The aftermath of the Great Debate

After the Great Debate, I had a chat with Pavel Kroupa. Here follow some quotes from one of his emails:

“The Event was interesting, but it is clear that rational argumentation will not bring L-CDM followers into thinking otherwise. It is like with the searches for DM: if you do not find it then it obviously has other properties. And so our Local Volume (8 Mpc) and Local Group (about 2Mpc) cannot be used to test LCDM.   Well, if you subscribe to this, then we can just as well stop arguing and do more sensible things. ”

“Rob Sanders held a talk at our institute the following day, on MOND. And again, without being a MOND person,  I was simply stunned how very naturally MOND is solving all galactic-dynamics problems – how well it fits, and how all its predictions were verified. This talk was very well attended, and there were many questions, notably also from the L-CDM camp. So this may suggest that the young people are beginning to think. Rob states that the real falsification of L-CDM is due to the amazing success of MOND. I think he is right.”

“I read your Blog on the debate. Also reading Daniel Fischer’s Blog  it is my impression that the relevance of the Local Volume and Local Group failures are just not understood. If I or anyone else could see how normal/standard physics can resolve the failures, at least even in principle, then I wouldn’t have been in the debate!”

“I did bring in stellar ages right at the end of the open debate just before the end of the affair: If stars are found that are older than the nominal age of the universe according to the L-CDM model, then L-CDM is ruled out. So PLEASE, make sure you publish your paper.”

Indeed, after discussing a bit with Pavel, we are now working on a new version of the “Very Old Stars” paper, getting it ready for re-submission, probably to a different journal.

By the way, you can now enjoy the videos of the Great Debate here:

1) Presentation

2) 5 minutes summary

3) Debate