explanation for the absence of dark matter in galaxies but its presence in things like galactic clusters to trigger lensing effects or the lack of isotropy in the CMB.
I imagine this is how Curtis felt debating Shapley though. One side of the debate shows that their theory explains FAR more, but does require we vastly expand our horizon of understanding. The other says no, I can come up with an alternate explanation one at a time until we do not have to expand our horizon. Ad hoc theories are inherently weak and should be met with skepticism.