GRAVITY IS BUNK:

Reliance on Indirect Evidence Fuels Dark Matter Doubts: Pinning down the universe's missing mass remains one of cosmology's biggest challenges (Bruce Dorminey, December 30, 2010, Scientific American)

But the dark stuff itself has yet to be detected, either directly, in particle physics laboratories as a new subatomic particle, via neutrino telescopes also operating in the subatomic realm, or with concrete evidence of such hidden matter using telescopes operating in the electromagnetic spectrum. Some astrophysicists are hopeful that the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope will deliver corroborating, if still somewhat indirect, evidence for the mutual annihilation of dark matter particles in the galaxy.

"Dark matter comes about because people unquestionably find mass discrepancies in galaxies and clusters of galaxies," says Mordehai Milgrom, an astrophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

Stars at the very edges of spiral galaxies, for instance, rotate much faster than can be explained by Newtonian gravity alone; the picture makes sense only if astrophysicists either modify gravity itself or invoke additional gravitational acceleration due to an unknown source of mass such as dark matter.

"The mass of visible matter falls very short of what is needed to account for the gravity shown by these systems," Milgrom says. "The mainstream assumes it is due to the presence of dark matter, while others, like me, think that the theory of gravity has to be modified."

One if the endearing things about Sciencism is the tendency to make fun of things like the elaborate gyrations that used to be dreamt up in order to preserve the orbit of planets around the Earth at the same time that you're torturing your own systems in order to preserve a failed paradigm.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 31, 2010 8:58 AM