Intergalactic conformal symmetry

Milgrom recently characterized MOND as about "scale invariance at low accelerations". Perhaps the universe began in a state of conformal symmetry, which has been broken within the galaxies, producing general relativity and the standard model; but perhaps conformal symmetry remains unbroken in intergalactic space.

Cosmic awakening

Three years ago I wrote that, even if new data from earthly colliders dries up, astronomy and cosmology will provide enough new data to keep model builders busy.

Now it's the age of LIGO and it looks like we'll be getting news from black holes across the universe every week. It's a leap in awareness of the universe, like the leap from no exoplanets, to thousands of them...

And my new thought is that, whether or not we soon stumble upon the complete explanation of the particle masses, the dark sector, etc., or whether we still have decades of theoretical work ahead in those areas... My thought is that the universe, which is coming into endlessly sharper focus, will be the way that future physicists think about and experience fundamental physics, in a way that was impossible in the 20th-century era of colliders and accelerators.

We are now just being flooded with data about astrophysical objects and their extreme physics. Nuclear physics and QCD have to account for white dwarves and neutron stars, the standard model has to explain various traces of the early universe imprinted on today's, and who knows what perspectives gravitational astronomy will yield. The LHC and its peers may begin to look like just one, local source of data, in a whole universe of information.

The eV scale II

Can "MOND phonons" emerge from a plasma like Archidiacono et al?