Stacy McGaugh Quotes (10 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Novel Test of Modified Newtonian Dynamics with Gas Rich Galaxies

Stacy McGaugh

Stacy McGaugh: 10 quotes 0 likes

Famous Stacy McGaugh Quotes

“Why does MOND get any predictions right? It has had many a priori predictions come true. Why does this happen?”

Stacy McGaugh

[Stacy McGaugh, "Degenerating problemshift: a wedged paradigm in great tightness", Triton Station blog, 30 April 2017, http://tritonstation.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/degenerating-problemshift-a-wedged-paradigm-in-great-tightness/]

“A long standing prediction (Milgrom 1983) of MOND is that rotating galaxy curves will fall on a single mass-velocity relation with slope 4: Mb \propto Vf4. This prediction is realized in multiple independent data sets. Gas rich galaxies fall where predicted by MOND with no free parameters. There are not many predictions in extragalactic astronomy that fare so well a quarter century after their publication. … a physical understanding for why galaxy formation in the context of ΛCDM should pick out the particular phenomenology predicted a priori by MOND remains wanting.”

Stacy McGaugh

[Stacy McGaugh, 2011, The Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation of Gas-Rich Galaxies as a Test of ΛCDM and MOND, p. 16, ApJ, http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.2934]

“… It was (in part) Gross’s excessive enthusiasm for string theory in the mid-80s that drove me (as an impressionable grad student at Princeton) away from theoretical physics (and into astronomy). String theory may have been a beautiful idea, but it made no predictions that could be tested experimentally in the then-foreseeable future. That’s not science.  A quarter century later and the theoretical physics community has yet to wake up and realize that there is new physics right under their noses – just not the new physics they’ve been expecting (GUTs, strings, membranes, etc.). Galaxy dynamics are consistent with a single, universal force law, but this unexpected behavior has largely been ignored because it doesn’t fit with particle theorists’ dreams of super symmetric dark matter particles. That we do not understand the observed behavior makes it more interesting than the “expected” (but unobserved) new physics: who ordered this?”

Stacy McGaugh

“The current cosmological paradigm, the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant, requires that the mass-energy of the Universe be dominated by invisible components: dark matter and dark energy. An alternative to these dark components is that the law of gravity be modified on the relevant scales. A test of these ideas is provided by the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR), an empirical relation between the observed mass of a galaxy and its rotation velocity. Here, I report a test using gas rich galaxies for which both axes of the BTFR can be measured independently of the theories being tested and without the systematic uncertainty in stellar mass that affects the same test with star dominated spirals. The data fall precisely where predicted a priori by the modified Newtonian dynamics.”

Stacy McGaugh Novel Test of Modified Newtonian Dynamics with Gas Rich Galaxies

[21 March 2011, Novel test of modified Newtonian dynamics with gas rich galaxies, Physical Review Letters, 106, 12, 121303, 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.121303]

“My gut reaction to all these questions is negative. But it appears that one set or the other must be answered in the affirmative. Either way, we are missing something fundamental about the nature of our universe.”

Stacy McGaugh

[Stacy McGaugh, http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/boileddown.html, "The MOND Issue"] at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2014.

“I came to the subject a True Believer in dark matter, but it was MOND that nailed the predictions for the LSB galaxies that I was studying (McGaugh & de Blok, 1998), not any flavor of dark matter. So what I am supposed to conclude?”

Stacy McGaugh

[Stacy McGaugh, http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/burn1.html, Why "Consider MOND?"] at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2014.

Stacy McGaugh Quotes

“One should not only be truthful, but as complete as possible. It does not suffice to be truthful while leaving unpleasant or unpopular facts unsaid.”

Stacy McGaugh

[Stacy McGaugh, http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/inthon.html, "Intellectual Honesty, The Mond Pages"] at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2014.

Truth

“I have experienced time and again people dismissing the data because they think MOND is wrong, so I am very consciously drawing a red line between the theory and the data.”

Stacy McGaugh

as quoted in [Cooper, Keith, Correlation between galaxy rotation and visible matter puzzles astronomers, 7 October 2016, physicsworld.com, http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2016/oct/07/correlation-between-galaxy-rotation-and-visible-matter-puzzles-astronomers]

People , Thinking , Time , Drawing

“The concordance model of cosmology, ΛCDM, provides a satisfactory description of the evolution of the universe and the growth of large scale structure. Despite considerable effort, this model does not at present provide a satisfactory description of small scale structure and the dynamics of bound objects like individual galaxies. In contrast, MOND provides a unique and predictively successful description of galaxy dynamics, but is mute on the subject of cosmology. … it is far from obvious that the mass spectrum of galaxy clusters or the power spectrum of galaxies can be explained in MOND, two things that ΛCDM does well. Critical outstanding issues are the development of an acceptable relativistic parent theory for MOND, and the reality of the non-baryonic dark matter of ΛCDM. Do suitable dark matter particles exist, or are they a modern aether?”

Stacy McGaugh

A Tale of Two Paradigms: the Mutual Incommensurability of LCDM and MOND, Stacy McGaugh, 29 Apr 2014, updated 17 May 2014 http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7525,

Reality , Parent , Effort , Universe

“People have been looking for this dark matter because there is a Nobel prize, for sure, waiting for whoever discovers it.”

Stacy McGaugh

[Stacy McGaugh, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0oZQpQbFx4, Dark Matter or Modified Gravity?, YouTube, 2 July 2015] (at 21:30 of 53:37)

People , Waiting