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Re:Entropic Gravity by phkahler on Monday September 02, 2019 @04:57PM (#20861716)
There is zero validity to treating galactic mass as a point mass. That is exactly one of the mistakes I suspect keeps being made. At best it is a misapplication of the divergence theorem. Disks dont behave like spheres and rings dont behave like uniform shells. Proximity matters.
Re:Entropic Gravity by Keysh on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @06:43PM (#20872019)
It generally works a bit better if you say something like, "Hmm... it seems like this approach would be wrong, for this reason that just occurred to me. Am I missing something? Or: How do people in the field actually do it, so as to avoid this error?"

If, on the other hand, you assume they must all be stupider than you are and say things like "That is exactly one of the mistakes I suspect keeps being made", then you're basically saying, "I'll bet none of the hundreds or thousands of people working in this field for decades have ever thought of this one point that just occurred to me!" The latter is, shall we say, rather unlikely.

(In point of fact, Newton's shell theorem generalizes to the case of axisymmetric, flattened spheroids with homeoidal density distributions, a result that was derived by Laplace and others in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Which means that disks do behave somewhat like spheres.)

To get a sense of what's really involved, you could look at something like Brandt's 1960 paper, and then some of the papers that cite it (including some of the classic early papers by Vera Rubin and collaborators), to get an idea of how much more sophisticated than an simple Keplerian rotation curve:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1960ApJ...131..293B/abstra...

Re:Entropic Gravity by DoctorOetker on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @10:05AM (#20866541)
what you say is obviously true, but could astronomers really be making this elementary kind of mistake? one would have to completely lose touch with elementary physics to make that mistake...