🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1d78l7INNhu2@agate.berkeley.edu> ted@physics1 (Emory F. Bunn) writes:

>I believe that the effect Matt is referring to is the following:
>If you measure the orbital speeds of objects in our galaxy, and
>use the laws of mechanics to determine the amount of matter in the
>galaxy, you find a need for some dark matter.  If you do a similar
>experiment over a larger distance scale, say by measuring the orbital
>properties of a pair of binary galaxies, you need an even larger
>density of dark matter.  If you keep going to still larger scales,
>you find an even greater required density.

Ah, thank you for this explanation, and my apologies to you and Matt
for completely misunderstanding the problem.

Well, if what you say is indeed what we observe - and I'll gladly
take that on faith - then the "dark matter" hypothesis seems to me
completely bogus.  I can't believe that, the more empty space is of
visible matter, the more dark matter there is hiding in it.  If the
dark matter gravitates, as it must to close the universe, then its
overall distribution can't be that much different from the distribution
of visible matter, since at that scale gravitation is the overwhelming
force.

What you describe sounds to me more like a cosmological force of some
kind, either a true fifth force or a gravitational force that, at
large distances, obeys not an inverse square law but an inverse 1.???
law.  Which leads to this thought: in Euclidean space, it's obvious
why gravity and light obey the inverse square law.  But why should that
be true in Riemannian space, where a sphere of twice the radius has less
than four times the surface area?  Or am I on the edge of lunacy again?