I was raised to believe that it was rude to tell people I told you so. Yet that’s pretty much the essence of the scientific method: we test hypotheses by making predictions, then checking to see which told us the correct result in advance of the experiment.

Some people have asked me to comment on the Scientific American article What if We Never Find Dark Matter? by Slatyer & Tait. For the most part, I find it unobjectionable – from a certain point of view. It is revealing to examine this point of view, starting with the title, which frames the subject … Continue reading What if we never find dark matter?

When I wrote about Nobel prizes a little while back, I did not expect to return to the subject.

Who we give prizes to is more a matter of sociology than science. Good science is a prerequisite, but after that it is a matter of which results we value in the here and now.

The time is approaching when Nobel prizes are awarded. This inevitably leads to a lot of speculation and chattering rumor. Last year one publication, I think it was Physics Today, went so far as to publish a list of things various people thought should be recognized.

I have said I wasn’t going to attempt to teach an entire graduate course on galaxy dynamics in this forum, and I’m not. But I can give some pointers for those who want to try it for themselves. It also provides some useful context for fans of Deur’s approach.

Given recent developments in the long-running hunt for dark matter and the difficulty interpreting what this means, it seems like a good juncture to re-up* this: The history of science is a decision tree. Vertices appear where we must take one or another branching. Sometimes, we take the wrong road for the right reasons. A … Continue reading Decision Trees &

I want to take another step back in perspective from the last post to say a few words about what the radial acceleration relation (RAR) means and what it doesn’t mean. Here it is again: This information was not available when the dark matter paradigm was developed. We observed excess motion, like flat rotation curves, … Continue reading Why’d it have to be MOND?

In the previous post, we discussed how lensing data extend the Radial Acceleration Relation (RAR) seen in galaxy kinematics to very low accelerations. Let’s zoom out now, and look at things at higher accelerations and from a historical perspective.

Flat rotation curves and the Baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR) both follow from the Radial Acceleration Relation (RAR). In Mistele et al. (2024b) we emphasize the exciting aspects of the former; these follow from the RAR in the Mistele et al. (2024a). It is worth understanding the connection.

Last time, we discussed the remarkable result that gravitational lensing extends the original remarkable result of flat rotation curves much farther out, as far as the data credibly probe. This corroborates and extends the result of Brouwer et al. They did a thorough job, but one thing they did not consider was Tully-Fisher.