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355 points jchanimal | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.419s | source | bottom
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samsartor ◴[] 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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meindnoch ◴[] No.42159582[source]
>We know for a fact that gravity is _not_ Newtonian, that the inverse square law does not hold

[citation needed]

The consensus is that gravity - outside of extreme mass/energy environments - works just as Newton described it to many many decimal places.

Emphasized part added because people in the replies thought that I literally think that General Relativity is somehow wrong. Don't be dense. All I'm saying is that gravity at galactic scales works as Newton described it. General Relativity has extremely tiny effect at those scales.

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EPWN3D ◴[] No.42159764[source]
You're simply wrong. There's no other way to put it. The GPS system would have been simply impossible to deploy without the general theory of relativity. There's no extreme energy or mass involved, just precision requirements that are influenced by the minuscule differences in time experienced by the surface of the earth and orbiting satellites.

Also Newton's laws famously could not account for Mercury's orbit. Mercury is just an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary star. Nothing extreme is involved. He knew his laws were incomplete. But they were so dead-on in basically every other scenario that could be physically observed at the time that he figured there was some small tweak missing (or maybe another planetary body that hadn't been spotted yet).

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meindnoch ◴[] No.42160083[source]
Easy there champ. Noone is shitting on general relativity.

All I'm saying is that the effect of general relativity at galactic scales is so minuscule, that galactic dynamics is - for all intents and purposes - governed by the Newtonian limit of gravity.

If you propose that gravity doesn't behave like the Newtonian limit at those scales, then you're contradicting general relativity as well, since the far-field limit of the Schwartzschild metric is literally Newton's inverse square law.

In layman terms, modified Newtonian gravity, that the article talks about, is an attempt to explain why galaxies don't rotate the way they should according to Newton (and Einstein, because at those distances the two are the same!!!).

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1. jfengel ◴[] No.42160505[source]
I had the impression that "shitting on general relativity" was exactly what MOND was about. That is, it starts from the position that Einstein is wrong, and searches for ways to support that.
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2. meindnoch ◴[] No.42160565[source]
The Wikipedia article on MOND literally starts with galaxy rotation curves: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics

There's zero mention of MOND being a rejection of general relativity.

OF COURSE, any tweaking of Newton's formula at galactic scales will necessarily invalidate general relativity, since general relativity predicts Newton's formula at those scales! But MOND tries to work backwards: they propose a modification of the far-field Newtonian formula, and the belief is that it can eventually be worked out to be a limiting case of a "modified general relativity", for lack of a better name. Just how Newtonian gravity was eventually worked out to be a limiting case of a theory called general relativity.

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3. throwawaymaths ◴[] No.42160592[source]
Can you explain how MOND shits on GR? My understanding is it's more like. "GR is mostly right but...". As for MOND being exclusively Newtonian, yeah. In terms of solving the math, you gotta crawl, walk, run. Let's not kid ourselves, GR invokes way harder math than algebra and simple integral calculus. TeVeS Is a first attempt at "walk", let's say, but even it might not be correct even if adjusting gravity may be correct.

If someone emerges with a proof that the two systems are irreconcilable then yeah you have an argument that it's "shitting on GR"

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4. at_a_remove ◴[] No.42162839[source]
Hi! Physics BS, but they let me take some grad courses, including a Spacetime and Relativity class. I can help.

The word "mass" is used in physics in three different general contexts. First, we have mass in mass-energy, as in "how much energy can I get for trading in this mass?" Mass-energy is the coin paid as the price of existence. If it exists, it has mass-energy. Mostly mass for us. Mostly. We can skip that one for now.

The second context of mass is inertial. Mass has the property of inertia, of resisting a change in its direction or speed. It resists stopping if it is motion, and if it is stopped, it resists moving. The degree of the resistance is also called mass. Put a pin in this one.

The third context of mass is gravitational. Two masses, attracting one another because a force between them, a force which is not based on charge or the relatively nearby exchange of some more exotic bosons, no, just attraction based on how much mass is present. Nothing more special.

Now, curiously, values of each one of these seem to agree!

Einstein's absolute core concept in general relativity, the idea from which all else is built, is that inertial mass is identical to gravitational mass, not merely in number, but so fundamentally intertwined that there is no real difference between them, other than being two faces of the same coin. Now, that does not sound like much, but it gives birth to experiments such as an elevator which is falling toward versus an elevator floating far from gravitational sources, and that they are, from the inside of the elevator, impossible to differentiate.

Einstein then constructs general relativity from this, that the "m" in "F = ma" is identical to the first m in "F = -G m1 * m2 / r^2"

In MOND, the two ms are not identical, they only appear close most places, and so you cannot construct general relativity atop it. You will get most correct approximations but you're missing out in some cases.

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5. Iwan-Zotow ◴[] No.42164831[source]
> There's zero mention of MOND being a rejection of general relativity.

you know what N in MOND stands for, right?

6. throwawaymaths ◴[] No.42169452{3}[source]
Why would they not be identical? You'd change either the Fg function or adjust F=ma (more common). The weak equivalence principle holds in MOND IIUC. You can't make a statement about the strong equivalence principle until the resolution of MOND with GR is well-defined, in which case the strong equivalence principle may still hold.

Anyways, to claim that failing equivalence principle is disqualifying is begging the question since support of the equivalence principle depends on the observations... And already we observe the rotation curves are "messed up". If that means EP is violated, so be it?

You wouldn't argue against a symmetry violation like CP because "it makes the cute rule fail"