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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> Why does MOND keep showing up on HN? Pretty odd considering it's not particularly popular elsewhere and fails to explain a lot of observations of dark matter (bullet cluster, CMB).

And DM fails to explain flat rotation curves out to 1000 parsecs, or how MOND was able to make so many successful a priori predictions where DM has to be curve fitted after the fact. This paper is just the latest to refute LCDM, but no doubt proponents will add yet more parameters to correct for this failure, as they have done many times in the past when observations refuted DM predictions.

Honestly, you and many others have fallen for the DM propaganda. Both DM and MOND are problematic and fail in various ways. DM is not nearly as successful a scientific theory as most think, and MOND is not nearly as problematic:

From Galactic Bars to the Hubble Tension: Weighing Up the Astrophysical Evidence for Milgromian Gravity, https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/7/1331

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What would cause the large majority of a scientific field to fall for propaganda? If MOND is predictively superior then why is it not accepted?

The simple answer is 1) because physicists don't want to muck with general relativity which has had many successes across sub-galactic scales, so they are trying as hard as possible to jam a particle into the hole that's been observed when extending GR/Newton to galactic scales, 2) MOND is just an "effective theory" that seems to fit observations but doesn't really have a fully fleshed out theory explaining why this change to gravity happens; this "inelegance" rubs math-oriented physicsts the wrong way.

I've mentioned elsewhere here that astrophysicsts tend to prefer DM because they like particles and mathematical elegance, and astronomers are more open to MOND because they like theories with few parameters that make successful predictions (a reductive generalization, but broadly true I think). JWST has validated many MOND predictions, so I hope people open their minds a little more now, but as I said, neither theory is fully satisfactory in the end.

Edit: the author of this post is an astronomer that has been working in this field for a long time and he posted another article that reviews MOND and LCDM with some history:

https://tritonstation.com/2023/01/05/question-of-the-year-an...

There are also tremendous social/professional/monetary incentives to stick to Lambda-CDM (or whatever the consensus happens to be.)

There's also outside support due to converging interests. If DM is a particle that gives particle physicists an excuse to fund numerous experiments in an attempt to detect it. There are just more physicists motivated overall to prefer particle DM.

It's also safe. There is no reputational risk because "everyone" (who matters to you professionally) already agrees with you. There isn't much immediate upside to sticking your neck out. Especially in the era of social media.

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