History of Heliocentrism

[Jon Miller]

There is versions of double gravity (I don't remember all the terms) and at UMD I knew people who worked on versions of the aether. The latter is more fringe than the former, the former is mostly not favored because there are particle physics/cosmological reasons that suggest Dark Matter and not just astronomy/astrophysics reasons.

JM

[Lorizael]

Although my understanding is that the latest non-results out of LUX and other searches have not been kind to those particle physics reasons.

[Jon Miller]

WIMPs are not the only form of Dark Matter. But there is truth to that.

JM

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

As JM -and I think Ben, too- seems to be implying, I'm with the minority who would prefer to believe we don't understand how gravity works on a galactic scale, is all. Seems far infinitely more elegant, for all that cosmology seems determined to defy being intuitive for us in our frame...

I'm certainly not claiming not to be a crank, mind you...

[Lorizael]

The universe has no obligation to be elegant, either. We might like it to be, but that's another imposition of ours on nature. (Consider the Aristotelian physics of geocentrists, which mandated that the universe was all perfect circles.)

More to the original point of the thread, I'm not sure it's clear that geocentric astronomers in the 17th century--or even aether-propounding physicists of the 19th--were actually doing science poorly. They turned out to be wrong, but they had reasons for believing what they did that were based on the best evidence and theories at the time. Similarly, if it turns out there is no dark matter, it doesn't necessarily follow that cosmologists now are guilty of groupthink or any other kind of poor scientific practice. They might just be wrong.

[Jon Miller]

I have given a few talks that I referred to it (double gravity and related theories) as not well motivated (I have done DM research).

The major problem is that there is astrophysics evidence that can all be explained by DM but would require double gravity and something else to explain.

Also, all the limits from things like LUX are for super boring DM where it is just one species of a SuSy type particle. If you have even a simple Dark Sector (still much simpler than what we see around us in the Standard Model) it would escape detection from any LUX/XENON/etc type experiments.

Additionally, SuSy is not so well motivated anymore due to not seeing it at the LHC. However, there are still a lot of DM style theories that are not SuSy theories.

I still believe in DM. I do not think there is any obvious way to be sure of seeing it, but there are a lot of ways we can look.

JM

[Jon Miller]

Basically there was one particle that seemed to explain everything (and such theories also predicted some additional short lived particles that should be seen in the LHC). And by everything, and mean almost everything in cosmology/astronomy/astrophysics/particle physics.

But this is really a lot to be hoped for and not what we really should have expected, I would argue. Although it is obviously a 'simple' extension for some definition of 'simple'.

JM

[Dauphin]

Has repulsive anti-matter gravity been thoroughly debunked yet? My recollection from some years ago was that attempts to discount it theoretically keep failing, and that they'll need to show empirically that, say, an anti-hydrogen atom falls under gravity, rather than rises.

[Ben Kenobi]

As JM -and I think Ben, too- seems to be implying, I'm with the minority who would prefer to believe we don't understand how gravity works on a galactic scale, is all. Seems far infinitely more elegant, for all that cosmology seems determined to defy being intuitive for us in our frame...

There's a theory out there that requires no changes to Newtonian or Einsteinian mechanics, but can also explain the galactic rotation curves without invoking Dark Matter.

Jon, do you know John Moffat? His theory looks like it might have something to it. Pity KH isn't here, I'd like to know his thoughts on that. Plus, no Higgs either...

[Uncle Sparky]

A great Greek romance-

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I'm not sure it's clear that geocentric astronomers in the 17th century--or even aether-propounding physicists of the 19th--were actually doing science poorly. They turned out to be wrong, but they had reasons for believing what they did that were based on the best evidence and theories at the time.

I believe I said that. It's exactly my point, really.

Similarly, if it turns out there is no dark matter, it doesn't necessarily follow that cosmologists now are guilty of groupthink or any other kind of poor scientific practice. They might just be wrong.

They were just wrong, in that case, in unison, in large numbers. [blinks]

[Elok]

A bit late to the party, but my understanding was:

(sometime late Renaissance-ish) Copernicus comes up with idea, mostly sits on it but word leaks out
(turn of seventeenth century) Galileo actually defends idea publicly, but is such an incredible d-bag about it he effectively sets the cause back fifty years
(sometime after that) Kepler gets it nice and polished, it gains more acceptance

[ZEE]

Elok is a nerd.

[The Mad Monk]

AAHZ is a fool.

[ZEE]

a damn good one too.