Appendix/Ramblings/DarkMatterMusings

Musings Regarding Dark Matter and Dark Energy

[Joel E. Tohline recollection on 3/8/2015] It was during my first year (July 1978 - June 1979) as a J. Willard Gibbs Instructor in the Astronomy Department at Yale University that I started wondering whether the nearly ubiquitous display of "flat rotation curves" in disk galaxies might be explained, not via the dark matter hypothesis, but by invoking a $1/r$ force-law for gravity at large distances. My reasoning was simple:

1. I was uncomfortable with the "dark matter" hypothesis, which smelled to me like the story of aether, all over again.
2. If Isaac Newton had been handed Vera Rubin's observations — which showed that orbital velocities were approximately constant with distance — instead of Kepler's observations — which showed that orbital velocities behaved as $v\propto r^{-1/2}$ — he likely would have hypothesized that the gravitational acceleration due to a central point mass is proportional to $r^{-1}$ instead of $r^{-2}$.

While I put quite a lot of thought into this idea in the late '70s and early '80s — and I still give it some thought from time to time because I consider the astrophysics community's fundamental understanding of "dark matter" and now, too, "dark energy" to be weak — I produced only two publications on the topic, neither of which was in a refereed archival journal:

• Stabilizing a Cold Disk with a $1/r$ Force Law.
• Does Gravity Exhibit a $1/r$ force on the Scale of Galaxies?

See Also