Is the Dark Matter Kludge collapsing?

[djolds1]

Think what you will of McCulloch's MiHsC idea, but the collapse of the physics kludges that are dark matter and dark energy would be momentous. Its been obvious for a long time they are epicycles in need of removing.

The original article at Phys Org is in McCulloch's references at the bottom.

Dark matter contradicts itself.
There has just been a study published in Science (Harvey et al., 2015) that is interesting because it forces the dark matter hypothesis to contradict itself.

Harvey et al. have looked at the light from familiar objects like galaxies as seen from behind galaxy clusters, and looked at the distortion in the images due to gravitational lensing. They know what a typical galaxy looks like: a disc, so if it looks like a U-bend instead when it's behind the galaxy cluster, then they can infer the bending of the light that must be occurring and assume this bending is due to dark (invisible) matter in the cluster. They looked at 72 galaxy cluster collisions, and have modeled the collisions using several kinds of dark matter, and have shown that the only kind of dark matter that fits the observations, is a kind that doesn't interact with itself. I'd like to point out here that this makes the dark matter hypothesis self-contradictory since it is well known it must repel itself to stay spread out in the halo of galaxies, and yet this study now shows it must not interact with itself. So dark matter disappears in a puff of logic? Well, I'm sure someone will think of a way to make it more complex to save the hypothesis, but it gets ever more ridiculous.

In contrast MiHsC says that there is no dark matter (see my blog here and my paper here) and that the light is bending because its inertial mass varies due to the variation in acceleration within the cluster. I know the inertial mass of light is a controversial issue, but it has never been well understood, and MiHsC predicts galaxy rotation, cosmic acceleration, the flyby anomalies, the emdrive (light in a box) and many other anomalies quite well without invisible entities or contradictions (Introduction to MiHsC).

References

Harvey D, Massey R, Kitching T, Taylor A, Tittley E. The non-gravitational interactions of dark matter in colliding galaxy clusters. Science 27 March 2015. Read more at Phys Org

McCulloch, M.E., 2012 Testing quantised inertia on galactic scales. Astrophysics & Space Sci., 342, 575-578. Preprint. Journal.

[hanelyp]

Just going on the summary...
They modeled the mass distribution around galaxies based on gravitational lensing, and the only dark matter model they had that fit those distributions was one with no discernible self interaction (aside from gravity).

Self repulsion would not be the only for dark matter to avoid collapsing in on the center of a galaxy. On the contrary, with collisionless dark matter the puzzle is how it "cools" as necessary to condense in a proto-galaxy. Kinetic energy works well for keeping a massive collection from collapsing under gravity.

[Tom Ligon]

Not that it matters one bit what I want, but there is one supposed property of one proposed form of dark matter that I find fascinating ... the particle is its own antiparticle, and would totally annihilate if it touched another particle of dark matter.

This opens up the possibility of having the ultimate interstellar ramjet. Or it would, except that it would seem unlikely that there is any way to scoop this stuff up. And it really is hard to find something we've only inferred, but have never directly detected, have no idea what it is, and are not sure actually exists.

[GIThruster]

Unfortunately, McCulloch's model violates both EEP and GR. I can't see any reason to take stuff like this seriously. He is a geophysicist, not a field theorist.

Also I would note that dark matter and dark energy are very different things. We know something is forcing the universe apart ever faster. Dark matter is another matter entirely.