No Arabic abstract
I review the history and development of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) beginning with the phenomenological basis as it existed in the early 1980s. I consider Milgroms papers of 1983 introducing the idea and its consequences for galaxies and galaxy groups, as well as the initial reactions, both negative and positive. The early criticisms were primarily on matters of principle, such as the absence of conservation laws and perceived cosmological problems; an important step in addressing these issues was the development of the Lagrangian-based non-relativistic theory of Bekenstein and Milgrom. This theory led to the development of a tentative relativistic theory that formed the basis for later multi-field theories of gravity. On an empirical level the predictive success of the idea with respect to the phenomenology of galaxies presents considerable challenges for cold dark matter. For MOND the essential challenge remains the absence of a generally accepted theoretical underpinning of the idea and, thus, cosmological predictions. I briefly review recent progress in this direction. Finally I discuss the role and sociology of unconventional ideas in astronomy in the presence of a strongly entrenched standard paradigm.
There are a wide variety of different vector formalisms currently utilized in engineering and physics. For example, Gibbs three-vectors, Minkowski four-vectors, complex spinors in quantum mechanics, quaternions used to describe rigid body rotations and vectors defined in Clifford geometric algebra. With such a range of vector formalisms in use, it thus appears that there is as yet no general agreement on a vector formalism suitable for science as a whole. This is surprising, in that, one of the primary goals of nineteenth century science was to suitably describe vectors in three-dimensional space. This situation has also had the unfortunate consequence of fragmenting knowledge across many disciplines, and requiring a significant amount of time and effort in learning the various formalisms. We thus historically review the development of our various vector systems and conclude that Cliffords multivectors best fulfills the goal of describing vectorial quantities in three dimensions and providing a unified vector system for science.
Based on Newtonian dynamics, observations show that the luminous masses of astrophysical objects that are the size of a galaxy or larger are not enough to generate the measured motions which they supposedly determine. This is typically attributed to the existence of dark matter, which possesses mass but does not radiate (or absorb radiation). Alternatively, the mismatch can be explained if the underlying dynamics is not Newtonian. Within this conceptual scheme, Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a successful theoretical paradigm. MOND is usually expressed in terms of a nonlinear Poisson equation, which is difficult to analyse for arbitrary matter distributions. We study the MONDian gravitational field generated by slightly non-spherically symmetric mass distributions based on the fact that both Newtonian and MONDian fields are conservative (which we refer to as the compatibility condition). As the non-relativistic version of MOND has two different formulations (AQUAL and QuMOND) and the compatibility condition can be expressed in two ways, there are four approaches to the problem in total. The method involves solving a suitably defined linear deformation potential, which generally depends on the choice of MOND interpolation function. However, for some specific form of the deformation potential, the solution is independent of the interpolation function.
Verlindes heuristic argument for the interpretation of the standard Newtonian gravitational force as an entropic force is generalized by the introduction of a minimum temperature (or maximum wave length) for the microscopic degrees of freedom on the holographic screen. With the simplest possible setup, the resulting gravitational acceleration felt by a test mass m from a point mass M at a distance R is found to be of the form of the modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) as suggested by Milgrom. The corresponding MOND-type acceleration constant is proportional to the minimum temperature, which can be interpreted as the Unruh temperature of an emerging de-Sitter space. This provides a possible explanation of the connection between local MOND-type two-body systems and cosmology.
Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) is an empirical theory originally proposed to explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies by modifying the gravitational acceleration, rather than by invoking dark matter. Here,we set constraints on MOND using an up-to-date compilation of kinematic tracers of the Milky Way and a comprehensive collection of morphologies of the baryonic component in the Galaxy. In particular, we find that the so-called standard interpolating function cannot explain at the same time the rotation curve of the Milky Way and that of external galaxies for any of the baryonic models studied, while the so-called simple interpolating function can for a subset of models. Upcoming astronomical observations will refine our knowledge on the morphology of baryons and will ultimately confirm or rule out the validity of MOND in the Milky Way. We also present constraints on MOND-like theories without making any assumptions on the interpolating function.
Subject of our present paper is the analysis of the origins or historical roots of the Higgs boson research from a bibliometric perspective, using a segmented regression analysis in a reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). Our analysis is based on the references cited in the Higgs boson publications published since 1974. The objective of our analysis consists of identifying concrete individual publications in the Higgs boson research context to which the scientific community frequently had referred to. As a consequence, we are interested in seminal works which contributed to a high extent to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Our results show that researchers in the Higgs boson field preferably refer to more recently published papers - particular papers published since the beginning of the sixties. For example, our analysis reveals seven major contributions which appeared within the sixties: Englert and Brout (1964), Higgs (1964, 2 papers), and Guralnik et al. (1964) on the Higgs mechanism as well as Glashow (1961), Weinberg (1967), and Salam (1968) on the unification of weak and electromagnetic interaction. Even if the Nobel Prize award highlights the outstanding importance of the work of Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, bibliometrics offer the additional possibility of getting hints to other publications in this research field (especially to historical publications), which are of vital importance from the expert point of view.