4 ms·

Whoo, boy, the astrophysics fanboys that come out of the woodwork to suppress the notion that the emperor has no clothes

• jcranmer 9y ago
  Even as someone who would rather MOND be true than dark matter, I have to admit that dark matter is internally consistent in ways that MOND is not. By comparison to the theories of planetary movement (since you seem to love comparing dark matter to them so much), MOND is rather like the Copernican model and dark matter rather like Kepler's model. It's well-known that the traditional equations are off. MOND provides a fix that starts off looking better, but the more precise you do the measurements, the more you need to add the fudge factors in to make the numbers come out right, and it ends up being just as bad as the original--which is a reasonable description of the evolution of the Copernican model. By contrast, both Kepler's model and dark matter provide a much more accurate picture with a somewhat more complex addendum to the original non-fudged equations. But they also both lack mechanistic explanations for their origin: Kepler's model ruined the traditional explanation of how planets moved and inherited the stellar parallax death-knell from Copernicus's theory. In the case of planetary motion, it took the development of Newton's Law of Gravitation and the derivation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion from said theory to provide a sound mechanistic basis. We lack that mechanistic basis for dark matter, but that doesn't really mean that dark matter is inherently wrong.
  • nilson 9y ago
    Why do physicists believe that formulas should be elegant, beautiful etc.? Maybe that is not how universe works.