Physicists and theoretical physicists are going to battle it out again!
I am not sure about this, since the key will come from data that will tell us what theory is likely and which one is not.
I also do not understand this statement about vested interests and so on. People are generally very open minded and consider all alternatives as soon as they are meaningful. Verlinde's work has been cited more than 500 times, and Milgrom's works more than thousands of times. Isn't this a proof of being open? :)
The current calculation for dark matter models need four free parameters that are adjusted to make the calculations, model and theory match and fit the observations.
Here is my real question. I have not understood this number of four parameters. There are many particle physics models of dark matter and on top of that, one also needs to consider the astrophysical models. The number of free parameters is way above four. Do you have precision about that?
LOL... well I'm no expert in this... but google can find you answers. Did you try?...
http://maths.dur.ac.uk/YTF/2014/TalkSlides/KarlNordstrom.pdf
I thought you knew, that was I asked (haven't read all of this yet).
However, the four parameters you have found on google are the traditional four parameters of particle physics models for dark matter. There is nothing you can do to reduce them further, except plugging the theory into a more fundamental one. But then you are trading those free parameters by others and the model starts to be more complicated. I am pretty convinced those are not the four parameters mentioned in your post (I cannot fund any reference to them in the scientific paper actually :p )
Anyway, I will check myself over the week end :)
Ok, thanks for the clarification. I don't know. I did some research, but not that deep ;)