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Physicists Howl at Dark Matter



 
 
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Old August 24th 06 posted to sci.astro,sci.math,sci.physics.relativity,sci.skeptic
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Default Physicists Howl at Dark Matter

Jack Sarfatti wrote:
I saw the top minds in physics go crazy trying to understand the Dark Side!
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night"
Alan Ginsburg "Howl"

New Scientist is competing now with The Onion.
http://www.theonion.com/content/

Even Bekenstein in desperation has become a Ptolemeist with epicycle
fudge factors.

Plain vanilla covariant non-aether GR works just fine. Dark energy is
zero point energy with w = -1 negative pressure. Dark matter is also
zero point energy with w = -1 with positive pressure at smaller scales
than dark energy because it clumps and mimics w = 0 CDM. Very simple.
LHC will not find any exotic dark matter particles. Omega(ZPF) ~ 0.96,
Omega(ordinary on shell quanta) ~ 0.04. Simple. End of story? Here I am
defending the orthodoxy.


Well, that's given though. Since the people who have been claiming
the existence of dark matter, not dark energy, have also been
claiming for 80 years, that it has nothing to do with particles,
of ANY kind, either exotic, or non-exotic.
Which is obviously what has the physics idiots scratching their
heads, since the only explanation they have is the
non-explantion of STUPER-SYMMETRY.




On Aug 24, 2006, at 8:54 AM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:


On Aug 24, 2006, at 7:25 AM, Gary S. Bekkum wrote:

Now Starkman's team has reproduced Bekenstein's results using just one
field - the new ether (www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/ 0607411). Even more
tantalisingly, the calculations reveal a close relationship between the
threshold acceleration a0 - which depends on the ether - and the rate at
which the universe's expansion is accelerating. Astronomers have
attributed this acceleration to something called dark energy, so in a
sense the ether is related to this entity. That they have found this
connection is a truly profound thing, says Bekenstein. The team is now
investigating how the ether might cause the universe's expansion to
speed up. Public release date: 23-Aug-2006
[ Print Article | E-mail Article | Close Window ]

Contact: Claire Bowles

44-207-611-1210
New Scientist
Ether returns to oust dark matterFrom his office window, Glenn Starkman
can see the site where Albert Michelson and Edward Morley carried out
their famous 1887 experiment that ruled out the presence of an
all-pervading "aether" in space, setting the stage for Einstein's
special theory of relativity. So it seems ironic that Starkman, who is
at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is now proposing
a theory that would bring ether back into the reckoning. While this
would defy Einstein, Starkman's ether would do away with the need for
dark matter.Nineteenth-century physicists believed that just as sound
waves move through air, light waves must move through an all-pervading
physical substance, which they called luminiferous ("light-bearing")
ether. However, the Michelson-Morley experiment failed to find any signs
of ether, and 18 years after that, Einstein's special relativity argued
that light propagates through a vacuum. The idea of ether was abandoned
- but not discarded altogether, it seems.Starkman and colleagues Tom
Zlosnik and Pedro Ferreira of the University of Oxford are now
reincarnating the ether in a new form to solve the puzzle of dark
matter, the mysterious substance that was proposed to explain why
galaxies seem to contain much more mass than can be accounted for by
visible matter. They posit an ether that is a field, rather than a
substance, and which pervades space-time. "If you removed everything
else in the universe, the ether would still be there," says Zlosnik.
This ether field isn't to do with light, but rather is something that
boosts the gravitational pull of stars and galaxies, making them seem
heavier, says Starkman. It does this by increasing the flexibility of
space-time itself . "We usually imagine space-time as a rubber sheet
that's warped by a massive object," says Starkman. "The ether makes that
rubber sheet more bendable in parts, so matter can seem to have a much
bigger gravitational effect than you would expect from its weight." The
team's calculations show that this ether-induced gravity boost would
explain the observed high velocities of stars in galaxies, currently
attributed to the presence of dark matter.This is not the first time
that physicists have suggested modifying gravity to do away with this
unseen dark matter. The idea was originally proposed by Mordehai Milgrom
while at Princeton University in the 1980s. He suggested that the
inverse-square law of gravity only applies where the acceleration caused
by the field is above a certain threshold, say a0. Below that value, the
field dissipates more slowly, explaining the observed extra gravity. "It
wasn't really a theory, it was a guess," says cosmologist Sean Carroll
at the University of Chicago in Illinois.Then in 2004 this idea of
modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) was reconciled with general
relativity by Jacob Bekenstein at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
Israel (New Scientist, 22 January 2005, p 10), making MOND a genuine
contender in the eyes of some physicists. Bekenstein's work was
brilliant, but fiendishly complicated, using many different and
arbitrary fields and parameters," says Ferreira. "We felt that something
so complicated couldn't be the final theory.Now Starkman's team has
reproduced Bekenstein's results using just one field - the new ether
(
www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/ 0607411). Even more tantalisingly, the
calculations reveal a close relationship between the threshold
acceleration a0 - which depends on the ether - and the rate at which the
universe's expansion is accelerating. Astronomers have attributed this
acceleration to something called dark energy, so in a sense the ether is
related to this entity. That they have found this connection is a truly
profound thing, says Bekenstein. The team is now investigating how the
ether might cause the universe's expansion to speed up.Andreas Albrecht,
a cosmologist at the University of Calfornia, Davis, believes that this
ether model is worth investigating further. "We've hit some really
profound problems with cosmology Ð with dark matter and dark energy," he
says. "That tells us we have to rethink fundamental physics and try
something new."Both Bekenstein and Albrecht say Starkman's team must now
carefully check whether the ether theory fits with the motions of
planets within our solar system, which are known to a high degree of
accuracy, and also explain what exactly this ether is. Ferreira agrees:
"The onus is definitely on us to pin this theory down so it doesn't look
like yet another fantastical explanation," he says.However, physicists
may be reluctant to resurrect any kind of ether because it contradicts
special relativity by forming an absolute frame of reference .
"Interestingly, this controversial aspect should make it easy to test
for experimentally," says Carroll. ###"This article is posted on this
site to give advance access to other authorised media who may wish to
quote extracts as part of fair dealing with this copyrighted material.
Full attribution is required, and if reporting online a link to
www.newscientist.com is also required. This story posted here is the
EXACT text used in New Scientist magazine, therefore advance permission
is required before any and every reproduction of each article in full.
Please contact . Please note that all material is
copyright of Reed Business Information Limited and we reserve the right
to take such action as we consider appropriate to protect such
copyright."THIS ARTICLE APPEARS IN NEW SCIENTIST MAGAZINE ISSUE: 26
AUGUST 2006Author: Zeeya MeraliIF REPORTING ON THIS STORY, PLEASE
MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE AND, IF REPORTING ONLINE, PLEASE
CARRY A HYPERLINK TO:
http://www.newscientist.comUK CONTACT - Claire
Bowles, New Scientist Press Office, London:Tel: 44-0-20-7611-1210 or
email CONTACT - New Scientist Boston
office:Tel: 617-386-2190 or email

[ Print Article | E-mail Article | Close Window ]

Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0607411From: T.G Zlosnik [view email] Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006
12:43:44 GMT (10kb)Modifying gravity with the Aether: an alternative
to Dark MatterAuthors: T.G Zlosnik, P.G Ferreira, G.D Starkman
Comments: Submitted to Physical Review Letters
There is evidence that Newton and Einstein's theories of gravity cannot
explain the dynamics of the universe on a wide range of physical scales.
To be able to understand the properties of galaxies, clusters of
galaxies and the universe on the whole it has become commonplace to
invoke the presence of dark matter. An alternative approach is to modify
the gravitational field equations to accommodate observations. We
propose a new class of gravitational theories in which we add a new
degree of freedom, the Aether, in the form of a vector field that is
coupled covariantly, but non-minimally, with the space-time metric. We
explore the Newtonian and non-Newtonian limits, discuss the conditions
for these theories to be consistent and explore their effect on
cosmology.Full-text: PostScript, PDF, or Other formats
References and citations for this submission:
SLAC-SPIRES HEP (refers to, cited by, arXiv reformatted);
NASA ADS;
CiteBase (autonomous citation navigation and analysis)


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