General relativity

No, it was Moffat who used the word "may". You seem to have interpreted his statement as strong support for an alternative theory of gravity: it never was. Later, more evidence showed that Moffat's hypothesis happened to be wrong. [The Higgs reference can be ignored: it was an aside].

The status of GR is that it is the simplest theory explaining all of the evidence. I know your obsession won't let you accept that.

No, the word "may" has a very precise dictionary meaning. It is a meaning which distinguishes between a hypothesis and a fact. Moffat could explain this to you.

I like your bit about three things with a ratio. Must be very advanced mathematics: lesser beings make their ratios out of two numbers.

It is not that your statements are not correct, they are undefined waffle and therefore meaningless.

Ok, so, going back to Moffat, and leaving aside Gravitational Waves for a second, your problem with GR with DM and Moffat seems to be the following: MoG (Moffat's Modifed Gravity theory) and GR predict very different things on cosmological scales (DM versus no DM). So, if MoG turns out to be right, that somehow kills GR. Is that more or less what you are saying?

You also seem to say: a theory can predict a million things right, but what matters is whether it predicts one thing wrong (which, for you is, among other issues, Dark Matter in GR). In this case the theory is falsified, you have to throw it all away, and restart from scracth, since the premises must have been wrong.

Can I summarize your thinking as I am doing above? Just to have some common ground for the discussion, before addressing MoG and other issues more in detail. Otherwise we just keep going in a loop. 

Ok, wait a second, you are adding something here. You are saying, both GR and MoG *predict what we see*, *but* they are both wrong because they use a mathematical framework (the description of differential geometry of space-time) which you do not like. 

That means one could have a theory that predicts all observations correctly with some 8 decimal digits accuracy (QED, for example), and you still find it wrong, because it still does not have the "right" (whatever right means) mathematical or logical structure.

Is that what you are saying?

By contrast, scientists would be more likely to say RPaulB's statement "Space particles, like all particles[,] are built from 3 preons" is a rambling fantasy with no known relationship to any real world observations. 

RPaulB, since your statement about space purports to be a scientific statement rather than pure science fiction, please describe an experiment that would support it.

Back to science fact, the square kilometer array project was mentioned in parliament today, and I was reminded that it will provide extreme tests of general relativity. It is certainly possible that these tests will show a refinement to GR is needed (such as the discovery in the 1990s that the cosmological constant was non-zero).  I would be willing to bet it won't.

Extreme tests of general relativity

No, RPaulB, I said your English statement "Space is a particle" was meaningless in physics until you defined what it means by reference to experiments (even impractical ones will suffice - for example, presuming the existence of a stupendously powerful accelerator).

I never stated your claim was incorrect, I said it was gobbledegook until it is precisely defined. [To be clear, I am very confident you are not going to succeed in defining it in a way which makes it correct]. This is an important point: a scientific statement does not even have a truth value until its terms are adequately defined.

Regarding Special Relativity, it has been known since 1911 to be merely a very useful approximation to the truth. It is also extremely accurate in any volume of space-time where the gravitational field does not significantly vary. For larger volumes, GR is needed.

As one example, although time dilation can be detected in a volume only one meter high in the Earth's gravitational field, this effect is totally explicable using only an accelerating frame and special relativity. General relativity only becomes necessary when curvature starts to be significant.

So you can not tell us what space is.

But, you are sure it is not a particle.

Experiments do not prove anything, they only

give you data, which then requires reasoning.

Physics is about defining observations and then predicting the relationship between such observations. Indeed that's the whole of science.

If you want proofs that aren't related to experiments, you should switch to pure mathematics.

I am pretty sure I have stated before what space is. First, lets make sure we focus on a small chunk of space viewed from a Lorentz frame with a negligeable gravitational gradient. Given that, we can ignore gravity and what is left is the ground state of the combined quantum field of the three forces we know. This is quite well understood, since the standard model is well-tested, but there may be subtle refinements due to physics beyond the general model (the same physics that is expected to explain the nature of dark matter).

The nice thing is that because this is the lowest energy state, one little piece of space is the same as another.

This is not a flimsy description: some particle physics describe their work as studying the properties of the vacuum. This is because in QFT, the vacuum is always full of virtual interactions, and the net result is the properties we see. For example, the vacuum has a permeability and a permittivity.

Unfortunately, none of us are going to get a full understanding of QFT, but we can all understand that it is the most successful theory in physics.

I will bet any one that they have learned more from my deleted comments than from all other comments here so far.