Making sense of the world through data
The focus of this blog is #data #bigdata #dataanalytics #privacy #digitalmarketing #AI #artificialintelligence #ML #GIS #datavisualization and many other aspects, fields and applications of data
This has been presented as Global Warming but 52C is Saudi Arabia in Summer is quite normal and also very dangerous. I have the experience of walking in the desert by 50+C. It feels like a hair drier is blowing in your face with no respite. You need to drink a lot and feel dizzy after 10 minutes. The worst is that usually the nights are very cool in the desert which allows you to actually live at night or rest from the heat. But often in the Gulf and the Red Sea, the humidity is very high and temperatures consequently stay high all night creating a cumulative effect which is extremely exhausting for the body if you have no way to cool. Mountains are worst. Bone dry. The ground is so hot that you can't touch it. The only natural place to stay during the day is deep within a cave. There is a reason why nobody lives in those places!
We explained earlier
that the Hajj is the final of the five pillars of Islam, and requires
that every Muslim who is of adult age complete the religious pilgrimage
to Mecca once in their lifetime, so long as they are financially and
physically able. This means huge numbers descended on the city which is
home to the shrine of the Kaaba in Saudi Arabia each year. More than 1.8 million people attended Hajj in 2023, approaching pre-pandemic levels. According to Saudi officials, they expect the figure to exceed the two million mark this year.
Not
only are the massive crowds a problem, but this year the Saudi city is
under an excessive heat warning, with highs at times having reached
between 110 and 115°F during the day, and 100°F even at night. This has resulted in what could be a record amount of heat injuries and deaths by the pilgrimage season's end. On Monday the Saudi weather service recorded a temperature of 125 degrees Fahrenheit at Mecca's Grand Mosque.
The AFP reported Thursday that deaths from heat-related causes has surpassed 1,000 people amid the extreme conditions.
"The
new deaths reported Thursday included 58 from Egypt, according to an
Arab diplomat who provided a breakdown showing that of 658 Egyptians who passed away, 630 were unregistered pilgrims," AFP writes. Indonesia also reported a high number of heat-related casualties.
In total ten countries have reported 1,081 deaths so far during
this annual pilgrimage season, the timing of which is determined by the
lunar Islamic calendar. Last year there was a total of 313 deaths
reported.
While authorities are estimating that over two million
people are present for the religious rites, this includes possibly a
couple hundred thousands of 'unauthorized' pilgrims, who may not have
access to the established amenities, including cooling or water
stations, that registered pilgrims have.
"This group was more vulnerable to the heat because, without official permits, they could not access air-conditioned spaces provided by Saudi authorities for the 1.8 million authorized pilgrims to cool down after hours of walking and praying outside," writes AFP.
Last Sunday alone saw over 2,700 cases of heat exhaustion, the Saudi foreign ministry had earlier announced.
Between
heat exhaustion and heat stroke, the latter is the most serious, and
includes a person's temperature rising rapidly as the body can no longer
regulate it, and the ability to sweat fails, resulting in an inability
to cool down. Dizziness, vomiting, fainting, and mental confusion are
signs of potential heat exhaustion leading to heat stroke.
It's been brewing for quite some time now but the war with Lebanon is getting closer by the day.
The long monologue about tactical nuclear weapons is probably not on the agenda yet but tensions are clearly rising fast as Ukraine as facing the wall.
My personal take is that tensions will keep rising during the Summer to reach a climax in September. Consequently, the US elections in November will be under extreme pressure and may or may not take place.
Question: Can the market avoid a crash before then? Can the West prevent a Ukraine defeat in the next 6 months? Can a spill over of the coming war in Lebanon be avoided? Each of these events in isolation might be manageable but of course when the dam breaks everything tends to break in unison. We are without doubt entering a true 4th turning event. Let's hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
We are on the edge. Martin Amrstrong with his long experience of Washington DC is a true insider and is adamant that the Western world is facing a wall of debt and sees war as the only option out. At this stage, there is simply no other way to interpret what is going on in the world so I concur.
In a way, the message is the same as the one from Alex Jones, just at a higher level with the essential financial component which gives meaning to what is unfolding.
This is the exact opposite of conspiracy theory, the naked financial truth and justification for what's going on. Simple and terrifying!
His worst prediction? Hillary President! Talk about a nightmare! (This is not a political statement!)
OK, Alex Jones and populism! But behind this there is a real story of crushing all dissenting voices and total control of the narrative. Is he over the top? Sometimes, yes. But then again, such voices were tolerated in the past. They were the symbol of democracy. Not anymore and that really is the true story.
Is our society nothing but a shadow of its former self, both economically and politically? Without mention of the moral and social decay!
This as usual should be listen to with alarm bells on. Alex Jones believes in a lot of things which are to some extent, "hypothetical" to be kind. Still, with the shaft comes a lot of interesting things. Who really controls the system? That's one of the questions Alex Jones is asking and he should be allowed to do so! (As for the end of the talk about aliens, I switched off and went to other things :-)
Hard to find someone I more disagree with! And still among the neo-cons Peter Zeihan ranks among the most intelligent and forward looking you can find. He has the knacks and knowledge to integrate population and resources in his economic analysis so a lot of what he says is deep and to the point. Then in the end, the way you look at the world makes the difference. He expects China to crash and the US to be resurgent. We're certainly seeing a sharp slowdown of the Chinese economy. As for the comeback of the US, you won't find it in the streets of San Francisco!
But he gets paid a fortune for his stuff and I don't so maybe from that perspective, he is the one on the right tracks!
21 Century has not been kind to information sources. A long time ago, in the last century, we still had a profession called journalism which was striving to bring us information. Often, the press was biased and partisan but even in the most oriented papers and magazines you could still find informative articles in which you could learn something valuable. Then came the 1990s and the Internet revolution which was supposed to open up the world. Instead, journalism lost it's main income source, advertising, and almost overnight became public relation mouthpiece for large corporations and propaganda engine for the state.
Since, finding information has become a struggle. No wounder people are reading blogs as this one. This is one of the very few places where relatively unbiased information is being curated and reprinted for public consumption.
As such, I regularly scan the Internet looking for deep articles with original angles on interesting and current subjects. And sometimes, as was the case yesterday, I find nothing!
One great source of information, I have been using over the last few years has been Zero Hedge: https://www.zerohedge.com/
Zero Hedge used to be edgy although mostly talking about finance and related subjects. Then slowly, "deep state" style articles started appearing, one at a time first until recently where they represent over half their line up of articles. The rest being mostly trashy click-bait articles on irrelevant current events.
Then there is the Burning Platform style of news sites. Right wing, conservative stuff for chem-trail, flat earth, moon hoax believers. You find one diamond a week on what is mostly a pile of trash. https://www.theburningplatform.com/
There are of course tens of other sites like Lew Rockwell but the problem there is that you don't know what you have until you've read the article. Not exactly convenient for a quick scan! https://www.lewrockwell.com/
And then there are videos. Unfortunately, on this blog hosted by Google, posting videos from YouTube is easy and from everywhere else in particular Rumble far more difficult. YouTube used to be a great source of videos until they started censoring left and right so that now, what is left is little better that what was there at the very beginning: "A day at the Zoo!" If I remember correctly the name of their very first video 20 years ago.
And if all this was not bad enough, now, we are starting to feel the effect of AI on news filtering, censorship and far more insidiously, bubble making.
If you're like me and try to understand the world, the ONE thing you do not want is web site like YouTube slowly encircling you with the same stuff specifically designed for your taste while slowly distancing you from interesting stuff by omission, cancelling and burying. There are still ways to avoid this but it's getting more and more difficult almost by the day. It was already hard with cookies, and now becoming almost impossible in the cookie-less world of mobile and machine number recognition.
I am already using ChatGPT regularly for advice on many subjects. It is simply amazing if you know what you are doing. Although there too the risk of manipulation will soon rise exponentially since slowly the AI will learn to know us better than we do and will consequently acquire unbelievable power through these means. As long as you're manipulating people and they are aware of it, you're doing a bad job! AI will not. It is truly on the verge of becoming more intelligent than we are.
Concerning YouTube for example, here's the suggestion of ChatGPT.
To escape from profiling and get more diverse and neutral suggestions on platforms like YouTube, you can try the following strategies:
Use Incognito or Private Browsing Mode:
When you browse in incognito or private mode, your browsing history and cookies are not saved, which can help you get more neutral suggestions.
Sign Out of Your Account:
Use YouTube without signing into your account. This can prevent the algorithm from using your profile to suggest videos.
Clear Your Watch and Search History Regularly:
Periodically clear your YouTube watch history and search history. This can reset the algorithm and provide more varied suggestions.
Create a New Account:
Consider creating a new YouTube account for a fresh start. Avoid watching too many similar videos in the beginning to keep the suggestions broad.
Use a VPN:
Using a VPN can mask your IP address, which might lead to more diverse suggestions based on different geographical locations.
Manually Explore Different Content:
Actively search for and watch a variety of content that interests you. This can help diversify your suggestions over time.
Use Browser Extensions or Tools:
Some browser extensions can help you see more diverse content. Extensions like "Unhook" for Chrome can remove algorithmic suggestions and show you more random or trending content.
Adjust Your YouTube Settings:
YouTube settings allow you to manage your data. Go to Settings > History & Privacy and manage your watch history and search history. Turn off the "Include your YouTube activity from the web" and "Include your YouTube activity from the app" options to limit tracking.
Use Alternative Platforms:
Explore other video platforms that might have different recommendation algorithms or less aggressive profiling.
Provide Feedback to YouTube:
Use the "Not interested" option on videos you don't like. This helps improve the algorithm's understanding of your preferences, but it can take time to see significant changes.
By incorporating these strategies, you can help mitigate the impact of YouTube's profiling and receive more neutral and varied suggestions, enhancing your overall viewing experience.
A year and a half already. Thought progress had stopped? Think again, It hasn't.
Eleizer Yudkowsky believes true advanced AI will be our last invention and that it may be much closer than most people believe. I agree.
As soon as we understood a few years ago that following the invention of back propagation and transformers, AI was just a matter of scale, our fate was sealed.
Control, alignment and other such concepts are just words. In reality, you cannot control what is more intelligent than you are. Where you see a circle of possibilities, the AI will see a sphere and can therefore approach any problem from unknown angles. Except that instead of a sphere, there are 10s of dimensions and therefore unimaginably complex answers like tunneling through dimensions and other complex answers.
This may or may not be the end of mankind. This too is unknowable. One thing is certain, as soon as we are not anymore the dominant life form on this planet, the future will stop belonging to us. We will start seeing "things" happening which we will not understand. Neither cause, nor purpose. Just Magic. How far is this? 2030 at the latest.
The video is pessimistic. Still very interesting and raising important questions. Worth watching and thinking about.
I always find it difficult to explain to people why I am so pessimistic about the prospects of the world and why I expect leaders to play for broke as they know the depth of the mess they have created.
Japan is and has always been the canary in the coal mine. It is obvious for anyone who understand how finance truly works that 2008 will never happen again. Would a bank go under like Bear Stearn or Lehman, the authorities would immediately flood the market with liquidity to make sure that a "freeze" is avoided.
Problem solved then? You wish! By doing the above what you have done is simply made the problem systemic and transferred the risk. To whom exactly? That, we will know only when we see it. But at some stage, something, somewhere is going to break. And it's going to be so big and systemic that there will be nothing we can do about it. Suddenly the whole house of cards will be going down. Accounts will be frozen and everything will be repriced. This is not me saying this but most market insiders at this late stage. This will be the true price of the 16+ years of virtual prosperity the West has bought on credit.
Which is the REAL reason why war is unavoidable. Incomes will be halved, services suspended, pensions paid with beans, inflation through the roof. How could any "democratic" country sustain such a shock? This is of course impossible so it won't happen. By later 2025 at the latest most countries in the West will have exited their "democratic" phase. The easiest way for people to accept this is a state of emergency. It looks like bird flu or whatever manufactured virus is unleashed will not be enough. Well, war it shall be then! I do not see any other option and unfortunately neither seems to do our current leadership. (The ones behind the curtain who control the financial system, not the clowns on television!)
Last October, when the wounds from the March 2023 bank failures - which surpassed the global financial crisis in total assets and which sparked the latest Fed intervention, setting the market's nadir over the past 16 months -
were still fresh, we made a non-consensus prediction: we said that
since the Fed has once again backstopped the US financial system, "the next bank failure will be in Japan."
This prediction only got warmer two months later when, inexplicably, Japan's Norinchukin bank, best known as Japan's CLO whale, was quietly added to the list of counterparties for the Fed's Standing Repo Facility, a/k/a the Fed's foreign bank bailout slush fund.
But
if that was the first, and still distant, sign that something was very
wrong at one of Japan's biggest banks (Norinchukin is Japan's 5th
largest bank with $840 billion in assets)
today the proverbial canary stepped on a neutron bomb inside the
Japanese coalmine, because according to Nikkei, Norinchukin Bank "will
sell more than 10 trillion yen ($63 billion) of its holdings of U.S.
and European government bonds during the year ending March 2025 as it
aims to stem its losses from bets on low-yield foreign bonds, a main cause of its deteriorating balance sheet, and lower the risks associated with holding foreign government bonds."
See, what's happened in Japan is not that different from what is happening in the US, where as the FDIC keeps reminding us quarter after quarter,
US banks are still sitting on over half a trillion dollars in
unrealized losses, as a result of the huge jump in interest rates which
has blown up the banks' long-duration fixed income holdings, sending
them trading far below par and forcing banks (and the Fed, see BTFP) to
come up with creative ways of shoving these massive losses under the
rug.
And
while Japanese rates have barely budged - the BOJ only just raised
rates for the first time in decades in April - the move is already
cascading into the form of huge losses for domestic banks, which have
been hammered twice as hard due to their holdings of offshore debt which
until 2021 was viewed as risk free, only to blow up in everyone's face
two years ago when the bull market since the early 1980s ended with a
bang.
Enter Norinchukin: according to the Nikkei, the company's net loss for the year ending March 2025, which was previously forecast to top 500 billion yen, will rise to the 1.5 trillion yen level with the bond sales.
"We
plan to sell low-yield [foreign] bonds in the amount of 10 trillion yen
or more," Norinchukin Bank CEO Kazuto Oku told Nikkei, an amount just
above $60 billion.
Facing
a problem that is very familiar to all US banks, Oku said the bank
"acknowledged the need to drastically change its portfolio management" to reduce unrealized losses on its bonds, which totaled roughly 2.2 trillion yen as of the end of March. Oku
explained bank's intention to shift its investments, saying, "We will
reduce [sovereign] interest rate risk and diversify into assets that
take on corporate and individual credit risk."
Now,
if Nochu, as it is affectionately known by bankruptcy lawyers, was a US
bank circa one year ago, it would not have to sell anything: it could
just pledge all of its sharply depreciated bonds at the Fed's BTFP
facility, and get a par value for them.
Unfortunately, Nochu is
not US but Japanese, and it is not 2023 but rather 2024, when the
high-rate disaster of 2023 was supposed to be over. Supposed to be...
but instead it's only getting worse. Regular readers will hardly need
it, but for novices Nikkei gives the following quick primer: "Interest
rates in the U.S. and Europe have risen and bond prices are down. This
reduced the value of high-priced (low-yielding) foreign bonds that
Norinchukin purchased in the past, causing its paper losses to swell."
So faced with no other options, Nochu is doing the only thing it can: an
orderly liquidation of tens of billions of securities now, when they
are still liquid and carry a high price, in hopes of avoiding a
disorderly liquidation and much worse, in a few months when the bond
market freezes up.
And yes, the Japanese rates canary is quite, quite massive: as of the end of March, Norinchukin had approximately 23 trillion yen of foreign bonds (about $150 billion), amounting to 42% of its total 56 trillion yen of assets under management.
To
get some sense of the scale, according to the Bank of Japan,
outstanding foreign bonds held by depositary financial institutions
amounted to 117 trillion yen as of the end of March. Norinchukin, which
is a major institutional investor in Japan, holds as much as 20% of the total on its own! And those asking, yes: once Nochu begins selling, all others will have to join the club!
But
why start the selling now? Because, as we warned last October when we
predicted that the next bank crisis will be in Japan, the Japanese
mega-bank now believes interest rate cuts in the U.S. and Europe are
likely to take longer than it previously expected, it will try to significantly cut its unrealized losses by selling foreign bonds in fiscal 2024.
And so, Norinchukin plans to sell over 10 trillion yen in foreign bonds, in addition to its normal trading activities.
The
rest of the story is filler: in attempt to divert attention from the 10
trillion yen elephant in the room, the Nikkei then wastes time
discussing the bank's other "alternatives" to wit:
The
company is now considering investment alternatives, including equities,
corporate bonds, corporate loans and private equity, as well as
securitized products such as corporate loan-backed securities and
mortgage-backed securities. By diversifying its portfolio, it aims to
prevent unrealized losses from expanding to the point where they become a
concern for management. It will also try to replace some low-yielding
foreign government debt with other such bonds offering higher interest
rates.
What are you talking about? What
diversification? Once the selling begins, the bank will be lucky if it
can get even a fraction of the proceeds it hopes for (because all the
other banks won't just be standing there twiddling their thumbs, as they
wait to see how massively Nochu reprices the market).
And it's
not just banks: if and when the selling begins by a bank that holds 20%
of all foreign bonds in Japan, the liquidation cascade will quickly
spread to Mrs Watanabe. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, Japanese investors held $1.18 trillion of U.S. government bonds as of March, the largest slice among foreign holders.
Needless to say, but the Nikkei does so anyway, "Massive sales by Norinchukin could have a sizable effect on the U.S. bond market."
And since we now know what is happening, it is only a matter of time before everyone else frontruns Norinchukin.
What
happens next will be even uglier: since the bank will no longer be able
to mask its fixed income losses under the guise of accounting sleight
of hand, the bank's financial results for the period ending March 2025
will "deteriorate significantly as a result of the huge divestment of foreign bonds and turn paper losses into real ones." As of May, Norinchukin put its final loss at more than 500 billion yen, but this is now expected to reach the 1.5 trillion yen level.
A
little more context: back in the immediate aftermath of the global
financial crisis, in the year ending March 2009, Norinchukin posted a
final loss of about 570 billion yen due to impairment of securitized products. The forecast loss for this fiscal year is expected to top the previous record by roughly 1 trillion yen. Nevertheless,
Oku said that putting the losses on the books in the year ending next
March will "improve [the bank's] finances and portfolio, thus enabling
to move into the black in the period ending March 2026."
Spoiler
alert: no it won't... and that's why the bank is now scrambling to share
the pain with even greater fools, i.e., "investors."
According to
the Nikkei, Norinchukin Bank is considering raising 1.2 trillion yen to
shore up its finances. It has already started discussions with Japan
Agriculture Cooperatives, one of its main investors, and others. Of
course, the question of who in their right mind would lend the bank good
money to plug an even bigger hole that is about to open up, is anyone's
guess.
But that won't stop the bank from doing what it has to,
now that it has picked the liquidation route: and once the selling flood
begins, it won't end as these flashing red headlines from Bloomberg
just confirmed:
*NORINCHUKIN TO SELL US, EUROPEAN SOVEREIGN BONDS GRADUALLY
*NORINCHUKIN ALSO WEIGHS LOCAL, OVERSEAS BONDS, PROJECT FINANCE
*NORINCHUKIN EYES ASSETS INCLUDING CLOS, STOCKS AFTER BOND LOSS
There's a name for this: a firesale, but - drumroll - a "gradual" one, because that's how firesales supposedly go in Japan.
Luckily,
the one thing nobody has to guess, is what happens next: as the
wonderful movie Margin Call laid out so very well, once you realize that
the music has stopped, you have three choices: i) be first, ii) be smarter, or iii) cheat.
In the case of Japan's Norinchukin, it has decided the time has come to
liquidate before everyone else. We wonder how "everyone else" will take
this particular news...
Yesterday, I introduced some fundamental questions about the cosmos which bring doubts about our current view of the Universe. In spite of General Relativity and Quantum Theory's successes, there are still many questions marks about our understanding of the cosmos, some deep enough to oblige us to completely rethink our theories. We may be on the edge of a new paradigm of physics.
Today, it is the turn of evolution: the great theory of Darwin. The purpose of the exercise is not to take us back to creationism but to progress towards a more complex and fundamental understanding of evolution. From the beginning, it was understood that "Darwin" was not enough to explain evolution so in the later part of the 20th Century came the concept of punctuated evolution. The idea that species are mostly static but that at some stage they go through an accelerated patch of evolution thanks to an "arm race" introduced by new factors or conditions. The best example is probably the sudden growth of our brains thanks to the discovery of abstract language. Then came the discovery of Epigenetics with the understanding that methylation is a way for the environment to actually have a direct effect on our gene. Could it be that Lamark was not completely wrong in the end?
But the discussion below goes one step further: Could evolution be directed? This sound incredible and would most certainly be anathema to die hard Darwinists since such a theory seems to contain a whiff of sulfuric "Creationism" but this is not what it is. As for the cosmos yesterday, some questions of evolution do not seem to make sense. One in particular is extremely hard to answer: If evolution was truly blind and completely directionless, how on earth was it so fast? The possibilities of combining genes to create new "things" of functions are truly infinite so to test them all randomly and eliminate the bad ones would take forever which is clearly not what we see. Evolution takes a long time but not forever. So how do we explain this? The short answer is that we do not! As for cosmology, we just ignore this pesky Question.
There is much more in the long discussion below. This is true science. No the "science" of semi-literate European bureaucrats whose science is whatever is convenient for their purpose as we saw during Covid. But real science of hard questions and experimentation to get closer to the truth. It is difficult, messy, mind wrecking, full of turns, cul-de-sacs and wrong paths but in the end, exhilarating.
Cosmology has a problem! The Universe doesn't behave as we expected. In particular, galaxies do not rotate according to Newtonian principles! This is huge because it shows that we understand much less than we thought we did. We invented "Dark Matter" to deal with this inconvenience but in the end, it looks more and more like Dark Matter will join the Ether in the black hole of discarded ideas. This is both a disappointment and an exhilarating time to be alive. (see below)
But this is not all. The James Webb telescope is on the verge of finding fully formed galaxies far too close to the origin of the Universe. They should not have had enough time to form. The days of the Big Bang theory may be numbered. But in reality they already were long ago. It has been a well known secret that some stars look uncannily older than the Universe by at least one and sometimes two billion years or more. How could this be? I remember a time not so long ago when we expected the Universe to be at least 15 billion years old because that was the estimated age of the oldest red dwarf stars. So it came as a shock when suddenly the consensus based on the calculation of the cosmic constant settled on 13.7 billion years. That was simply not enough time! We had a Benjamin Button problem! Scientists have been trying to fill this gap for the last 20 years to no avail.
Einstein once said about the Universe that the most extraordinary thing was that it was understandable. But is it? Or are our theories just weak approximations of a strangely complex underlying reality?
In his classic book On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
the philosopher Thomas Kuhn posited that, for a new scientific
framework to take root, there has to be evidence that doesn’t sit well
within the existing framework. For over a century now, Einstein’s theory
of relativity and gravity has been the existing framework. However,
cracks are starting to show, and a new paper from researchers at Case
Western Reserve University added another one recently when they failed
to find decreasing rotational energy in galaxies even millions of light
years away from the galaxy’s center.
Galaxies are known to rotate – even our solar system travels in a
circle around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at around 200 km per
second, though we can’t perceive any motion on human time scales.
According to Newtonian dynamics, this rotational speed should slow down
the farther away a star is from the center of a galaxy. However,
observations didn’t support this, showing that the speed kept up no
matter how far away the star is.
That led scientists to create another force impacting the speed of
rotation of the farthest-out stars. Today, we commonly call it dark
matter. However, scientists have also spent decades trying to puzzle out
what exactly dark matter is made of and have yet to come up with a
coherent theory.
Anton dives into a weird quirk of galaxy rotation. Credit – Anton Petrov YouTube Channel
But in some cases, even the existence of dark matter as we know it
doesn’t match the observational data. Dr. Tobias Mistele, a post-doc at
Case, found that the rotational speed of galaxies doesn’t drop off, no
matter how far out they are and no matter how long they’ve been doing
so. This data flies in the face of a traditional understanding of dark
matter, where its gravitational influence is felt by a “halo”
surrounding the dark matter itself. Even these dark matter halos have an
effective area. Dr. Mistele and his co-authors found evidence of
maintained rotational speed that should be well outside the sphere of
influence of any dark matter halo existing in these galaxies.
To collect this data, the authors used a favorite tool of
cosmologists – gravitational lensing. They collected data on galaxies
that were far away and had their light amplified by a galaxy cluster or
similarly massive object that was nearer. When collecting the data, Dr.
Mistele analyzed the speed of rotation of the stars in a galaxy and
plotted it against the distance of those stars from the galaxy’s center.
This is known as a “Tully-Fisher” relation in cosmology.
The result was an almost perfectly straight line – the rotational
speed of stars in a galaxy did not seem to diminish with distance from
the galaxy’s center, as both traditional Newtonian dynamics and
relativity via dark matter predicted it would. So, what alternative
explanations are there?
Why do galaxy rotation curves matter? Nora explains. Credit – Nora’s Guide to the Galaxy YouTube Channel
Paper co-author Stacy McGaugh points out in a press release that one
theory in physics accurately predicted the data his team had
collected—the modified Newtonian Dynamics (or MOND) theory. Designed
explicitly to account for things like galaxy rotations, MOND was
developed in 1983 and remains controversial to this day. It struggles
with things like the gravitational lensing with which the paper’s data
was collected.
That disconnect points to the need for a deeper understanding of
gravity – what Kuhn called a “crisis,” which many cosmologists already
believe is afflicting the discipline. While there is no current
consensus on what might resolve that crisis, the evidence is mounting
for the need for resolution. If we’re truly going to understand our
place in the universe, we will eventually need to figure out a solution –
it just might take a while.
