John Moffat: Modifying Gravity & The Dark Matter Myth

John W. Moffat is a Danish-born British-Canadian physicist known for theories of Modified Gravity. He is currently Professor Emeritus in physics at the University of Toronto and is also an adjunct Professor in physics at the University of Waterloo and a resident affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

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CORRECTIONS: John Moffat emailed me these corrections after the video was published: “I named the supermassive black hole the image of which was captured by the EHT project was hosted in the galaxy M31. The host galaxy was M87. Also my book Cracking the Particle Code was published by OUP not by Harper Collins. Oh well…”

0:00:00 On “Modified Gravity” (or MOG) and how new theories are born
0:24:58 Does MOG agree with the data?
0:29:53 Black holes are characterized by “mass, spin, and alpha” not “mass, spin, and charge”
0:32:49 His thoughts on current Theories of Everything, including Weinstein’s and Wolfram’s
0:34:56 The problem with quantum gravity
0:43:16 Modifying Quantum Field Theory and Moffat’s method for learning
0:55:27 The advent of the Higgs, due to the non-renormalizability of SU(2) x U(1)
1:00:16 The Higgs is needed for unitarity, not renormalizing (in Moffat’s theory)
1:04:54 On the Arrow of Time
1:06:44 When Moffat met Feynman (brief story)
1:07:36 Why modifying gravity is so difficult, apart from quantum gravity
1:10:58 What Moffat is currently working on
1:12:01 Non-technical books Moffat has written, explaining all his theories
1:14:04 Black hole singularity points often being dependent on coordinate choice
1:18:55 Moffat’s start in math and physics from a painter with PTSD who had no previous predilection for mathematics
1:30:16 The history of Einstein’s first attempts at a Theory of Everything (or Unified Field Theory)
1:41:04 Bohr and Schrödinger hating on Einstein
1:52:17 Attending Dirac’s course
2:02:44 Some love for Prof. Brian Keating from Moffat