English

Problems with Mannheim's conformal gravity program

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2013-12-16 v6 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We show that Mannheim's conformal gravity program, whose potential has a term proportional to 1/r1/r and another term proportional to rr, does not reduce to Newtonian gravity at short distances, unless one assumes undesirable singularities of the mass density of the proton. Therefore, despite the claim that it successfully explains galaxy rotation curves, unless one assumes the singularities, it seems to be falsified by numerous Cavendish-type experiments performed at laboratories on Earth whose work have not found any deviations from Newton's theory. Moreover, it can be shown that as long as the total mass of the proton is positive, Mannheim's conformal gravity program leads to negative linear potential, which is problematic from the point of view of fitting galaxy rotation curves, which necessarily requires positive linear potential.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1305.0163,
  title  = {Problems with Mannheim's conformal gravity program},
  author = {Youngsub Yoon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.0163},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

5 pages, no figures. Published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:09:33.935Z