2,376 karma · joined April 18, 2017
https://9bladed.com
https://wanderingmind.substack.com
Great work!
I did close them all: https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-co... (but alas, the number creeps up again)
Tips?
Okay, so maybe I did continue the argument a little :) I love for people working on alternative less mainstream ideas. But MOND was never very alive to begin with, let alone decades later. Let's move on.
While the bullet cluster may not be as definitive as we would like, it is at the very least very strongly suggestive of particle dark matter or something similar. As far as I remember modified gravitational theories without particle dark matter don't offer a good explanation of the bullet cluster (in short, evidence of a non- or weakly interacting but gravitational matter).
I won't argue with schemes like MOND or this proposal that can explain rotation curves, but the bullet cluster at the very least is a more interesting test these days. Without even a mention of some alternative explanation here (from my quick look), it is a non-starter for a dark matter-less theory. And a pretty glaring omission (again, maybe I missed it) for what is a well-known observation.
Still, alternatives for quantum gravity, and anything that might say something about dark energy, are exciting. Falsifiable ones especially. But if you didn't address the bullet cluster then...
After not getting a faculty job (and after a couple of postdocs) a wrote an essay about failure in academia. At the urging of a friend, I pitched it to a place that liked it and published it. The response was really surprising to me, all the kind random messages I got. And someone asked if I wanted to apply for a job opening they had, teaching writing at a university. A couple of weeks later I had moved and was in the classroom, the last place I expected to be. It was teaching in an area I never expected and not research in my field, but I've always enjoyed the teaching part of university life.
And that story, along with all the rest here, is what I tell my students about putting work out there. Good and surprising things happen!
See, for instance, Stigler's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy (for the concept an example itself)
Discussed previously many times in the past here [1], but thought it timely given [2] on the front page today.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/sep/07/change-...
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...