I was at Borders the other day, waiting for the wife to buy her 67th pair of black heels :roll: , when I came across this month's issue of Discover Magazine.
In it, there is a article on what is called MOND -MOdified Newtonian Dynamics. It claims that F=ma is a high acceleration appoximation of a grander law that describes all accelerations. The guy who came up with it was working on the rotation rates of galaxies. He noticed that F=ma works for most things, but at very small accelerations, it does not hold.
Under MOND, the new equation would be F=m((mu)(a/a0))a. Where a0 is a new constant of acceleration and (mu(x)) gives 1 if x>1 or x if x<1.
This seems to be a trade off between dark matter and inventing new math. On one hand, we have this matter that can't be detected, but seems plausable to be in existance and on the other we have math formulas that are rewritten to fit the data. However, the new formula has been shown to accurately describe the lensing effect and 'fix' the mass discrepency of the universe.
I'm big on theorectical physics and this was new to me. Anyone else heard of this?
Here are some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONDhttp://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/mond/faq.html