Stacy McGaugh

Stacy S. McGaugh (born January 11, 1964) is an American astrophysicist, known for his research on Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) and tests of the dark matter hypothesis. Quotes I've never observed wisdom to emerge from shouting. Stacy McGaugh http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/quotes.html "Gallery of Quotes" at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2024. You can lead a theorist to data, but you can't make him think. Stacy McGaugh http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/quotes.html "Gallery of Quotes" at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2024. Obvious results provoke opposition. The more obvious the result, the stronger the opposition. Stacy McGaugh http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/quotes.html "Gallery of Quotes" at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2024. It is often stated that the evidence for dark matter is overwhelming. This is not quite correct: the evidence for mass discrepancies is overwhelming. These might be attributed to either dark matter or a modification of gravity. Stacy McGaugh MOND in the Early Universe https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9812328.pdf 1998 srXiv preprint astro-ph/9812328v1 My gut reaction to all these questions is negative. But it appears that one set or the other must be answered in the affirmative. Either way, we are missing something fundamental about the nature of our universe. Stacy McGaugh http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/boileddown.html "The MOND Issue" at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2014. I came to the subject a True Believer in dark matter, but it was MOND that nailed the predictions for the LSB galaxies that I was studying (McGaugh & de Blok, 1998), not any flavor of dark matter. So what I am supposed to conclude? Stacy McGaugh http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/burn1.html Why "Consider MOND?" at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2014. One should not only be truthful, but as complete as possible. It does not suffice to be truthful while leaving unpleasant or unpopular facts unsaid. Stacy McGaugh http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/inthon.html "Intellectual Honesty, The Mond Pages" at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2014. A long standing prediction (Milgrom 1983) of MOND is that rotating galaxy curves will fall on a single mass-velocity relation with slope 4: Mb Vf4. This prediction is realized in multiple independent data sets. Gas rich galaxies fall where predicted by MOND with no free parameters. There are not many predictions in extragalactic astronomy that fare so well a quarter century after their publication. … a physical understanding for why galaxy formation in the context of ΛCDM should pick out the particular phenomenology predicted a priori by MOND remains wanting. Stacy McGaugh 2011 The Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation of Gas-Rich Galaxies as a Test of ΛCDM and MOND p. 16 ApJ http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.2934 The current cosmological paradigm, the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant, requires that the mass-energy of the Universe be dominated by invisible components: dark matter and dark energy. An alternative to these dark components is that the law of gravity be modified on the relevant scales. A test of these ideas is provided by the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR), an empirical relation between the observed mass of a galaxy and its rotation velocity. Here, I report a test using gas rich galaxies for which both axes of the BTFR can be measured independently of the theories being tested and without the systematic uncertainty in stellar mass that affects the same test with star dominated spirals. The data fall precisely where predicted a priori by the modified Newtonian dynamics. 21 March 2011 Novel test of modified Newtonian dynamics with gas rich galaxies Physical Review Letters 106 12 121303 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.121303 ... It was (in part) Gross’s excessive enthusiasm for string theory in the mid-80s that drove me (as an impressionable grad student at Princeton) away from theoretical physics (and into astronomy). String theory may have been a beautiful idea, but it made no predictions that could be tested experimentally in the then-foreseeable future. That’s not science. 
A quarter century later and the theoretical physics community has yet to wake up and realize that there is new physics right under their noses – just not the new physics they’ve been expecting (GUTs, strings, membranes, etc.). Galaxy dynamics are consistent with a single, universal force law, but this unexpected behavior has largely been ignored because it doesn’t fit with particle theorists’ dreams of super symmetric dark matter particles. That we do not understand the observed behavior makes it more interesting than the “expected” (but unobserved) new physics: who ordered this? Comment (posted 30 Dec. 2013) in Responses section of "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn" 29 December 2013 Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit's blog) http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6532 The concordance model of cosmology, ΛCDM, provides a satisfactory description of the evolution of the universe and the growth of large scale structure. Despite considerable effort, this model does not at present provide a satisfactory description of small scale structure and the dynamics of bound objects like individual galaxies. In contrast, MOND provides a unique and predictively successful description of galaxy dynamics, but is mute on the subject of cosmology. … it is far from obvious that the mass spectrum of galaxy clusters or the power spectrum of galaxies can be explained in MOND, two things that ΛCDM does well. Critical outstanding issues are the development of an acceptable relativistic parent theory for MOND, and the reality of the non-baryonic dark matter of ΛCDM. Do suitable dark matter particles exist, or are they a modern aether? http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7525 A Tale of Two Paradigms: the Mutual Incommensurability of LCDM and MOND Stacy McGaugh 29 Apr 2014, updated 17 May 2014 People have been looking for this dark matter because there is a Nobel prize, for sure, waiting for whoever discovers it. Stacy McGaugh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0oZQpQbFx4 Dark Matter or Modified Gravity? YouTube 2 July 2015 (at 21:30 of 53:37) I have experienced time and again people dismissing the data because they think MOND is wrong, so I am very consciously drawing a red line between the theory and the data. as quoted in Cooper, Keith Correlation between galaxy rotation and visible matter puzzles astronomers 7 October 2016 physicsworld.com http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2016/oct/07/correlation-between-galaxy-rotation-and-visible-matter-puzzles-astronomers Why does MOND get any predictions right? It has had many a priori predictions come true. Why does this happen? Stacy McGaugh "Degenerating problemshift: a wedged paradigm in great tightness", Triton Station blog 30 April 2017 http://tritonstation.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/degenerating-problemshift-a-wedged-paradigm-in-great-tightness/ ... I was deeply shocked when it was not my predictions or any of my immediate colleagues' predictions that came true in my data — but Milgrom's. This was completely outside my conceptual framework. Stacy McGaugh – "Dark Matter and Gravity" March 21, 2021 YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvXvB55xnSw (quote at 1:36:06 of 1:38:46) A long time ago when I first got interested in MOND, having come from the background where I believed in dark matter, I wrote a proposal saying, "Gee, this theory had its predictions come true, ... we should look into that" and it was rejected, you know, very harshly. And I thought "OK, the community is not willing to fund this kind of thing" — this was almost twenty years ago. And so I basically did a global substitute, replaced MOND with dark matter, resubmitted, and I got my money. ... Pavel is totally correct that scientists are focused on getting grants, because that's what you need to support your students, and your postdocs, and getting the data, and all those sort of things. And I would like to believe that that was an anecdote from the distant past, but I am aware of a colleague who had this experience very recently where this person did not even mention MOND in the proposal, but the panel came back saying "MOND is no good — you must not spend money on this." ... the panel had associated ... this person's name with having at some point written a paper about MOND and projected that onto this proposal that ... did not mention MOND. And so it really is that bad. Pavel Kroupa: On the Non-Existence of Dark Matter October 10, 2021 YouTube, Astrofisica UC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVgwLWVETIM&t=673s (quote at 1:38:40 of 1:57:00) Whenever I come across a case that doesn't make sense in MOND, it usually doesn't make sense in dark matter either. September 15, 2025 Non-equilibrium dynamics in galaxies that appear to lack dark matter: ultradiffuse galaxies https://tritonstation.com/2025/09/15/non-equilibrium-dynamics-in-galaxies-that-appear-to-lack-dark-matter-ultradiffuse-galaxies/ Triton Station Blog Quotes about McGaugh ... Dark matter provides the additional gravitational pull to bring model and reality broadly into alignment. Researchers now routinely take this model – Einstein plus dark matter, often called the ‘null hypothesis’ – as their starting point and then perform detailed calculations of galactic systems to test it. ... Most recently, Stacy McGaugh at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and his team documented that the pattern of rotation in spiral galaxies seems to precisely follow the pattern of the visible matter alone, posing yet another challenge to the null hypothesis. Pavel Kroupa Pavel Kroupa Has dogma derailed the scientific search for dark matter? aeon.co November 2016 https://aeon.co/ideas/has-dogma-derailed-the-scientific-search-for-dark-matter See also Modified Newtonian dynamics External links Category:Physicists from the United States Category:Astronomers from the United States Category:Cosmologists Category:Living people Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni