2025-01-01 MOND activity levels as estimated by Arχiv activity.

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It's time to update my data on "MOND" activity. First, the what/ why/ when.

A common plaint on the Internet is that "interesting" theories are being "suppressed" by … someone, rarely specified, for reasons eve more rarely specified. The Illuminati have an interest in suppressing techniques for running your gas-guzzler on water ; Donald Trump doesn't want the kompromat tapes that Vladimir holds to become public, whatever.

A while ago I was sufficiently irritated by this to actually look at one of the genuine scientific controversies, which greatly irks the Wingnut Fraternity - how "Big Physics" ignores alternatives to General Relativity because … no clearly-stated reasons, but it doesn't take long before someone points out that Einstein was a "cultural" Jew, and therefore a prime candidate for High Wizzzard of the Illuminati etc. etc. Which irritated me, so I decided to collect some data.

If theories are being actively suppressed, then you certainly wouldn't see papers on them being published out in, uh, public, where any YT-kook can see them (if they knew how to look, or cared to). Since most physics papers get published on "the Arχiv" before they go into their respective journals-of-publication, that's an ideal place to look. (The habit is spreading too: bioarxiv.org for the biological sciences; eartharxiv.org for the Earth sciences, and probably others in fields I'm not so familiar with.

Last year I collated the last few years of research results for a number of terms related to the ever-contentious problem of gravity &emdash; how does it relate to the structure of the universe (a lot of people don't like the counter-intuitive consequences of modern cosmology &emdash; even those who don't have particular invisible sky-fairies they want to proselytise for). That collection had some problems, which I address below, but showed that the "non-standard" theories do get some attention ; just not a lot of attention. It's almost as if the "suppression of independent thought" is profoundly inefficient, and instead not many physicists find the question (or this particular "solution" to it) to be interesting or productive. The level of interest is not greatly increasing or decreasing compared to the general changes in science publication.

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Data - the Kook's enemy.

Date

Annual publication numbers for various cosmological theory terms, in Arχiv abstracts over the years.

Date	Search terms
(year-end)	Mordehai Milgrom	MOND	Non-Newtonian Gravity	MOG	dark matter	Brans-Dicke [gravity]
Mordehai Milgrom	MOND	Non-Newtonian Gravity	MOG	dark matter	Brans-Dicke [gravity]
Total 1991-09-01 to 2001-12-31	22	54	54	0	3137	251
2001-12-31	4	38	46	16	538	18
2002-12-31	2	12	13	2	576	18
2003-12-31	1	22	17	2	691	25
2004-12-31	1	12	20	2	752	30
2005-12-31	2	35	22	2	876	34
2006-12-31	2	35	27	4	895	34
2007-12-31	2	49	24	2	1053	24
2008-12-31	3	61	20	3	1199	34
2009-12-31	4	51	23	6	1443	35
2010-12-31	5	50	38	4	1306	54
2011-12-31	4	60	35	5	1475	51
2012-12-31	5	42	23	6	1543	41
2013-12-31	6	56	33	3	1602	45
2014-12-31	3	58	33	8	1700	32
2015-12-31	3	40	33	5	1864	48
2016-12-31	6	51	32	6	1799	53
2017-12-31	2	55	39	17	1889	39
2018-12-31	3	48	35	16	1993	44
2019-12-31	4	55	34	8	2128	54
2020-12-31	3	51	46	19	2149	52
2021-12-31	2	43	47	9	2180	37
2022-12-31	4	63	44	11	2320	37
2023-12-31	4	85	51	24	2369	31
2024-12-31	1	59	34	11	2582	34

Notes

1. The term “non-Newtonian gravity” has a problem : it collects a lot of material like “non-Newtonian rheology” where gravity gets a mention ( e.g. . non-Newtonian fluids flowing on slopes). Which is perfectly valid science (Oh, I remember having to do my drilling engineering hydraulic pressure calculations on "non-Newtonian" models, on power-law models and at least one other ; every morning at 04:30 for the 06:00 report.) So, on no better grounds than that I’m going to swap that term for “Brans-Dicke gravity”, which is a term I’ve seen before. It actually pre-dates the "MOND" concept.
2. The Arχiv search engine has numerous complications, and I didn’t note last year’s search terms closely. Generally I'm searching in "Abstracts" (except for Mordehai Milgrom, an "Author") ; I'm searching in the "Physics(all)" space ; other terms are covered by this search link, and substitute dates and search terms as desired. That should make it repeatable over the years. Search URL : “ https://arxiv.org/search/advanced?advanced=&terms-0-operator=AND&terms-0-term=Brans+Dicke&terms-0-field=abstract&classification-physics=y&classification-physics_archives=all&classification-include_cross_list=include&date-year=&date-filter_by=date_range&date-from_date=2018-01-01&date-to_date=2018-12-31&date-date_type=announced_date_first&abstracts=show&size=50&order=-announced_date_first ”
   Don't forget to strip the enclosing quotes!
3. The different (probably) search details this year returned 3429 “dark matter" results last year, but this years searching, on the appropriate date range, returns 2369. That’s not good repeatability. So I have to re-do at least the "dark matter" results. The other terms are numberically insignificant, and I can't be bothered to repeat the search manually. Let's see what it's like next year. Having worked out the components of that search URL, I should be able to write it into a script for … wget or cURL. But how to parse the results?
4. Brans-Dicke theory has a Wiki page, and has been around longer than MOND. It’s interesting that this was trending slightly upwards until 2010~2014, but has been declining since.
5. I’ve re-done the “dark matter” queries with this year’s search parameters. The numbers are down &emdash; I was probably getting “dark” and “matter” last time, but now should just be getting “dark matter”. Or something like that. If I was doing a formal literature search, I’d probably investigate further.
6. Arχiv got started in August 1991, so searches from 1991-09-01 should work.
7. I need to get those gridlines aligned to year-ends - every 4th year or something like that.

Last year I posted a graph of the results. Same again this year, but with some more details on the axes and header.

Results

Again, "dark matter" is far and away the most popular of these different cosmologies. The figures for "non-Newtonian gravity" remain "flat" (bearing in mind that contains a significant amount of "viscosity" related research too). "MOG" (a variety of "MOdified Gravity" theories) continues to attract a little attention. My fairly-blind choice to look at "Brans-Dicke" gravity (I recognised the name, that's pretty much all!) has turned out to be interesting : until about 2010 to 2014 it was generating more publications, but since then the number has dropped, and the trend line shows that with reasonable accuracy. Those paper numbers are higher than I think could reasonably be explained by one retirement from the field ; maybe several. This is in contrast to the continuing modest rise in publication rates on "MOND".

TLDR; version : "suppression" is ineffective. Or non-existent.

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