Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> What happened to the recent work showing that galactic rotation curves are consistent with ordinary GR? Last I read, cosmologists were choosing to ignore it.

Gravitomagnetism is a well-understood and experimentally measured effect. It is also a very small effect, of the order v^2 / c^2 where v is the speed of the sources. In the galaxy, stars move with v/c ~ 1/1000, which means the gravitomagnetic correction is one in a million. So while N-body simulations do sometimes account for general relativistic corrections like these, they're not nearly large enough to remove the requirement for dark matter.

That is the simple reason the paper has been ignored by everyone in the scientific community and rejected from decent journals. Of course, this hasn't stopped hundreds of fluffy pop articles being written on it, or it getting posted every week on HN. The blind leading the blind.



What I am hearing is that nobody has found an error in his derivation; instead, everybody has chosen to continue skating on the v^2/c^2 estimate arrived at without having done the detailed maths.

In general, anytime mathematical rigor is at issue, I will prefer to bet on the plasma fluid dynamicist over the cosmologist.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: