One step closer to Grand Unified Theroy?

Factual Questions
1

I read Discover, Popular Science and Scientific American regularly, and two articles from two of those magazines (I forgot where they came from, which is going to make this statement harder to sound convincing)

One article described MOND: MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, which (I remember as having been) stated (as) that Newton’s Second Law (F = MA) might not work for very small accelerations, like 10^-6 M/s/s (galactic spin)(might be ^-16, can’t remember, but it was very small), which would fix all this ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ talk that’s going on. They had a curve that showed MOND vs Law #2 and the like. The interesting part was that they said that if an object at the time of the big bang that had an acceleration of this amount, by modern times it would have attained the speed of light.

Now here’s where it gets interesting: the other article in the other magazine was talking about the new Variable Speed of Light theory that said…

Crud. I forgot. I knew I should have written this down sooner.

…I believe that it said the speed of light was slower earlier in time, but I forget what they were explaining in the article. I believe it had something to do with reletivity and extrasolar travel.

In any case, at the time I came up with my theory combining them- I’m not sure how to phrase this, so bear with me. Perhaps the statement “an object at the time of the big bang that had an acceleration of this amount, by ______ time it would have attained the speed of light” is always true. Because I can’t remember the exact values, call the acceleration X. After, say, one second, the speed of light was X m/s, and after 5 seconds it would be 5X m/s. This would mean that the speed of light is speeding up very, very slowly.

If anyone could find the origional articles I’m refering to, I’m sure they would help my case (or destroy it, depending on my memory). I beileve MOND came from Discover and VSL came from PopSci.

Any takers? Think I’m insane? I’m not sure anymore.
Unrelated: I’m no scientist, but Dark Matter seems like a silly idea to me. Simpler is better: (a) 80% or our universe is invisable and undectable, or (b) our physics formulas are wrong? Sure they work when throwing things or pushing people out of buildings, but on the galactic scale MOND just makes more sence. To me, anyway.

2

I knew it! I knew I misspelled ‘theory’ somewhere in there! Too bad I didn’t check the Topic box…

3

Your posts are quite a challenge to me to decrypt.

I must confess that I often doubt whether my head is not good for understanding your kind of subjects – which makes me feel that I must be inadequate in some areas of mental acuity.

Can you do a poor brother a good deed, by telling me in simple English what your message is all about.

Theory of relativity, I seem to appreciate, that as a thing gets to travel faster and faster, time slows down(?) Am I wrong, dummy that I am.

Quantum mechanics or physics, does it mean that when you see a thing or that particle whatever, it is no longer there?

Please, therefore, for the love of the fight against ignorance and to the advancement of knowledge, tell me in simple English if possible, what your post is all about, aside from your request for where you read and how you read your materials.

Otherwise, I am consigned to never fathom such mysteries of the vast universe. But I can understand sex, now in my grown-up years; whereas before it was some kind of mystery to me also. Any chance for me?

Susma Rio Sep

4

I was surprised by that article on MOND. Nowhere in it did the author mention that a whole bunch of recent studies came up with numbers that simply won’t work with MOND. I thought it had already been seriously discredited, although not yet disproved.

The other article presumably referred to Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation, by Joao Magueijo. He’s a good publicist, and his theory has been discussed everywhere. I don’t believe it for a second, though.

As for your other speculations, well… you should have stopped when you said “I’m no scientist.”

5

My favorite explanation for the missing mass is that it is the “shadow” of adjacent alternate universes. I would love for this to be true, but unfortunately I do not know how credible it is. I see stuff arguing both ways.

6

Are you interested in gravity? Interested in dark matter and energy? Well folks, step right up! Forget the MOND and FTL subcults; no one can beat mainstream theoretical physics in terms of original wackiness! Nima Arkani-Hamed et al. are proposing that dark matter can be accounted for by gravitons leaking from other universes! Not only that, our own space-time is folded unto itself! This three-year old theory doesn’t have a catchy name yet. See “The Universe’s Unseen Dimensions”, Scientific American, Aug 2000.

Not only is this a real step closer to GUT/TOE, they will be able to test it perhaps as soon 2005, when the Large Hadron Collider is completed!