The Elephant in the Universe: 100-year search for dark matter Author: Govert Schilling Challenging Dogma: MOND and the Exclusion of MACHO
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 September 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Challenging Dogma: MOND and the Exclusion of MACHO
Headline: Alternative Gravity, MOND, Contests Dark Matter Theory as MACHOs are Ruled Out
Amidst the elusive search for dark matter, alternative theories have emerged. Mordehai Milgrom and his colleagues developed Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), proposing that our understanding of gravity is flawed at galactic scales, thereby explaining rotational curves without needing dark matter. While some like Jeremiah Ostriker dismiss it, others such as Stacy McGaugh acknowledge its surprising success in fitting observational data. Gravitational lensing, as demonstrated by the Bullet Cluster, offers strong evidence for dark matter by showing separate distributions of mass and gas during galaxy collisions, challenging MOND. Meanwhile, another dark matter candidate, Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs)—very massive, compact objects in galactic halos—was extensively searched for in the 1990s using gravitational microlensing. Despite significant effort, these searches yielded no detections, effectively ruling out MACHOs as the primary form of dark matter.
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| 0:32.3 | This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor. The Search for Dark Matter. |
| 0:38.4 | The Elephant in the Universe is the new book by Govert Schilling, 100-year Search for Dark Matter. |
| 0:44.4 | Our story so far, the universe doesn't hold together unless we can find something called dark matter, or unless dark matter doesn't exist, then we cannot explain how the universe |
| 0:51.8 | holds together. It's that puzzling. So Govert has introduced us to the |
| 0:57.2 | reasoning of what this particle might look like. They call it a WIMP, weakly interacting massive particle, |
| 1:05.8 | WIMP. However, the searches continue, and we're going to go to one of those searches. |
| 1:11.6 | But before we go there, Gover's surprises in his explication to introduce a chapter about a heretic. |
| 1:19.4 | The man's name is Milgram, and he and his colleagues are using Newtonian physics to explain what we observe in the heavens. |
| 1:30.3 | This is the part that I loved completely because this is not contrary. |
| 1:35.3 | This is what about? |
| 1:38.3 | And what I take is there are some cosmologists who accept the contrariness of it and some who are annoyed by it? |
| 1:48.5 | Is that correct, Covert? |
| 1:50.0 | Absolutely. |
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