As you may know, Justin Khoury is a next era star. This paper looks like a huge slam dunk to get this era moving in the professional ranks. Check out the abstract. HUGE!
Dark Matter Superfluidity
Justin Khoury
Abstract — In these lectures I describe a theory of dark matter superfluidity developed in the last few years. The dark matter particles are axion-like, with masses of order eV. They Bose-Einstein condense into a superfluid phase in the central regions of galaxy halos. The superfluid phonon excitations in turn couple to baryons and mediate a long-range force (beyond Newtonian gravity). For a suitable choice of the superfluid equation of state, this force reproduces the various galactic scaling relations embodied in Milgrom’s law. Thus the dark matter and modified gravity phenomena represent different phases of a single underlying sub-stance, unified through the rich and well-studied physics of superfluidity.
Dr. Justin Khoury https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10928
Here is another choice quotation :
A middle-ground interpretation is that the MOND law is telling us something about the fundamental nature of DM. In other words, DM certainly exists, and behaves as a cold, col- lisionless fluid on large scales. However, the MOND law informs us about the microphysics of DM and its interactions with baryons.
ibid
The Time I Called Dr. Khoury
Justin has been on this line of investigation for several years. I called him up one fine morning about two years ago (March 4, 2019) and lo and behold, he answered. I quickly introduced myself and said I wanted to discuss some ideas. He replied “I’m very busy!” I don’t remember what I replied, probably something like ‘Ok, I’ll try you again later.’ and the call ended.
When I called Justin, I was 100% certain that nature could be successfully modeled as geometric Euclidean space and time with two types of immutable fractional charge. I also already had the strong intuition that spacetime was a superfluid, which I had picked up from an audiobook from Lawrence Krauss which discussed Bose-Einstein condensates. I must have listened to that section of Dr. Krauss’s audiobook two dozen times as I drove across the country on a road trip. I first heard about Dr. Khoury from social medial posts by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder who is also doing work on superfluids in addition to her outreach work of the last several years which has illuminated the crisis in physics. I have found Sabine’s outreach material to be quite helpful.
I never had that conversation with Dr. Khoury, but I’m happy to say that it appears Justin has discovered the mathematics that not only do what he claims, but also describes the detritus of the Noether cores present in all standard model particles. The soup of spacetime. It will be even better when more professionals come along and show the math of the lossless interaction between standard matter particles and the superfluid spacetime aether that I expect will reproduce or at least map to Justin’s math. There’s still far more for the professionals to discover though. If you are curious what a Noether core is, look here : New Physics in Pictures
I posted about this on reddit r/particlephysics as well. Here is an image of three responses (over 12 hours after they were posted on a lazy Sunday) and I think the responses as well as the up and down voting are fascinating. I upvoted all three. The post itself has a net 0 score including my upvote, so a -1 from the subreddit. Fascinating.
Response 1 : The quote about agreeing with experiment is oft expressed in the sciences, and emphasized in physics which has been lost interpretively for 150 years. There were productive periods, but frankly the incorrect priors really made physics a 150 year snipe hunt.
I think there is a nuance with respect to this quote that is important. Disregard how smart you are, that is a red herring. However,
- IF you do have a ‘beautiful theory’ from various perspectives
- AND the technology is not yet feasible to test the scales of size and energy that the theory covers,
- THEN we have a special case where there is no experiment to AGREE or DISAGREE with.
- THEREFORE the quoted statement is not applicable.
Certainly we must be allowed to imagine a different solution to nature and use thought experiments to develop the architecture and shape it to fit the existing patchwork quilt of theories, maths, and observations. We must also be allowed to imagine if certain accepted priors were wrong in whole or in part and if there is a better explanation. Perhaps incorrect priors led to a cascade of bad interpretations. Such a scenario could be the cause of the current crisis in physics. Of course you can’t stop there, you have to build up an entire network of connections to the existing patchwork quilt of physics and show how each piece moves over to the new architecture either straight away, or with some transformation to interpretation, or with entirely new physics that explains major unsolved problems.
Response 2 : It seems a bit nit-picky to quibble about paper vs. lecture notes, but whatever. It goes on to make some interesting commentary about Dr. Khoury and his work. Then it expresses the opinion that NPQG is quackery. If we are going to quibble about words, I think there are much more professional ways to convey an opinion about an idea. I still think that whomever wrote this must not have given NPQG serious thought. I don’t know specifically about this commenter, but physicists have a tendency to vigourously defend a number of incorrect narrative interpretations. This has been an impediment to their discovery of nature.
Response 3 : This is a very pleasant response. Check out the vote differential though. This comment has a net -2 vote not counting my upvote. Wow, why would people downvote a pleasant comment like that while upvoting the other two sort of aggro comments?
It occurs to me that when the imminent physics revolution happens that some physicists may benefit from psychological counseling and therapy due to the degree of change that will be coming their way.
Question : How does this relate to eternal inflation?
Superb question. I’m a hobbyist, not a professional physicist, and my hypothesis is that below the standard model are immutable point charges that make all the standard model structures. So that would mean these dark matter particles, which I would call a relatively low energy Noether core or structures formed from those cores, ARE the spacetime aether. Let’s just call them superfluid particles for discussion purposes.
Now Dr. Khoury has provided the math which starts linking these superfluid particles to modified gravity which is a good start, but only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more, but consider that gravity is the domain of general relativity. Now things are getting really interesting. If you hypothesize that these superfluid particles actually implement Einstein’s spacetime and several more necessary functions, then everything will snap into place like a giant transformer toy as we rethink the narrative interpretation of physics. Here are some more functions we might consider assigning to the superfluid spacetime particles.
- Lorentz invariance
- SU(3)
- implementing the quantum of angular momentum h-bar joule-seconds
- Energy accounting and conservation, both continuous and discrete
- acting as an ideal black body
- implementing inflation and expansion
- serving as a reactant sourcing pair production (because we don’t have a vacuum anymore, we have a particulate superfluid)
- serving as a reaction product that is the sink for pair annihilation (because we don’t have a vacuum anymore, we have a particulate superfluid)
Now to your question : These spacetime superfluid particles can take on very high energy as well. Not sure how superfluid the particles will be at super high energy, but general relativity works amazingly well, so their Lorentz invariance characteristics must last to the very highest energies we can currently observe for objects in spacetime since our tests of general relativity have been accurate and precise to a touted, but minor degree. If the particles have the characteristics as described above then at super high energies they will size contract and time dilate.
If those particles are then exposed to lower energy environments they will start dissipating energy and the opposite happens. First they would inflate rapidly and later on as their energy gets reasonably low, they would grow at a rate that we call expansion.
Notes : This is a very different way of looking at nature and the universe. It is rather mind-blowing for physicists because it would require them to revert a number of priors going back to 1870. For this reason they will often say this is a totally nonsense idea and call me various derogatory names (sigh).
Take a few moments to relax and free your mind. Imagine the idea that inflation/expansion is implemented by point charge dipole powered particle structures. That line of thought leads to a lot of new and even more mind-blowing ideas. What is the provenance of a spacetime aether particle? Where did it come from? What processes generate new spacetime aether particles? My intuition says we want to look for high energy reactions that shed massive matter-energy in standard model particles, some of which eventually decays to spacetime aether, which is always the local ground floor.
My gut feel says that spacetime aether is likely dominated by the decay products of ultimately redshifted photons and neutrinos. I think this makes sense because the concentrated matter in free standard matter particles and their super-structures appears to be a minor constituent of the universe. I have only one caveat. We have not accounted for the concentration of immutable point charges and energy inside black holes and in particular supermassive black holes. I’ve said it before many times, it must be possible for a concentration of point charges to overcome a black hole event horizon of their own creation. We really need to start understanding that we use photons as a crutch in situations where they don’t apply, due to a lack of understanding the point charge architecture of nature.
Is the major source of new spacetime aether the theorized big bang, galaxies in general, high energy stars, neutron stars, magnetars, or one of the range of black holes types? Which of those provide the dominant source of point charge structures which are all the while redshifting, i.e., losing energy, and causing inflation and expansion and eventually decaying into relatively high energy spacetime aether particles which continue to shed energy when possible? I have difficulty imagining the root cause a one time big bang, so I am placing my bet on supermassive black hole jets being the dominant source of recycled point charges. I look forward to the day when cosmologists figure out all the contributing flows. What are your thoughts? Please share in the comments.
J Mark Morris : Boston : Massachusetts
Neoclassical Physics and Quantum Gravity 