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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Glancing impacts on Earth

There is this guy who appears regularly on Twitter, trying to fill the shoes of Archimedes Plutonium, and the Expanding Earth guy, who asserts ad nauseam that the Puerto Rico back-arc basin and some structures in the Southern Andes are the product of glancing impacts by cosmic projectiles. He's a bit irritating - typically very dismissive of counter evidence, totally dismissive of plate tectonics possibly operating in "his" (I assume it's a "he" ; safe bet) area, but somewhat content that plate tectonics operate in the rest of the world. He's got a bit of and "Electric Universe" or "plasma physics" hang up too, associated with his putative impacts. He's probably also afraid of 5G telephones, and I think he's spoken approvingly of Expanding Earth ideas too.

A bog-standard, run of the Internet kook, in other words.

Well, I'm not saying that this piece's author is the same guy, or even knows of his existence, but this is the sort of thing that would greatly encourage the kook. I found this while checking for references about the potential "glancing impact" origin of Mars' Borealis (North Polar) basin.

On a Possible Giant Impact Origin for the Colorado Plateau

This is an Arxiv preprint, for a paper that was submitted to EPSL ("Earth and Planetary Science Letters" - a medium-hitter of a journal in the field) but with no mention of it actually being published. I'm not surprised.

So, firstly, it's a single-author paper. It would seem that Xiaolei Zhang hasn't managed to persuade any of his GMU (George Mason University, wherever that is) colleagues that his theory is valid. He's got a reasonable track record of publishing in "galaxy dynamics" (which he shoehorns into this paper too - confirming the identity of the author), but AFAICT, this is his only foray into geology/ planetary science. In itself, this isn't a disbarring factor, but it is a warning sign.

What is the theory? That about 750 Myr ago (in the Neoproterozoic era), the Earth suffered a "glancing blow" by an impactor to produce an astrobleme of about 640km diameter, which we now call the "Colorado Plateau". 

Aside : digging out the "area under discussion" was surprisingly hard - the author clearly thinks his audience has the same familiarity with the area that he does. There is a map - labelled as "Figure 1", but placed on P 52. That's an artefact of publishing conventions (let the journal arrange the figures into the text ; the author supplies them after the text) - annoying but not the author's fault. There's no legend on the map, which I think only shows volcanic rocks at surfaces versus "other" - which looks very single minded from a geologist's PoV.

Now, this is where the author departs from conventional cratering theory (to put it politely). Given the dimensions of the area considered "anomalous", and an estimate for how deeply the anomalies are incised into the Earth (estimate : 16km, but this seems to be derived from conventional cratering scaling laws, which this paper is rejecting for this "feature" - that point needs justification) then the author derives a simple geometrical estimate for the size of the "grazing" impactor as "Mars size". Actually, "3208km". The calculation used is the inverse of the well-known one for "distance to horizon from ships mast/ cliff, whatever". An allowance is made for drag changing the travel vector of the impactor by several degrees. But that's just about bonkers.

At this sort of scale, planets don't have significant strength. Their spherical shaoe is because the strength of the rocks is negligible compared to the hydrostatic forces due to their weight. Essentially, planets behave as strengthless drops of liquid. A contact like that would leave both objects with surfaces vibrating up and down by hundreds if not thousands of km until the energy is dissipated through most of the mass of the bodies.

It's also a very improbable contact. Even a small degree closer to head on, and the bodies would have merged, or generated so much ejecta that there would have been global secondary impacts, if not forming a moon of orbiting ejecta. And if the alignment had been 16km in the other direction (0.5% of impactor diameter) then it would have been a near miss.

It seems the geological data the astronomer is tieing onto is reporting of apparent horizontally directed shear at high levels in the crust of the Colorado plateau, combined with the Plateau's elevation. He's also relying on there being some great mystery about the so-called "Great Unconformity" observed in the Neoproterozoic of the Grand Canyon. (We have a "Great Unconformity" covering about the same Interval here in Scotland, but we don't blame it on wildly unusual events.)

The author ascribes the appreciable NW-SE elongation of the "Plateau" to the motion of the "impactor" ("grazer"?), but makes very little mention of the Sudbury structure in the Canadian Shield, which is generally accepted as being an impact structure that has been compressed on a NW-SE axis to have about twice the NE-SW dimension compared to the NW-SE dimension. The deformation of Sudbury is generally ascribed to continent-scale compression during the Grenville orogeny shortly after the impact. The more modest non-circularity of the posited Colorado Plateau structure is as easily explained by distortion since it's formation - regardless of intrinsic (e.g. mantle plume) or extrinsic (impact, the FSM's paintbrush) origin. (I emphasised elongation versus compression to avoid people thinking there was some stress field similarity - the elongation is similar, but the direction is opposite.)

Memo to astronomical dynamicists : you leave the geology alone, and I'll leave stirring the pot of star alone. OK?

Methusalah's star

I'm composing a mail for His CeilingCatness at WEIT, but it needs work.

So far : 

A common attack tactic for creationists is general assault on science - which they frequently support by deliberate mis-reading of reports, and/ or mixing of data from different eras. As you well know.

A popular target is that in the mid-late 1970s some stars had their ages estimated up in the 10+Ga (giga-annum, billion years ago) age range, while measurements from the ground put the cosmic microwave background at around 6 to 7 billion years. Obvious fodder for the god-squaddies. "Science can't be right, therefore God!"

This factoid sometimes gets described as the "Methuselah Star" and variations thereof.

One of the particular stars involved, and the most extreme example is in the Henry Draper star catalogue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Draper_Catalogue, number HD 140283 (catalogue data and references at http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-basic?Ident=HD+140283&submit=SIMBAD+search). This is a spectroscopic catalogue that was published 1918-1924. 19-teens era spectroscopy required relatively bright stars, and it should be no surprise that "Methusalah's Star" is quite close (parallax 16.1140+/-0.0720 milliarcseconds (from SIMBAD, link above) - translating to 62+/-0.1 parsecs, 202.4+/-0.3 light years. That's about the total thickness of the Milky Way's "disc" ; the Milky Way has a shape similar to a CD or DVD disc. Really quite close! Corollary : in the rest of the galaxy, there are probably a lot of equally old, if not older, stars.

Multiple measurements since the 70s have improved our estimate of the age of the universe (BOOMerang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOOMERanG_experiment, WMAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMAP Planck, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_Surveyor), and converged on 13.772±0.040 Ga as the age of the CMB - which is about 370,000 years after the big bang ( 0.00037 Ga - compare with the uncertainty cited above). Obviously that no longer conflicts with the age estimate for "Methusalah's Star".

Having updated the age of the universe, and the distance to the "Methusalah Star", what about it's age? Well that has been updated too. (Arxiv link below) Unfortunately, stars don't come with "Best Before" dates, or even interesting sets of isotopes (which we can read at many trillions of km range), so estimating their ages is rather difficult. But that has improved even more since the 1970s then the age estimates for the CMB.

What initially attracted attention to HD 140283 - why indeed, the astronomers producing the catalogue considered it worth taking note of - is that it's spectrum contained very few, weak absorption lines for what the astrophysicists call "metals" (their jape is that anything which is not hydrogen or helium is a "metal" ; hilarious!). In the 19-teens that was just a datum. As the characterisation goes, astrophysics at that time was more "stamp collecting" than "science". However when Hoyle (and others) developed a theory of powering stars by nucleosynthesis in the 1930s and 40s, this both justified the value of "stamp collecting science" and provided a tool for understanding the ages of stars.

[explain stellar age modelling]

Need to keep the emphasis on nucleosynthesis and core heat production, not get side-lined into primordial elements.