> The essential thing, and I mean really essential, is that modified gravity (MOND) uses fewer free parameters than cold dark matter (CDM), by a long shot. The

> The essential thing, and I mean really essential, is that modified gravity (MOND) uses fewer free parameters than cold dark matter (CDM), by a long shot. The only MOND formulations that actually work are ones that simply reduce cold dark matter from 80% of the universe to 30% of the universe. MOND has all -- literally all, as in 100% of them -- the free parameters of lCDM plus the parameters for MOND. I like MOND. It's elegant. It's intuitive. It's simple. You get to put your name at the end of the sequence Aristotle, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein. When I first started reading about dark matter in the '90s I thought MOND was the obvious solution. (MACHO was still a leading theory at the time, they were still analyzing the data from the microlensing surveys) lCDM is messy and existentially unsatisfying. We don't know what what it is, and if it has the properties we think it has, we could not conceivably ever know what it is. But regardless of the fact that MOND is nicer than lCDM, lCDM explains all of our observations, but MOND only explains some of them, and depending on which formulation of MOND you subscribe to, is falsified by the the bullet cluster, or by galaxies whose rotation curves show a lack of dark matter, or by the LIGO/VIRGO observations that show gravity moves at the speed of light. MOND reminds me of the meme of Homer Simpson where he's standing there looking fairly fit and then the camera turns around him and he's just got all his fat and loose skin pinned and tied up on his back. It looks great on the face of it but once you really, really start digging into the details it doesn't work anymore. lCDM wears all of its warts on its face.