23 ms·

Is the great neutrino puzzle pointing to multiple missing particles?

72 points by theafh 5y ago

chmike 5y ago
A not so new theory [1] explaining elementary particles, predicts and justify the existence of multiple electricaly neutral elementary particles. [1] "Elementary Particles Result from Space-Time Quantization" by A.Meessen https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=112335 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
denton-scratch 5y ago
I buy this story. /me not a physicist or cosmologist! I have a revulsion for the Dark Matter/Dark Energy thing, that seems to have become conventional thinking in recent decades. Those theories look to me like a tangled beard, just waiting for Occam's Razor. FWIW, I'm also not enchanted by the theory of "cosmic inflation". I wonder if sterile neutrinos might eventually offer an alternative explanation for the unexpected smoothness of the MBR.
- vecter 5y ago
  TFA says that sterile neutrinos have been ruled out.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    "TFA"? OK, too bad. I still think there are seriously-hard problems in cosmology that are not explained: DM, DE, and inflation. I'm not convinced by the explanations that are on the table. Nobody has to convince me of anything, of course; I'm just some old dude with a laptop, and a long interest in cosmology. I just think there's something wrong: those three proposed mechanisms are very hairy, in Occam's Razor terms. It would be deliciously sweet, if the observations they purport to explain could in fact be explained by a single, simple theory.
    - SquibblesRedux 5y ago
      My experience is that there is always something wrong with current theories, no matter what field or what time. We linger on the theories we find useful, but we never know how deep the rabbit hole goes, really, and there is always another surprise waiting to be revealed.
    - raattgift 5y ago
      > long interest in cosmology Good, let's start with that expression of interest and run with it. Here's my high level challenge to let you reflect for yourself (privately) on how interested you really are. > those three proposed mechanisms are very hairy, in Occam's Razor terms Write down a standard gravitation-containing effective Lagrangian or the action on the one hand, and an alternative (see e.g. Famaey & McGaugh 2012 in Living Reviews in Relativity, 15, 10, §§6-7) and run it through your favourite character-counting tool. Then try an analytical or numerical solution for a simple toy model in either of them. Then tell us which one you think is hairy and why, and whether your idea about how to assess hairiness has differed during this little study programme. There is local help available for you in doing this at a local community college or small state-funded university (or local equivalents) in the physics department. It won't take long to walk you through it at a STEM undergraduate level (I would start with the Einstein-Hilbert action with the cosmological constant and proceed to perturb that in small steps [1]), go deeper if you can follow the mathematics, and aim you at further resources if you are honestly interested in them). I think this will be more satisfying for your intellectual curiosity than making self-admittedly uninformed negative comments on Internet forums (even this one). I'm pretty sure that if you asked in the comments here you'd have several people offering to help put you in touch with someone local to wherever it is you are. Satisfying honest intellectual curiosity is catnip to academics. > seriously-hard problems in cosmology that are not explained Yes, you're right. Cosmologists collectively are working towards a consistent and complete and explanatory model, but are not done, despite the "corpses" of many many ruled-out possibilities. (It is easy to dream up a possibility, hard to write it down consistently, and almost always really easy to kill it on first contact with real astronomical data; Einstein went through this many times including on papers he sought to have published). However, I think you can get closer to understanding what those problems are, and why they're hard, and what we know can't solve them, assuming you retain your interest. > [DE] ... could in fact be explained by a single simple, theory. The Cosmological Constant is literally just a scalar multiplier on the curvature. Practically the only way to make it simpler is to zero it out, which is exactly what had been done before the discovery of the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Dark energy research (on the theoretical side) is principally, "in order to improve the accuracy of our modelling compared to data from various observatories, do we need to change the Cosm.Const., which is the \Lambda in the \Lambda-CDM model, into a more complicated function? If we do so, what observables are generated (especially if they would appear in already-gathered data (e.g. DES)?". [See the parenthetical three paragraphs up...] - -- [1] An actual lecture for grad students (and some undergraduates) at McGill University in Montréal has this section: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjn_wZ-1ne0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjn_wZ-1ne0 (from https://www.mcgill.ca/study/2021-2022/courses/phys-514 https://www.mcgill.ca/study/2021-2022/courses/phys-514 ETA: n.b. at the 41min58sec mark re my approach above) Please feel free to reply in the comments about whether this is interesting but too difficult to follow, and I will try to aim you at something more suitable for you. (You also will probably find lots of HN commenters directing you at e.g. PBS Spacetime and similar, but I think that's not really a path to understanding what hairy even is). Really I'm guessing you'd be better off with an informal tutorial session, which might cost you a coffee and a decent sandwich brought to some physics teacher's office, and some diplomacy beforehand (don't start with "I want you to show me how to argue on the Internet about physical cosmology's failings", for instance, much less "give me a devastating 240-character slogan I can repeat until all the relevant physicists get different jobs or mute me").
  - not2b 5y ago
    My understanding from following reports on these experiments (including this article) is that the simplest version of sterile neutrinos, where instead of three kinds of neutrinos there are four, and one interacts only gravitationally, has been ruled out, but maybe some more complex version is still possible.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I have a revulsion for the Dark Matter/Dark Energy thing, that seems to have become conventional thinking in recent decades. Those theories look to me like a tangled beard, just waiting for Occam's Razor. IMHO, that's sort of what the end of science (or at least particle physics) will look like: detectable inconsistencies or anomalies with no means to probe further to resolve them, but new theories will keep getting produced and maybe even taught. This might be one of the areas were probing further may not be possible: > These possibilities make the dark sector “not just a bedtime story,” said Weiner. However, even if the dark sector exists and the familiar neutrinos act as intermediaries, there’s no guarantee that their link is strong enough to reveal what’s hidden. “It is possible that heavy [neutrinos] may be completely inaccessible to any reasonable experiment,” said Josh Spitz of the University of Michigan.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    >This might be one of the areas were probing further may not be possible I like this way of thinking. As a kid, I thought that everything could be figured out, eventually, in principle. Now I'm resigned to the prospect that there are things that can't ever be figured out. It's a humbling prospect.
- ggambetta 5y ago
  That's an unpopular opinion... that I completely share. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21279144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21279144
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Thanks for the HC link. I seem to be in agreement with the unpopular people. By the time this is all sorted out, I'll be dead. My girlfriend doesn't care about physics or cosmology, so it doesn't really matter if my opinions are unpopular with her. Maybe having unpopular views on science would explain why I have so few friends, though! :-)
- ajkjk 5y ago
  Fortunately it is not up to armchair science enthusiasts to determine whether the evidence for dark matter or dark energy (which are unrelated concepts that share similar names) is sufficient to validate those theories. That would truly be a disaster. Every time fundamental physics articles are posted on HN there's some commenters who say something like "I dunno about this dark matter stuff, even though I know basically nothing about it". It's the physics equivalent of being an anti-vaxxer: you have only a superficial idea of where ideas come from or why they're considered credible and you naively assume that the experts are in the same boat, and therefore it's you against them and you both have equally valid stances. The newsflash is: the experts on these subjects know _so_ much more about what they're talking about than you can possibly imagine in your armchair, and you have no idea the depths of the analysis they've done, or how comprehensive and repeatable the measurements were that led to these theories being taken seriously.
  - chasil 5y ago
    This article says several times: "...the Standard Model of particle physics, the well-tested set of equations describing the known elementary particles and forces, unequivocally deems neutrinos massless. "Even scientists who backed the idea that neutrinos oscillate and have mass distrusted LSND’s numbers, because the inferred oscillation rate overshot the rate implied by solar and atmospheric neutrinos. "Ever since the discovery in the 1990s that neutrinos have mass, theorists have wondered if neutrinos could account for the enormous amount of dark matter that seems to engulf galaxies. They soon concluded that the three known neutrinos don’t have anywhere near the mass needed to do so. But if a larger family of neutrinos exists — including some heavy ones — they might. "The Standard Model predicts that electron, muon and tau neutrinos are massless — except they aren’t." Is it not reasonable to express interest and hope for new discoveries when fundamental axioms are proven incorrect?
    - ajkjk 5y ago
      Interest and hope is fine. I was responding to the parent poster's stated revulsion for these theories -- and not just any of them but all of them, as though they have a blanket distrust in any unproven theory in physics, uncorrelated with the experimental evidence for it. > fundamental axioms are proven incorrect It's not that fundamental axioms are disproven so much as simplifying assumptions are invalidated. The standard model models the particles we understand well, and has obvious extension points for new physics (like new Lagrangian terms / new gauge fields). Nobody thinks that it models all of physics as written; it clearly doesn't account for lots of things.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  I don't understand why people think dark matter is "hairy." It's the simplest explanation imaginable - only one new particle. We used to discover particles all the time, and this idea that we somehow must have already found them all is a recent product of the end of accelerator growth.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I think it's "hairy" because it's not an explanation - the proposed particle is defined (more-or-less) as the error-factor in an equation. Show me the particle, I'll reconsider my views.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      I know it sounds like a fudge factor that can be made to do anything, but the truth is that particle models of weakly interacting dark matter can only be made to do a few things. If any distribution of matter imaginable could be created through dark matter, you're right, that would be an empirical fudge factor, but only a few distributions of matter can be created this way, and it's noteworthy that one of them matches the one in real life. An example of a limitless fudge factor is epicycles. They could be made to do anything - now through our understanding of the Fourier transform, we can make them draw elephants. That's not what CDM is like because it can't be made to draw elephants.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        Thank you. I didn't know that epicycles had the creative expressiveness to generate elephants, I'm impressed, and I'll have to dig into that - sounds interesting. I thought that Ptolemy's epicyle ideas were defeated precisely because they were not able to explain observations.
        whatshisface 5y ago
        This isn't an elephant but it demonstrates the principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw Epicycles were originally considered a good idea because it takes exactly two circles to make an ellipse, and Kepler's laws were satisfied by such an ellipse. They were "falsified,", in the two-cycle form, when closer observations revealed that Kepler's laws were not obeyed exactly. At that point, the choice was to either add more epicycles (working your way up to an elephant), or for Newton to discover universal gravitation.
- ketralnis 5y ago
  > Those theories look to me like a tangled beard, just waiting for Occam's Razor Well then, get in there and show those career physicists what you know
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I've already said that physics and cosmology are not my game. I'm just interested. But perhaps it's worth noting: a cosmologist that wants to argue against e.g. DM is putting his career at risk. If your career is cosmology or physics, and you want to rock the boat, you had better have some pretty surprising research, or you're going to have trouble. Look at the trouble Roger Pensose stirred up for himself; he's a big fish, but got seriously trashed over OR. An interested bystander like me doesn't face those problems (except here).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - raattgift 5y ago
      > a cosmologist that wants to argue against e.g. DM is putting his career at risk Academia doesn't work like that in all countries, at the very least. Putting together a single-author or maybe two-author theoretical paper in gravitation or cosmology is commonplace, and getting it published is usually a lot easier than stopping oneself from throwing it out because of unsolved problems that almost inevitably creep up when one sets out to write down a non-trivial theory. You don't really have to take my word for it. Start here: https://arxiv.org/list/gr-qc/new https://arxiv.org/list/gr-qc/new and observe the large number of one-and-two-author papers. Then let's try https://arxiv.org/search/?query=mond&searchtype=all https://arxiv.org/search/?query=mond&searchtype=all which by default sorts newest-first. The first four digits of the identifers are YYMM. You can see for yourself whether there are only few papers dealing with Milgromian/Modified-Newtonian-Dynamics gravitation, and work out some median author count. If you do an in-browser search on that second results page you'll see "Famaey" a lot. Benoît Famaey's career in academia has hardly come to a dead end because of his many explorations of MOND over the past fifteen years or so; he's a Belgian working in Germany and France and indeed has grad students and a research team (cf. https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/deebea0f https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/deebea0f ), although not just for MOND to the exclusion of other areas of galaxy astrophysics. I think Famaey in his mid-50s or so, but I am not an especially good judge of people's ages. Whether he could have had this sort of career in private universities in the U.S.A. is a sociological or political question that I decline to speculate about. With minor effort at searching, you can certainly follow the publication lists and careers of his many collaborators, if you are tempted to argue that he is an especially rare or lucky individual to have avoided "hav[ing] trouble" or being "seriously trashed". I would not read too much (bearing in mind I did not search deeply) into his recent coauthors being almost all from European universities, even if tempted into speculating about cross-juridictional comparative academy. Finally, I'll end by pointing to Stacy McGaugh, an American at a U.S. university https://astronomy.case.edu/faculty/stacy-mcgaugh/ https://astronomy.case.edu/faculty/stacy-mcgaugh/ , has coauthored specifically about MOND alternatives to General Relativity and Dark Matter with Famaey and it does not seem to have wrecked his career, and neither have his rather forceful blog statements at https://tritonstation.com/ https://tritonstation.com/ .
Sapere_Aude 5y ago
Sounds like more patchwork crap for a failed model...
- dang 5y ago
  "Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

72 points by theafh 5y ago

A not so new theory [1] explaining elementary particles, predicts and justify the existence of multiple electricaly neutral elementary particles. [1] "Elementary Particles Result from Space-Time Quantization" by A.Meessen https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=112335 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...

denton-scratch 5y ago

I buy this story. /me not a physicist or cosmologist! I have a revulsion for the Dark Matter/Dark Energy thing, that seems to have become conventional thinking in recent decades. Those theories look to me like a tangled beard, just waiting for Occam's Razor. FWIW, I'm also not enchanted by the theory of "cosmic inflation". I wonder if sterile neutrinos might eventually offer an alternative explanation for the unexpected smoothness of the MBR.

vecter 5y ago
TFA says that sterile neutrinos have been ruled out.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  "TFA"? OK, too bad. I still think there are seriously-hard problems in cosmology that are not explained: DM, DE, and inflation. I'm not convinced by the explanations that are on the table. Nobody has to convince me of anything, of course; I'm just some old dude with a laptop, and a long interest in cosmology. I just think there's something wrong: those three proposed mechanisms are very hairy, in Occam's Razor terms. It would be deliciously sweet, if the observations they purport to explain could in fact be explained by a single, simple theory.
  - SquibblesRedux 5y ago
    My experience is that there is always something wrong with current theories, no matter what field or what time. We linger on the theories we find useful, but we never know how deep the rabbit hole goes, really, and there is always another surprise waiting to be revealed.
  - raattgift 5y ago
    > long interest in cosmology Good, let's start with that expression of interest and run with it. Here's my high level challenge to let you reflect for yourself (privately) on how interested you really are. > those three proposed mechanisms are very hairy, in Occam's Razor terms Write down a standard gravitation-containing effective Lagrangian or the action on the one hand, and an alternative (see e.g. Famaey & McGaugh 2012 in Living Reviews in Relativity, 15, 10, §§6-7) and run it through your favourite character-counting tool. Then try an analytical or numerical solution for a simple toy model in either of them. Then tell us which one you think is hairy and why, and whether your idea about how to assess hairiness has differed during this little study programme. There is local help available for you in doing this at a local community college or small state-funded university (or local equivalents) in the physics department. It won't take long to walk you through it at a STEM undergraduate level (I would start with the Einstein-Hilbert action with the cosmological constant and proceed to perturb that in small steps [1]), go deeper if you can follow the mathematics, and aim you at further resources if you are honestly interested in them). I think this will be more satisfying for your intellectual curiosity than making self-admittedly uninformed negative comments on Internet forums (even this one). I'm pretty sure that if you asked in the comments here you'd have several people offering to help put you in touch with someone local to wherever it is you are. Satisfying honest intellectual curiosity is catnip to academics. > seriously-hard problems in cosmology that are not explained Yes, you're right. Cosmologists collectively are working towards a consistent and complete and explanatory model, but are not done, despite the "corpses" of many many ruled-out possibilities. (It is easy to dream up a possibility, hard to write it down consistently, and almost always really easy to kill it on first contact with real astronomical data; Einstein went through this many times including on papers he sought to have published). However, I think you can get closer to understanding what those problems are, and why they're hard, and what we know can't solve them, assuming you retain your interest. > [DE] ... could in fact be explained by a single simple, theory. The Cosmological Constant is literally just a scalar multiplier on the curvature. Practically the only way to make it simpler is to zero it out, which is exactly what had been done before the discovery of the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Dark energy research (on the theoretical side) is principally, "in order to improve the accuracy of our modelling compared to data from various observatories, do we need to change the Cosm.Const., which is the \Lambda in the \Lambda-CDM model, into a more complicated function? If we do so, what observables are generated (especially if they would appear in already-gathered data (e.g. DES)?". [See the parenthetical three paragraphs up...] - -- [1] An actual lecture for grad students (and some undergraduates) at McGill University in Montréal has this section: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjn_wZ-1ne0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjn_wZ-1ne0 (from https://www.mcgill.ca/study/2021-2022/courses/phys-514 https://www.mcgill.ca/study/2021-2022/courses/phys-514 ETA: n.b. at the 41min58sec mark re my approach above) Please feel free to reply in the comments about whether this is interesting but too difficult to follow, and I will try to aim you at something more suitable for you. (You also will probably find lots of HN commenters directing you at e.g. PBS Spacetime and similar, but I think that's not really a path to understanding what hairy even is). Really I'm guessing you'd be better off with an informal tutorial session, which might cost you a coffee and a decent sandwich brought to some physics teacher's office, and some diplomacy beforehand (don't start with "I want you to show me how to argue on the Internet about physical cosmology's failings", for instance, much less "give me a devastating 240-character slogan I can repeat until all the relevant physicists get different jobs or mute me").
- not2b 5y ago
  My understanding from following reports on these experiments (including this article) is that the simplest version of sterile neutrinos, where instead of three kinds of neutrinos there are four, and one interacts only gravitationally, has been ruled out, but maybe some more complex version is still possible.
tablespoon 5y ago
> I have a revulsion for the Dark Matter/Dark Energy thing, that seems to have become conventional thinking in recent decades. Those theories look to me like a tangled beard, just waiting for Occam's Razor. IMHO, that's sort of what the end of science (or at least particle physics) will look like: detectable inconsistencies or anomalies with no means to probe further to resolve them, but new theories will keep getting produced and maybe even taught. This might be one of the areas were probing further may not be possible: > These possibilities make the dark sector “not just a bedtime story,” said Weiner. However, even if the dark sector exists and the familiar neutrinos act as intermediaries, there’s no guarantee that their link is strong enough to reveal what’s hidden. “It is possible that heavy [neutrinos] may be completely inaccessible to any reasonable experiment,” said Josh Spitz of the University of Michigan.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  >This might be one of the areas were probing further may not be possible I like this way of thinking. As a kid, I thought that everything could be figured out, eventually, in principle. Now I'm resigned to the prospect that there are things that can't ever be figured out. It's a humbling prospect.
ggambetta 5y ago
That's an unpopular opinion... that I completely share. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21279144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21279144
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Thanks for the HC link. I seem to be in agreement with the unpopular people. By the time this is all sorted out, I'll be dead. My girlfriend doesn't care about physics or cosmology, so it doesn't really matter if my opinions are unpopular with her. Maybe having unpopular views on science would explain why I have so few friends, though! :-)
ajkjk 5y ago
Fortunately it is not up to armchair science enthusiasts to determine whether the evidence for dark matter or dark energy (which are unrelated concepts that share similar names) is sufficient to validate those theories. That would truly be a disaster. Every time fundamental physics articles are posted on HN there's some commenters who say something like "I dunno about this dark matter stuff, even though I know basically nothing about it". It's the physics equivalent of being an anti-vaxxer: you have only a superficial idea of where ideas come from or why they're considered credible and you naively assume that the experts are in the same boat, and therefore it's you against them and you both have equally valid stances. The newsflash is: the experts on these subjects know _so_ much more about what they're talking about than you can possibly imagine in your armchair, and you have no idea the depths of the analysis they've done, or how comprehensive and repeatable the measurements were that led to these theories being taken seriously.
- chasil 5y ago
  This article says several times: "...the Standard Model of particle physics, the well-tested set of equations describing the known elementary particles and forces, unequivocally deems neutrinos massless. "Even scientists who backed the idea that neutrinos oscillate and have mass distrusted LSND’s numbers, because the inferred oscillation rate overshot the rate implied by solar and atmospheric neutrinos. "Ever since the discovery in the 1990s that neutrinos have mass, theorists have wondered if neutrinos could account for the enormous amount of dark matter that seems to engulf galaxies. They soon concluded that the three known neutrinos don’t have anywhere near the mass needed to do so. But if a larger family of neutrinos exists — including some heavy ones — they might. "The Standard Model predicts that electron, muon and tau neutrinos are massless — except they aren’t." Is it not reasonable to express interest and hope for new discoveries when fundamental axioms are proven incorrect?
  - ajkjk 5y ago
    Interest and hope is fine. I was responding to the parent poster's stated revulsion for these theories -- and not just any of them but all of them, as though they have a blanket distrust in any unproven theory in physics, uncorrelated with the experimental evidence for it. > fundamental axioms are proven incorrect It's not that fundamental axioms are disproven so much as simplifying assumptions are invalidated. The standard model models the particles we understand well, and has obvious extension points for new physics (like new Lagrangian terms / new gauge fields). Nobody thinks that it models all of physics as written; it clearly doesn't account for lots of things.
whatshisface 5y ago
I don't understand why people think dark matter is "hairy." It's the simplest explanation imaginable - only one new particle. We used to discover particles all the time, and this idea that we somehow must have already found them all is a recent product of the end of accelerator growth.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I think it's "hairy" because it's not an explanation - the proposed particle is defined (more-or-less) as the error-factor in an equation. Show me the particle, I'll reconsider my views.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    I know it sounds like a fudge factor that can be made to do anything, but the truth is that particle models of weakly interacting dark matter can only be made to do a few things. If any distribution of matter imaginable could be created through dark matter, you're right, that would be an empirical fudge factor, but only a few distributions of matter can be created this way, and it's noteworthy that one of them matches the one in real life. An example of a limitless fudge factor is epicycles. They could be made to do anything - now through our understanding of the Fourier transform, we can make them draw elephants. That's not what CDM is like because it can't be made to draw elephants.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      Thank you. I didn't know that epicycles had the creative expressiveness to generate elephants, I'm impressed, and I'll have to dig into that - sounds interesting. I thought that Ptolemy's epicyle ideas were defeated precisely because they were not able to explain observations.
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        This isn't an elephant but it demonstrates the principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw Epicycles were originally considered a good idea because it takes exactly two circles to make an ellipse, and Kepler's laws were satisfied by such an ellipse. They were "falsified,", in the two-cycle form, when closer observations revealed that Kepler's laws were not obeyed exactly. At that point, the choice was to either add more epicycles (working your way up to an elephant), or for Newton to discover universal gravitation.
ketralnis 5y ago
> Those theories look to me like a tangled beard, just waiting for Occam's Razor Well then, get in there and show those career physicists what you know
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I've already said that physics and cosmology are not my game. I'm just interested. But perhaps it's worth noting: a cosmologist that wants to argue against e.g. DM is putting his career at risk. If your career is cosmology or physics, and you want to rock the boat, you had better have some pretty surprising research, or you're going to have trouble. Look at the trouble Roger Pensose stirred up for himself; he's a big fish, but got seriously trashed over OR. An interested bystander like me doesn't face those problems (except here).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - raattgift 5y ago
    > a cosmologist that wants to argue against e.g. DM is putting his career at risk Academia doesn't work like that in all countries, at the very least. Putting together a single-author or maybe two-author theoretical paper in gravitation or cosmology is commonplace, and getting it published is usually a lot easier than stopping oneself from throwing it out because of unsolved problems that almost inevitably creep up when one sets out to write down a non-trivial theory. You don't really have to take my word for it. Start here: https://arxiv.org/list/gr-qc/new https://arxiv.org/list/gr-qc/new and observe the large number of one-and-two-author papers. Then let's try https://arxiv.org/search/?query=mond&searchtype=all https://arxiv.org/search/?query=mond&searchtype=all which by default sorts newest-first. The first four digits of the identifers are YYMM. You can see for yourself whether there are only few papers dealing with Milgromian/Modified-Newtonian-Dynamics gravitation, and work out some median author count. If you do an in-browser search on that second results page you'll see "Famaey" a lot. Benoît Famaey's career in academia has hardly come to a dead end because of his many explorations of MOND over the past fifteen years or so; he's a Belgian working in Germany and France and indeed has grad students and a research team (cf. https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/deebea0f https://jobregister.aas.org/ad/deebea0f ), although not just for MOND to the exclusion of other areas of galaxy astrophysics. I think Famaey in his mid-50s or so, but I am not an especially good judge of people's ages. Whether he could have had this sort of career in private universities in the U.S.A. is a sociological or political question that I decline to speculate about. With minor effort at searching, you can certainly follow the publication lists and careers of his many collaborators, if you are tempted to argue that he is an especially rare or lucky individual to have avoided "hav[ing] trouble" or being "seriously trashed". I would not read too much (bearing in mind I did not search deeply) into his recent coauthors being almost all from European universities, even if tempted into speculating about cross-juridictional comparative academy. Finally, I'll end by pointing to Stacy McGaugh, an American at a U.S. university https://astronomy.case.edu/faculty/stacy-mcgaugh/ https://astronomy.case.edu/faculty/stacy-mcgaugh/ , has coauthored specifically about MOND alternatives to General Relativity and Dark Matter with Famaey and it does not seem to have wrecked his career, and neither have his rather forceful blog statements at https://tritonstation.com/ https://tritonstation.com/ .

Sapere_Aude 5y ago

Sounds like more patchwork crap for a failed model...

dang 5y ago
"Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html