The dark matter myth | Pavel Kroupa full interview

and then we can apply instead of Newton plus dark matter because it's almost relativistic we apply milgramian gravity without dark matter and study the structures which form and the calculations which we've done show that the uh what we observed so the population of galaxies uh comes out just right [Music] hello Krupa welcome to how the light gets in hello so in one of your many presentations on cosmology you start by saying that no physical Theory can never be proved to be right is that because we can never exclude the possibility of another theory coming along precisely some yeah um so you you can look for example at the Horizon so you stand on Earth as I said the ocean of the Ocean looks flat so you can bring up the hypothesis that the Earth is flat and just from the observation which are at uh which you have available there is a viable hypothesis which you can't disprove but equally viable is the hypothesis that the Earth is around and you just happen to see a fat Horizon because that's what happens when you step on a when you sit on a on a ball and both hypothesis are explained that particular observation of a flat Horizon but what about the claim that the Earth is round isn't that a final kind of precisely and so uh one needs to devise we have two hypotheses and we can test these now so the Flat Earth hypothesis would tell you that if you go up in in height take a balloon or you go up on a higher mountain or the to the top of a very tall Mast of a ship and you will see that the Horizon just extends and you can calculate how it would extend if it's completely flat right or the other hypothesis is that when you go far away you start seeing that the Earth is actually uh curved and so you test both hypothesis with that experiment and then yes the Flat Earth hypothesis is excluded falsified and you stop thinking about the flat one stops thinking about the fat Earth hypothesis and will only consider the round earth hypothesis but does that mean that it's proven to be right once and for all that's a very good question because we can never prove a theory right so um uh again so we see around earth now we've discarded the Flat Earth and the hypothesis now is it a perfect circle or is it not a perfect circle but of course all the remaining hypotheses which in in we will continue thinking about um of which they are still an infinite number still have to always be consistent uh with this Global observation of the earth is around dish right right it's of course not a perfect circle or a perfect sphere right let's move from uh sort of simple astronomy to particle physics and for particle physicists one of the most exciting findings for them in the last few decades was the discovery of the Higgs boson a particle that was predicted by the standard module in the 1960s but that was undetected until um 2012 when scientists working in the large hardened collider sort of detected it however I've heard you say that strictly speaking the claim that the Higgs boson exists is a non-scientific statement what do you mean by that well the correct statement would be the hypothesis that the Higgs boson does not exist has been falsified with five Sigma confidence I see so it's it's just a matter of being precise about the language with which we describe science and separating it from this kind of more colloquial kind of language yeah so so with the Higgs boson uh it's it's correct to say today the Higgs person exists and we um I don't want to use the word belief in science right but in that case I'm convinced the ex-person exists just like I'm convinced that that the proton exists or the electron exists which does not exclude always the possibility that they might be a completely different uh mathematical construction which would also contain entities which we call protons but which have a totally different theoretical description of course we don't know whether this exists maybe it exists we just don't know at the moment and what about Dark Matter to go from particle physics now to cosmology it's an entity that's postulated by cosmologists in order to make sense of observations that would otherwise conflict with general relativity and some other theoretical claims that cosmologists operate under the so-called standard model of cosmology so a lot of people are pretty convinced that dark matter does in fact exist are you skeptical of that statement for the same reasons you are for the Higgs boson statement of existence or are there other reasons that come into this yes no I'm um I wouldn't say I'm skeptical I would I would say that the existence of Dark Matter uh cold Dark Matter particles has been falsified with more than five Sigma confidence uh so um it's not there in fact it's much more than five Sigma so now um which means can you tell us what five sigmas for those who don't remember their statistics yeah exactly yeah that's so imagine you're You observe an apple falling down from a tree right and you could you see that for the first time and you say that's interesting why doesn't it fly up or go sideways right so you do another observation and again the upper falls down but you still you wouldn't be you wouldn't at that point say it's a law that it always falls down because two observations don't really make the decision right and um it's been established that um you sort of if you've completely lost confidence if you have to do this uh two million times that's the sort of um So You observe two million um experiments of the falling of Apple which detaches from the tree and if in every single case it always falls down following the same um description of how it gets fast as it falls at that point you you you would say you have the five Sigma confidence um which means that the probability that the Apple will not fall down has become negligibly small you just don't want to entertain that idea anymore because it will absolutely not be economic so going back to dark matter what makes you believe that darker matters existing has been disproven with such high confidence because we've done since 25 years we are studying the properties of galaxies and um we've put a lot of emphasis into understanding how galaxies function so we means myself and the collaborators I have in many countries and um there are a few key experiments you can do experiments in the sense of um uh the theory predict making us very clear hard predictions the Dark Matter Theory and then we can test that against the observations and one particularly uh strong uh prediction is uh that we if you have galaxies orbiting other galaxies and they are moving around in the dark matter Halos every galaxy has this huge Dark Matter hello and if it's moving around the stock matter hello it will be suffering it will be losing kinetic energies it will be getting slower and Falling Towards the center of the other Galaxy and merge so this is called the dynamic of friction it's the same as if you have a pot of honey and you put a marble into the honey it will not accelerate downwards but it will slowly sink although if you have the same pot without honey the ball would just fall down quickly in the hand it will sink slowly so that basically the same thing happens in a dark but the hello a Galaxy enters the stock but how long it slowly sinks down it does an extra red fast as it should if there were no Dark Matter hello so we've tested this observationally and the effect of the slowing down is not there yeah with uh with that type of confidence and um so galaxies are encountering each other far too rapidly and a case in point is the large measuring clouds which is just not racing past our milkway very close to the Milky Way actually and it's far too fast so and the small management counts too and so this was a prediction that was made by the the claim that dark matter exists and it's been falsified yeah absolutely Obsession so why do people still in your view cling on to this idea of dark magic well that's an interesting sociological problem which uh one would like to understand because it has no rational basis it is non-rational and it's probably related to um to um sociological pressures in the community so when students come into the research so they study that they want to do a project research project they are um for one thing attracted by their interesting ideas and and possibilities of doing research and the other by um how great the group looks like they would like to join so it's Tribal thinking and um and that pulls a lot of young people into an established um thinking because just that's where they can have a career that's where the funding is that's where the leaders of the field are famous they get prizes and that's a self-strengthening system in a scientific establishment which relies on competition for funding and that is simply and I think that's the whole fallacy of the situation that um that comes from American United States this concept of competition for funding in The Sciences is the most stupid idea you could have even thought up because that's absolutely not how science Works in order to um to discover the laws of nature you cannot compete with anybody you can only follow your intuition and work on that for as long as it takes to to develop an idea and maybe sometimes some ideas simply don't get developed into new theories or not successful theories but that's just what you have to do you cannot have scientists competing for funding in order to improve our understanding of nature that's just the most stupid idea ever put up in terms of our civilization you can do that in economics you get a better product and that will be bought and then you invest into that but not in science absolutely not science is Art yeah you you are you a scientist the brilliant scientist paints a picture which is the theory for that they sometimes have to invent their own tools like Newton had to invent the mathematics to actually do the unification hit which you did fully up with the motion of the Moon and yeah and that's upon us to to do today to allow the scientists to work creative creatively and the question is how does how does one sell this concept that you you allow some people to be supported by the taxpayer to um to do that it looks like a holiday you know people just dream of they go on a ship for three years and just dream up some ideas funded by the taxpayer right doesn't say it sounds right on the other hand um that's actually the basis of how our civilization progressed uh in every single case people always invented the new Concepts not under pressure but because they themselves wanted to understand what's happening out there that's so let's get back to the kind of scientific motivation for Dark Matter putting aside all these interesting kind of claims about the sociology behind it dark matter was originally postulated to explain some observations that didn't seem to make sense with the theory of gravity that we had what's the alternative do we need to abandon our theory of gravity do those observations mean that that's wrong well given the scientific deduction the dark matter does not exist with more than five Sigma confidence one cannot consider that model further and so we have to indeed consider how can we explain what we observe out there and so the next thing we do is to look at another proposition which was formulated by Milgram in 1983. it's a it's a different law of gravitation people call it the modified Newtonian Dynamics um nature doesn't modify anything so I would I prefer to just call it milgramian gravitational logarian Dynamics in equivalence with Newtonian gravitation and and that's what we're doing so we are working now to develop a new cosmological model with the basis of those equations of motion because um just like Newtonian gravitation we get equations we can put into type into the computer the differential equations which the particles have to follow and solve so we can do that in more we can do that in Newton that is falsified and so we are testing those calc those models under various boundary conditions one boundary condition is there's a hot big bang CMB is the Photosphere of the hot big bang and then structures evolve as Universe expands in a in a traditional Manner and then we can apply instead of Newton plus dark matter because it's almost relativistic we apply milgramian gravity without dark matter and study the structures which form and the calculations which we've done um show that the what we observed so the population of galaxies comes out just right yeah you get these disc galaxies with a proper correct properties you get the correct number of galaxies as a function of mass and the correct density of galaxies around us so that's most most most remarkable and exciting and um and so we now will continue this by looking at whether we need to relax um whether there are some tensions with this picture this needs larger scale calculations was there Big Bang and so on so is it this theory is called the modified Newtonian Dynamics does that mean that we're going a sort of step back from Einstein and Einstein's theory of general relativity as an alternative to Newton's theory of gravity and just modifying instead of making the leap from the Newtonian Paradigm to Einstein we're just modifying Newton what's what's the right way to think about it the way I think about it is that the correct one I don't know but um uh it's not a modification well technically the way it's done is it's a it is mathematically one starts with a Newtonian gravitation uh and modifies in the sense of of of putting into the equations that the accelerations change when the curvature of uh so the gradient of the potential so the curvature of space becomes um nearly negligible yeah and and um and that can be put into um a body on body fiber generalized poisson equation and the way I think about it is that Einstein gravitation so Einstein postulated that we understand gravitation as a consequence of curvature of space and time but that's just one possibility there are other possibilities uh gravitation could be an emerging phenomenon from the different regions of space having different information content that's from valinda all because particles are waves and so they react to changes of refractive index which they themselves change because the oscillations in some medium we call it the ether if you like and um so the thing is that gravitation is the least well understood a phenomenon I wouldn't want to call it a force because it might not be it doesn't seem to be a force um since the least understood phenomenon so it's not surprising that the one formulation which is currently um favored the einsteinian formulation fails and that's just not no surprise it could have worked well it doesn't so we need to go on from that Milgram gave us a non-relativistic formulation which seems to work incredibly well every every single prediction made in 1983 about objects which at that time had not been known they had astronomers didn't know about those type of objects and they've all been verified it's most it's one of the greatest success stories in science actually and um and so that's an indication that the true understanding of gravitation whether it's verilinda or particle wave nature um will need to allow and compass that formulation by by Milgram so we're often told that we have really good indications that general relativity is a better account of gravity because things like GPS that we rely on rely on general relativity and the way in which it relativizes time in some way in which it sort of time there's time dilation depending on the gravitational field and so on so does modified Newtonian Dynamics able to account for these discrepancies in time when it comes to different gravitational fields yes so um when uh formulating a new theory of gravitation one of course always must make sure that this new formulation accounts for the phenomena which have already been established and that's what Einstein did too Einstein when he reformulated the gravitation in terms of space-time curvature so geometric in interpretation there's a long section in his 1916 paper where he discusses how this new formulation becomes identical to Neutron's formulation because at that time it was one really known and well established that new transformulation works very well in the solar system and that's what Einstein was working with Einstein was only working in the solar system because galaxies had not been discovered right uh and so with uh Milgram and gravitations except exactly the same one make sure that the well-established regime which is the Newtonian gravitational regime works just as it does that also includes uh then by implication Einstein in the description within strong gravitational fields including our solar system and that the departure in the regime with space tanker which is extremely small or negligible so basically binkowsky space in their additional phenomena start playing a role and probably the quantum vacuum affects the Motions of objects in that regime and Milgram actually wrote a paper on the 7099 laying out this possibility and so this is a really exciting uh opening of of doors towards possibly merging of understanding of gravitation with quantum mechanics and the um the remarkable uh situation about this is that the uh because the physical physics community and the astrophysical community has been entirely ignoring this incredible opening of the doors on a massive scale which again I must say I do not comprehend how scientifically one can ignore such great ideas and not and that people didn't continue and develop them in any further way so I think we might be seeing a departure from unsteining gravitation because of quantum mechanics it's a possibility one of the claims that philosophers of science have sometimes made is that there is this thing called the undetermination theory that theories when when we have competing theories that are trying to explain the same phenomena data alone are not able to sort of determine which of the two theories is the correct one because theories are always capable of being adjusted in some ways having additional postulates and so on so do you think this is one of the reasons why the scientific immunity hasn't moved yet to modify Newtonian Dynamics and abandon general relativity because the data alone don't tell us which of the two is correct yes so I wouldn't go as far as to say that we have to Abundant General activity altogether because I was just saying that maybe if we just group on the mechanics on it in that sense as Milgram suggested maybe some reasonable approximation to reality can be achieved but um I think we are well beyond the situation where we have two theories competing um and um because of the falsification right so the the because we want to decide which Theory will be more relevant and is relevant for the theory for real Universe because the real Universe cannot be milgramian and have called Dark Matter in it this would not work and so I've we've devised this test of Dark Matter Theory which is extremely robust and does not allow any leeway in the sense of saying we can adjust the theory and that test is very simple we I was saying I mentioned that before we just measure the Motions of the Galaxy so how much energy does the Dark Matter hello absorb from the Motions of the massive objects within it and uh and that is simply not not evident in the data and so one particular very nice test which falsifies the Dark Matter existence of cold dark matter or warm dark matter with more than 10 Sigma confidence I mean that's uh false you couldn't imagine a more significant falsification than that I mean the rule is the existence of cold or warm dark matter is totally massively falsified right and and that's very simple so the bars of galaxies have bars if you look at a spiral galaxy it has the of many that have a bar you see the pictures of a disc and there's a big bar in the middle right and and those bars of rigid rotators they rotate around is the Galaxy is rotating so we can measure how fast they are rotating and this bar contains a lot of mess so as it's rotating it's like a spoon in a cup of coffee if you take a spoon and the coffee is there and you you um whirl around and the coffee starts to rotate and and you have to exert pressure on the on the spoon to keep it rotating otherwise the spoon will just uh stop rotating basically because the the coffee rotates but you wouldn't spit it up to this to the speed of the spoon you let the spoon go and the spoon slows down and so exactly the same thing happens with the Dark Matter here we've got the Galaxy the bar and the Dark Matter hello and the bar is like the spoon it's whirling around in the Stark Mata hello and speak and and exerting energy on it so that dark matter header starts to move around to the bar but not as fast and the bar slows and becomes smaller yeah and this has been calculated to death you can do this very precise calculations the computer and we do this effect is absolutely not in the data the Galaxies have big bars and they're rotating very fast too many galaxies in fact most galaxies with bars it's about half of all Galaxies have these bars which are big and rotate and this is physically impossible if there is dark matter and that's why I'm so completely confident there is no dark matter which means Dark Matter theory is not um cannot be entertained anymore it's just something a reasonable reasonable physicist who really wants to do serious research but not consider dark matter anymore can you tell us a little bit more about what the response to that critique is from the supporters of dark matter so apart from sort of explaining the phenomenon another microscopic scale by saying like well well economic interests involved in denying this what are the actual arguments what do people say when they are confronted with this data well I think the general argument would be to say that galaxies are very complicated and we can't do this exact calculations uh but that's what they always do I mean this com dark Better Community always argues that the normal matter which we have in the computers in terms of stars and gas is badly understood and that's why the models don't match with the observed galaxies and that these not understood baryonic processes or baryon means just normal matter so gas and stars that is not understood processes lead to these disagreements remarkably if we do well we we can do these calculations meanwhile extremely precisely so that actually generally it's not not a correct statement that that there are these uncertainties but even if there were these uncertainties and we would do this and we do these calculations in a growing gravity so we take the Galaxy with the bars and we set up the Galaxy's in Belgium in fact we let the galaxies form in Gravity from from cosmological gas clouds we get the galaxies as they are observed the bars are as fast as observed the match with the observational data with the known physics of the normal matter is stunningly good yeah so and we've tested we've had very interesting calculations and tests we've constructed galaxies with with very poor descriptions of these baryonic physics and with extremely complicated descriptions with radiation transfer Supernova explosions um chemicals so the transitions of of electrons and atoms absorbing radiation and um both of these uh calculations the one is very expensive takes a lot of time computes the other one is much much simpler quicker both of them lead they do not affect the results in any major significant way or I mean one Galaxy is maybe a little bit more larger than the other Galaxy starting with the same conditions but that is simply a level of uh disagreement which is which is not relevant and so if we do the calculations we the uncertainties in the baronic physics do not seem to affect the results in dark matter they use that as an argument to to to argue that the theory is correct it's just that we have two large uncertainties and I think that is wrong but even independent of those uncertainties the test of chandraseka dynamical friction so the Slowdown of the bars the Motions of satellite galaxies are independent of these uncertainties and there's no way of saving the Dark Matter picture given those data and can you tell us a little bit about um This Promise of a more complete theory of gravity being able to unify quantum mechanics with a more complete theory of gravity and how that promise might be found by by following in the footsteps of this milgramian model of gravity well I think that's um what I can only say to that is in the end only speculation but then of course speculation leads to uh the development ideas which can then be put into mathematical formulations the speculation is that um in um in the um so that this is what Milgram discussed in in his paper 1999 that um in in a normal in a space like we have here with with the space is quite curved which is why apples fall down quite fast because space series is curved and why we sit on the chairs and so on um so einsteining gravity applies and Newtonian gravitation applies and that's and that's uh uh comes from a property of how partic individual quantum mechanical particles accelerate in this curved uh space time in the sense of how the quantum vacuum is blue shifted in front of the particle when it's accelerated so the quantum vacuum is a is a vacuum where particles and anti-particles appear and then any light again and this is constant bubbling so it's content certain amount of energy and when you accelerate through this then the front is blue shifted exerts more pressure against you than the back and this leads to the uh um to the result that you need forced to x-ray the particle because you're sort of x-rating it against this vacuum of uh energy and in the situation where the um curvature is negligible the um this this larger symmetry between the front and the back and um and that cancels out and you get an effectively larger acceleration so this is one interesting idea um can one understand this in terms of quantum field Theory I do not know more research much more research has to be done on this there's an entirely different possible interpretation and that is that particles are just waves we know that there are waves and particles because you can describe a particle just as a wave packet the wave packet to business oscillation you you can hypothesize the existence of a medium Call It The Ether we can we can discuss whether the ether exists or not right that's a really interesting question but say there is this Ethan which light propagates and particles exist as oscillations the oscillations change the refractive index just tiny little amount it's an incredibly weak effects and then another particle which is also a oscillation which is made of all these waves which are creating this interference which we call the particle is then refracting on the change of the effectiveness of the one particle and that leads to a change in the position of this uh wave just naturally that you get that completely nitrogen Optics it's just refraction of waves and that leads to gravitation and we are actually we have a project in in Bon on exactly this question we've already published two papers on this we are now investing anything that's in more details so you sense you set up these waves and they actually do attract each other and so you get gravitation just from the fact that particles are quantum mechanical structures because there are these waves of course what do they oscillate in what's the medium in which these particles oscillator that's a big question yeah you did mention the term ether a few times I wanted to ask you is this the same ether that Einstein was sort of um well Einstein sort of disproves according to the standard account of special relativity right we so we used to think that there was an ether electromagnetic waves traveled through it it was a medium but then special relativity seems to suggest that that's that's not the case so is it the same ether is this a different kind of well so so mentioning that with ether of course um in the eyes of my colleagues would terminate my existence as a physicist because today the ether is a no-go right however Mickelson Morley in um the 19th century in the Case Western Reserve University United States made this famous experiment because the Molly experiment where they tested for the existence of The Ether by looking where the light rays are a blue or wretch of the depending on how the Earth is going around the Sun so the direction and they did not find an effect from that the conclusion is that The Ether does not exist and yes Einstein postulated that now um if we go back to this experiment one because morally they assume that the measuring devices were rigid and it's only the waves the the photons which um suffer the blue um uh or ratchet or zopler shift and um if however particles are themselves waves then they also suffered exactly the same Doppler shift which means you measurement apparatus just like the photon is is shifted is Doppler shifted in exactly the same manner and all the effects of The Ether cancel out you cannot detect it in that particular way and um the uh Einstein interpretation of a constant speed of light in the vacuum which means he has one has to when you have a strong gravitational field you essentially get more space yeah this is the interesting thing that if you take the Earth if you take the region around the Earth in a box and the Earth is not there you can calculate the volume in the box now you put the earth into this exactly same box and you you end up having more space in there that's curvature of space right and um that same effect as can be obtained by saying that the speed of light changes slightly because of the refractive index which is actually changed by this uh body of Earth and now that's an idea which we are entertaining with a tiny little project on the side just investigating the implications maybe we can throw it out of the window maybe we can see that there will be some sort of major fallacy but at the moment this has not happened well that would be a true kind of revolution in some ways overthrowing the Mickelson Morley experiment finding and well that that we have already published actually the the fact that the experiment was ill-device because um they did not understand at that time that particles are waves no they didn't know that the source discovered much later so obviously they wouldn't be able to have handled that but today we know that and so we can do this reinterpretation it's a very fascinating situation you know you can ask yourself what's holding up the cosmological model the Big Bang the CMB Cosmic microwave background is always the argument by the community to say we know the model is correct because of the CMB the CMB and we have great the theoretical we have great deep theoretical understanding of the CMB the power spectrum and so on it's supposed to be the footprint from them exactly yeah and um now um I had no reason to adapt it of course but what appeared fairly recently um was a research paper by a somebody in Prague actually who pointed out that there is dust between galaxies how did you get this interesting question but it's measured from a quasi-absorption runs so this dust between galaxies is a very small amount but there is another huge amount of space right if you take all the stuff between the galaxies you go backwards in time the universe was smaller so the dust density was higher The Starlight was blue and because he had more younger Stars the further go you go back you go in time the dust was warmer and if you now calculate how much photons the dust because the dust absorbs light from the stars in the surrounding galaxies reread dates this in the infrared and then this radiation is redshifted to come to us today if you do all of this calculation this is what the colleague of average sugar did and I did not know him before at all I just noticed his paper he showed that if you add up all the photos from all this dust going back to the Early times of the universe that flux is that same amount we observe at this as the CMB so since I've seen his paper I'm asking everybody I I know would be knowledgeable to tell me where is the error in his calculation because if there's no error then we have the nuclear bomb for cosmology because then the evidence for the big hot big bang disappears The only evidence you would have is that the universe is expanding which I think is an established observation because of the redshift but the CMB interpretation would still be cosmological it would just be dust and not the actual Photosphere of the universe completely changing the initial condition for any cosmological simulation you want to do so now we have to understand this that beverage should make an error in the calculation he published published it in 2018 no error has been discovered so far I've not heard of anything and um you know this means that we are truly looking at a one of the greatest possible Paradigm changes in our understanding of cosmology and all of Sciences which is comparable to um to the revolutions we we had with Copernicus and Darwin I think because um maybe in 50 years time we will understand the universe in a completely radical manner which people can't even most people can't even imagine today thank you very much well thank you it was a great pleasure for more debates talks and interviews subscribe today to The Institute of Arts and ideas at IAI TV

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

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Length: 35min 54sec (2154 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/jacktherer]

why are modified theories of gravity acceptable to the mainstream but modified theories of electricity are all just woowoo conspiracy garbage?