About Dark Matter and Gravitation

Abstract

A close inspection of Zwicky's seminal papers on the dynamics of galaxy clusters reveals that the discrepancy discovered between the dynamical mass and the luminous mass of clusters has been widely overestimated in 1933 as a consequence of several factors, among which the excessive value of the Hubble constant $H_0$, then believed to be about seven times higher than today's average estimate. Taking account, in addition, of our present knowledge of classical dark matter inside galaxies, the contradiction can be reduced by a large factor. To explain the rather small remaining discrepancy of the order of 5, instead of appealing to a hypothetic exotic dark matter, the possibility of a inhomogeneous gravity is suggested. This is consistent with the ``cosmic tapestry" found in the eighties by De Lapparent and her co-authors, showing that the cosmos is highly inhomogeneous at large scale. A possible foundation for inhomogeneous gravitation is the universally discredited ancient theory of Fatio de Duillier and Lesage on pushing gravity, possibly revised to avoid the main criticisms which led to its oblivion. This model incidentally opens the window towards a completely non-standard representation of cosmos, and more basically calls to develop fundamental investigation to find the origin of the large scale inhomogeneity in the distribution of luminous matter

On Some Damped 2 Body Problems

“…It does not seem obvious at all to introduce a damping mechanism in that model, and it might very well happen that in order to do that, an effective coupling between deterministic corpuscular and probabilistic wave conceptions of particles has to be devised, as was always advocated by L. De Broglie and even suggested by E. Schrödinger himself in [16]. 6 The atomic contraction hypothesis.…”

On Some Damped 2 Body Problems

“…It does not seem obvious at all to introduce a damping mechanism in that model, and it might very well happen that in order to do that, an effective coupling between deterministic corpuscular and probabilistic wave conceptions of particles has to be devised, as was always advocated by L. De Broglie and even suggested by E. Schrödinger himself in [13]. 6 The atomic contraction hypothesis.…”

On a variant of Newton-Coulomb's law

“…This is not sufficient to explain the remaining factor 5 remaining in the "missing mass enigma" after reduction of the extraneous sources of discrepancy studied in [6], but it is not completely negligible. At the level of galaxies (to explain the flat rotation curves), the amplification factor will be reduced by an extra factor 31/33 and will become 1.5.…”

“…For the classical Newton gravitational law, some potential explanations have been proposed even at the time of Newton himself (cf. [2,3,4,6]) but for the time being no mechanism is recognized by the scientific community as being the certain cause of the gravitational field. As long as the cause is unknown, speculations about the exact form of the law are still admissible.…”