I’ve been busy, and a bit exhausted, since the long series of posts on structure formation in the early universe. The thing I like about MOND is that it helps me understand – and successfully predict – the dynamics of galaxies.

This is what I hope will be the final installment in a series of posts describing the results published in McGaugh et al. (2024). I started by discussing the timescale for galaxy formation in LCDM and MOND which leads to different and distinct predictions.

As discussed in recent posts, the appearance of massive galaxies in the early universe was predicted a priori by MOND (Sanders 1998, Sanders 2008, Eappen et al. 2022). This is problematic for LCDM. How problematic? That’s always the rub. The problem that JWST observations pose for LCDM is that there is a population of galaxies … Continue reading The fault in our stars: blame them, not the dark matter!

Continuing our discussion of galaxy formation and evolution in the age of JWST, we saw previously that there appears to be a population of galaxies that grew rapidly in the early universe, attaining stellar masses like those expected in a traditional monolithic model for a giant elliptical galaxy rather than a conventional hierarchical model that … Continue reading Old galaxies in the early universe →

This post continues the series summarizing our ApJ paper on high redshift galaxies. To keep it finite, I will focus here on the growth of stellar mass. The earlier post discussed what we expect in theory.

Happy new year to those who observe the Gregorian calendar. I will write a post on the observations that test the predictions discussed last time.

I’ve been wanting to expand on the previous post ever since I wrote it, which is over a month ago now. It has been a busy end to the semester.

I was raised to believe that it was rude to tell people I told you so. Yet that’s pretty much the essence of the scientific method: we test hypotheses by making predictions, then checking to see which told us the correct result in advance of the experiment.

Some people have asked me to comment on the Scientific American article What if We Never Find Dark Matter? by Slatyer & Tait. For the most part, I find it unobjectionable – from a certain point of view. It is revealing to examine this point of view, starting with the title, which frames the subject … Continue reading What if we never find dark matter?

When I wrote about Nobel prizes a little while back, I did not expect to return to the subject.

Who we give prizes to is more a matter of sociology than science. Good science is a prerequisite, but after that it is a matter of which results we value in the here and now.