Newton and Einstein Ideas Faulty?

[Garr]

http://www.discover.com/issues/aug-06/cover?page=1

Mordehai Milgrom never wanted to be a heretic. Twenty-five years ago, while poking around for a meaty research problem, he found one that changed the course of his career—and that might yet transform our most fundamental understanding of the universe. His ideas, long relegated to the fringes of physics, where all but cranks fear to tread, have finally become too intriguing for his mainstream colleagues to ignore. Milgrom's heresy? He denies the existence of dark matter, the shadowy and thoroughly hypothetical stuff generally held to make up 80 percent or more of all matter in the universe. Even though dark matter has eluded all attempts at detection, most cosmologists are convinced it must be out there. Without it, there's no explanation for much of what they see in the cosmos.

Or at least there hadn't been until Milgrom's break with orthodoxy. His alternative not only eliminates dark matter, it strikes at the heart of modern physics. In short, Milgrom thinks that Isaac Newton's laws of gravity are incomplete. Unlike many radical alternatives to conventional physics, Milgrom's brainchild—known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND—has not withered under scrutiny. Attacked? Yes. Ridiculed? Certainly. Refuted? No.

A little more than a year ago, Milgrom, a professor of physics at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, gained new support for his ideas when his longtime collaborator, Jacob Bekenstein, published a new, more powerful version of the theory, one fully consistent with Einstein's general theory of relativity. With this advance, MOND is poised to go head-to-head with dark-matter theories in describing how galaxies form and evolve. Should MOND prove successful, thousands of papers in mainstream cosmology will become obsolete overnight. And that is just half the story. If Milgrom can claim victory, he will have wrought the most dramatic revision of our understanding of gravity since Einstein's work of almost a century ago.

Click the link above for more!!!

[Grindspine]

Now THAT is news...

That being said, to my novice understanding, so much of physics is abstracted from math... I wonder how so much solid math can point evidence toward something if it's not there. If I had a little more knowledge on the subject, it would definitely be intriguing to hear a comparison between the dark matter theories and these new theories.

[Garr]

It makes me want to find this guys papers, and the papers of his supporters and look them over. I'm by no means a mathematician or a physicist, but I understand the base concepts and I think that this would be an interesting and enlightening journey through what may be the first major upheaval of standards in a couple hundred years. This is akin o the discovery that the Earth was flat, or that the Earth revolved around the sun, or that CWallace is actually straight.

[Leon]

i'm a physicist

one of the things that points to our faulty understanding of gravity is the fact that the Voyager satellite, the one that recently passed the reaches of Pluto, isn't where we think it should be. given our model of gravity, and all the calculations that can be done, it's not where we think it should be.

and honestly, how are we supposed to have a good understanding of gravity? all we really have to go on is what terrestrial experiment tells us. sure we can look out into space, but events in space are both very long, and take place over distances which our Newtonian understanding of gravity just doesn't hold to.

i've had the same idea for a while now, as i'm sure many have. the tough part of presenting a viable theory to the physics community is to spend a year (or 25) developing, refining, and researching it. that's too much work