There is nothing there (Xenon Collaboration)
In article , jacobnavia
writes:
Anyway I would like to know what do you think about MOND. Why it hasn't
been accepted by the community at large? What are the problems with it?
[[Mod. note -- There are two "aesthetic" objections to MOND which
account for a lot of its low acceptance:
* Ockham's razor suggests "not multiplying hypotheses unneccsarily",
and hypothesizing that there's some matter clustered around galaxies
which is hard to detect with today's telescope technology (i.e.,
dark matter) seems a much lesser extrapolation than hypothesizing
either a modification to gravity (MOND) or a whole new force unrelated
to gravity.
* It's hard to construct a MOND theory which respects what we know
about special relativity: the basic idea of MOND is that you modify
gravity in "weak fields"... but how do you define "weak" in an
observer-independent way? There have been some attempts made
in this direction (like TeVS), but they have other problems.
-- jt]]
I agree with what the moderator wrote.
Personally, I think that there is something interesting with regard to
MOND phenomenology, and I think that not enough people appreciate how
much there is. It is not just flat rotation curves. Much of it is
bread-and-butter astronomy and astrophysics which many people who work
on cosmology are not that familiar with. I think some progress were
made if MOND phenomenology were more common knowledge.
At the same time, I think that the MOND camp are sometimes guilty of the
"LambdaCDM doesn't work because we haven't seen WIMPs" argument. A
little less heat in the debate would shed more light for both sides.
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