Gravitons and General Relativity

[PeterDonis]

so what do you think of the plausibility of Deur "Gravitational self-interaction" in classical GR could explain the missing mass in galaxies without dark matter via non-perturbative effects

I don't have enough of an intuition to hazard an opinion. There are no known exact solutions for the primary case of interest (a disk-like matter distribution), and nobody else has tried to check Deur's numerical simulations, and I'm certainly not in a position to do that on my own.

 

[ohwilleke]

it's hardly fair to criticize MTW for not taking into account work that has been done in the more than 50 years since it was published.

Part of the problem is that MTW is still being used as a standard textbook (probably the leading one in its subject), with almost no substantive updates through later editions.

There are lots of disciplines in which the best selling textbooks have been around for that long, but in other disciplines (e.g. economics and law) there have been a dozen or more significant substantive new edition updates since then.

In contrast, MTW has added only a brief updated introduction and maybe some slightly improved printing and paper quality in later printings. AFAIK, it hasn't even gone back and made a comprehensive purge of errata in the original edition (which certainly must exist in one of the largest textbooks for sale in university bookstores these days, which is chock full of highly technical content). No one would even try to cram all of that material into a single volume today.

While GR has not been the most quickly developing field in that time period, the field hasn't been entirely stagnant in that time period. MTW was written before the PC existed, before the Internet, before arXiv, and before space telescopes existed. M, T, and W did their math with slide rules and drew their diagrams by hand with straight edges and curve drawing tools that today's physicists wouldn't recognize at a yard sale. None of them could type, so it was either written long hand, or dictated. They were already esteemed full professors when my late father, who died in his 80s, was awarded his PhD in engineering from Stanford in 1970. It predates the fully elaborated Standard Model of Particle Physics. MTW was written so long ago that it is almost as old now as Einstein's original papers discovering GR were when it was written. Some or all of them had met Einstein himself in person in a professional capacity, even if they weren't strictly his professional contemporaries. There are whole sub-disciplines of relevant math, like chaos theory and the mathematical fruits of string theory, that are relevant to gravitation but didn't exist when it was written.

This contributes to a generation of new astrophysicists who are leaving graduate school unnecessarily behind the cutting edge of new research in the field. We really deserve a new industry standard GR textbook.

 

[kodama]

Are Deur results published in a peer reviewed journal?

 

[PeterDonis]

MTW is still being used as a standard textbook

Is it? It's commonly given as an advanced reference, but I'm not sure it's commonly being used to teach courses in GR.

 

[ohwilleke]

Are Deur results published in a peer reviewed journal?

Yes.

I maintain an annotated bibliography which includes both his published and unpublished papers related to astrophysics and gravity.

Overall he has 230 publications on arXiv, most of which are published QCD papers, and many of which are papers in which he is simply one member of a large HEP collaboration that is publishing its results.

The published astrophysics/gravity papers include:

A. Deur, “Implications of Graviton-Graviton Interaction to Dark Matter” (May 6, 2009) (published at 676 Phys. Lett. B 21 (2009))​

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Alexandre Deur, "A relation between the dark mass of elliptical galaxies and their shape" arXiv:1304.6932 (2013) (published in MNRAS (2014) doi: 10.1093/mnras/stt2293)​

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A. Deur, "An explanation for dark matter and dark energy consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity" arXiv:1709.02481 (September 7, 2017 published October 22, 2019) (published in Eur. Phys. J.C.) doi10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-7393-0​

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A. Deur, “Self-interacting scalar fields at high temperature” (June 15, 2017) (published at Eur. Phys. J. C77 (2017) no.6, 412) (despite the somewhat oblique title, this does address the relevant topic)​

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Alexandre Deur, "Relativistic corrections to the rotation curves of disk galaxies" (April 10, 2020) (lated updated February 8, 2021 in version accepted for publication in Eur. Phys. Jour. C)​

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Alexandre Deur, "Effect of gravitational field self-interaction on large structure formation" arXiv: 2018:04649 (July 9, 2021) (Accepted for publication in Phys. Lett. B) DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2021.136510​

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David Winters, Alexandre Deur, Xiaochao Zheng, "New Analysis of Dark Matter in Elliptical Galaxies" arXiv:2207.02945 (July 6, 2022) (published at 518 (2) MNRAS 2845-2852 (2023))​

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B. Guiot, A. Borqus, A. Deur, K. Werner, "Graviballs and Dark Matter" (June 3, 2020 revised September 3, 2020)(a different hypothesis than his main work). A follow up paper from February 9, 2022 is here​

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Corey Sargent, William Jackson Clark, Alexandre Deur, Balsa Terzic, "Hubble tension and gravitational self-interaction" Physica Scripta (June 25, 2024)​

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Given the time that elapses before uploading a preprint and getting an article accepted for publication, this is about as up to date as it is possible to be. His most recent peer reviewed publication of any kind was in February of 2025 (a QCD related chapter in an Encyclopedia of Particle Physics).

He is cited in some papers as well, including:

Valentina Cesare, "Dark Coincidences: Small-Scale Solutions with Refracted Gravity and MOND" arXiv:2301.07115 (January 17, 2023) (at page 23) (accepted for publication)​

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Pierfrancesco Di Cintio "Dissipationless collapse and the dynamical mass-ellipticity relation of elliptical galaxies in Newtonian gravity and MOND" arXiv:2310.12114 (October 18, 2023)(accepted for publication)​

The main paper criticizing his result (which is unpublished) is:

W. E. V. Barker, M. P. Hobson and A. N. Lasenby, "Does gravitational confinement sustain flat galactic rotation curves without dark matter?" arXiv:2303.11094 (March 20, 2023)​

He responded with a (currently unpublished) comment in:

Alexandre Deur, "Comment on "Does gravitational confinement sustain flat galactic rotation curves without dark matter?'' arXiv:2306.00992 (May 13, 2023)​

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[ohwilleke]

Is it? It's commonly given as an advanced reference, but I'm not sure it's commonly being used to teach courses in GR.

I don't know where to find good statistics, but according to Google AI it is in the top two in response to the query: "most widely used general relativity textbooks"

I'd love to see more authoritative sources as I don't particularly trust AI for accuracy.

 

[weirdoguy]

most widely used general relativity textbooks

Well, that is different from "most used for teaching"

 

[jacobbry]

I have problems understanding gravitons. I would understand them in the context of Newtonian gravitation. The Newtonian gravitational field is a force field and the gravitational interaction takes directly place between specific masses. It would therefore make sense to assume the existence of mediators for the interaction in this context.

The Einsteinian gravitational field, however, is not a force field. As I understand it, the field seems to be spacetime itself. In general relativity, gravitation is a geometric phenomenon and each mass just follows the curvature of spacetime, without direct interaction with other specific masses. I find it difficult to see why mediators would be needed in this picture. It even seems that gravitons would invalidate GR – not as an abstract mathematical model, but as a model of the physical reality. Is the reality of gravitation curved spacetime, or is it an exchange of particles? I don’t see how it can be both.

1. No Einstein’s gravitational field is not space time but rather warps space time.
2. In general relativity masses follow the curvature of space time as you have stated however that is only mostly true as in the physical world all masses actually have a infinitesimally small effect on space time such that it can be ignored in the study and mathematics of general relitivity with the exception of masses with extreme gravitational forces such as black holes that can warp space time as in Einsteins gravitational field