by David Garofalo
When Vera Rubin discovered that Newton's second law applied to the gravitational force is not obeyed out there in the Universe at large, I was still in diapers. When I was in elementary school, a heretic had modified Newton’s second law and tried to get away with it by predicting velocity curves in galaxies with remarkable accuracy. By the time I was in graduate school I had learned enough about academia and the certainties of the men who fill the halls of the hard sciences to know that little attention would likely be paid to understanding such issues. If the masters of knowledge are correct and dark matter exists, why does Milgrom’s modification work so well? I predict that I will be back in diapers before this question is addressed, much less resolved, but please prove me wrong if you can.
Moti Milgrom’s modification kicks in at low acceleration when a << a_0: ma^2/(a + a_0) = Fg. Why this works so well in galaxies cries out for explanation.