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James Webb Space Telescope finds evidence for alternate theory of gravity

(thedebrief.org)
355 points jchanimal | 1 comments | 16 Nov 24 18:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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samsartor ◴[16 Nov 24 20:21 UTC] No.42158987[source]▶
My hangup with MOND is still general relativity. We know for a fact that gravity is _not_ Newtonian, that the inverse square law does not hold. Any model of gravity based on an inverse law is simply wrong.

Another comment linked to https://tritonstation.com/new-blog-page/, which is an excellent read. It makes the case that GR has never been tested at low accelerations, that is might be wrong. But we know for a fact MOND is wrong at high accelerations. Unless your theory can cover both, I don't see how it can be pitched as an improvement to GR.

Edit: this sounds a bit hostile. to be clear, I think modified gravity is absolutely worth researching. but it isn't a silver bullet

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1. ajross ◴[16 Nov 24 20:45 UTC] No.42159161[source]▶
To be fair, there are relativistic generalizations of MOND, in the sense of relativistic theories that simplify to MOND dynamics in the low energy case. My understanding (this not being my field) is that they're sort of kludgey and non-calculable and that no one takes them very seriously. All the "real work" on MOND is just done using the classical stuff.

And yeah, that seems like pretty terrible cheating. It's one thing to hang a big theory on a single conjecture, but you still need to be trying to prove the conjecture.