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While the article is perhaps not written as well it could have been, alternative gravity is probably indeed bust, the point that other theories need to be funde
by manquer 6y ago
While the article is perhaps not written as well it could have been, alternative gravity is probably indeed bust, the point that other theories need to be funded and studied is valid. it is not a either/or scenario.
The argument the article makes is that just because emergent gravity or many alternative candidates potentially cannot explain all of evidence that dark matter can , does not mean it should be thrown out completely and rejected, it could be still funded and studied to see if it can explain some of it.
The real issue is given the way modern academic funding works we have been tending more and more towards narrower research with main line theories and lesser riskier proposals perhaps being incentivised. This is not just limited not dark matter , this phenomenon is evident in string theory research and many other fields as well.
- narrator 6y agoHow about we fund somebody like a George Church to just a have a lab and pursue whatever he feels like in cosmology instead of such a narrow "school of thought" picked by a donor?
- rob74 6y agoMaybe, if the donor feels like it... I mean, even if dark matter is the theory most likely to be correct, it's not as if further research along that path will yield any kind of monetary "return on investment" in our lifetime, so researching alternative theories is no more or less a waste of money :)
- Misdicorl 6y agoNo, the conclusions are not valid. This person doesn't know the most important experimental results in the field, doesn't understand why modified gravity is both theoretically and experimentally unsound, doesn't understand that dark matter research is already not a mono culture, doesn't understand that detailed investigations of gravity potentially diverging from the inverse square law already exist and that new studies are planned. This is the equivalent of someone reading some nasty things about C and claiming we need to investigate python for kernel development.
- Misdicorl 6y agoAs an aside, you've put the cart before the horse here. When you have multiple competing theories, you don't study them separately. You design experiments which will (hopefully) measure different results depending on which theory is true. This is exactly what is happening in cosmology. The experiments have ruled out MOND and their like. New results will rule out more dark matter candidates. Surprising results will lead to new theories.