Augblog 2025
Augblog comes a little late due to a number of summer clan gatherings, plus a certain preoccupation with game design, and some extended conversations with various usually pseudonymous physicists about Hypersphere Cosmology (presumably such people wish to avoid peer disapproval of their interest in such heretical interpretations of the data) but don’t worry - the Physics Department and the Magic Department of Arcanorium College treat all enquiries in the strictest confidence. Your unpublished reservations about orthodox theories, and your speculations, hypotheses, and identities remain safe with us.
Doubly Modified Newtonian Dynamics? (DMOND)
The debate about whether Dark Matter or Some Kind of Modified Newtonian (or Relativistic) Dynamics best explains the apparently anomalous rotational behaviour of galaxies and their varied shapes and sizes rages with increasing intensity.
Galaxies present as extremely diverse structures – some look huge, some look smaller, most but not all seem to have central black holes, they all seem to rotate but often in ways that violate Newtonian or Relativistic expectations based on our estimates of the amount of ordinary (Baryonic) matter that they contain. Galaxies contain visible baryonic matter in the form of incandescent stars and less easily detectable baryonic matter in the form of rocks and dust and gas – which almost certainly includes very extensive spherical gas halos that extend very far beyond the incandescent stars, as definitely seems the case for the galaxies nearest to ours.
Whether or not galaxies also contain some sort of non-baryonic Dark Matter that accounts for their anomalous rotational behaviour and their morphology by just supplying more invisible mass and hence more gravity but otherwise not interacting much at all, remains contentious. If they do, then such Dark Matter would need to occur in varied amounts and in rather improbable configurations to resolve the rotational anomalies. Moreover, many galaxies would have to contain about five times as much of this mysterious and otherwise undetectable substance as the ordinary (Baryonic) matter made of protons, neutrons, and electrons that we know of.
Alternatively, we can try and make sense of galactic rotations by adjusting our theories about the effects of gravitation and inertia at the vast scales of entire galaxies.
Basic MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) depends on simply adding an extra acceleration ao to the cosmos to account for the apparently missing gravity. Although the origin of a0 remains unexplained, it does at least model the behaviour of some galaxies well, but not others – and thus, many cosmologists continue to prefer to use equally ad hoc arrangements of ‘whatever hypothetical configurations of dark matter it takes’ to resolve the anomalies.
Hypersphere Cosmology models the cosmos and its galaxies using Doubly Modified Newtonian Dynamics (DMOND) in which both gravitation and inertia become modified with effects that show up easily only on galactic scales.
Equation 9) shows how the rotational velocity v, at the radius (r) of a galaxy depends on the velocity vi(r) from Newtonian theory, plus an additional velocity of 2(sqrt pi G d)r from a Gödelian rotational component of the entire mass of the galaxy right out to the limit r of the vast spherical gas halo which seems likely to surround every galaxy.
Equation 10) shows how Newton’s Second Law, F = ma, remains subject to modification by the small positive curvature of the entire hyperspherical universe which gives rise to an omnidirectional deceleration A, where GM/L2 = A. Note that this mechanism does not violate conservation of energy as it converts linear momentum into orbital momentum.
I suspect that a combination of both of these effects together with fuller datasets on galactic gas halos can explain the apparently anomalous galactic rotation curves without recourse to the hypothesis of Dark Matter or any other form of Phlogiston.
All criticism and collaboration welcome.
That Space Game. The obsession/distraction that keeps on giving has now become more easily portable between main and holiday homes with the innovation of a modular board of moveable hexagonal tiles. Nevertheless the full set of all metal starships (nuts and bolts, ball bearings and various carpentry and plumbing fittings) and the board tiles still weighs in at over 10kg.
Developments continue and possibly converge towards a final form. I decided to throw all my favourite game concepts into this.
The provisionally re-titled Spaceforge War has the following new experimental features:
1) Hexagonal tiles - plywood coaster blanks sprayed matt black and then marked to show star systems within ~20 light years of the solar system, 5 lightyears to a hex.
(Alternatively the reverse sides of the Hexes can represent abstract or sci-fi fantasy arrangements of star systems.) (Shades of Twilight Imperium but the pieces do fit the board and it remains playable in a single day.)
2) The basic rule structure depends on sequential moves and dice to settle search and evasion and combat between units. (Rather like Risk protocols but with polyhedral dice.)
3) The tournament rule structure depends on simultaneously revealed movement orders (as in Diplomacy) and the use of simultaneously revealed tactics of search and evasion and combat, resolved by reference by asymmetric polygons.
4) It has endless scope for the introduction of Alien Mercenaries or Invaders, Ground Forces, and Characters or Psi-Devices which modify production, movement, search/evasion and combat etc.
If satisfying playable self-consistent rule systems emerge from all this, they will appear in the Games sections in due course. Work continues.
Weakening Dark Energy?
A flurry of papers and articles has appeared this last year in response to astronomical observations which suggest that something looks very wrong with mainstream ideas about so called ‘dark energy’ . It appears that this piece of phlogiston will require yet another aliquot of phlogiston to patch it. Some theorists have started to reexamine Gödelian rotating universe ideas: -
https://arxiv.org/html/1910.10819v2
Yet they try to patch the problem whilst still adhering to the Expansion Hypothesis.
A rotation of a non-expanding hyperspherical universe (in which bodies vorticitate around randomly orientated Hopf Fibrations) can solve the problem, but not in the way they think. The hypersphere model has balanced centrifugal and centripetal accelerations/curvatures of c2/L. This results in cosmological redshift and in us observing the universe in Stereographic Projection which creates the optical illusion of accelerating cosmic expansion.
At all points in 4D space and time the universe remains: -
4 Gigaparsecs to Antipode, and vorticitating at 0.005 arcseconds per century in finite and unbounded spacetime.
A more satisfactory metaphysic methinks.