I haven’t found anything calling this crank science, although it does make some rather sweeping claims. One is that dark matter does not exist, and another is that the universe is 27 billion years old.
Sure. In model building like this I would assume that you’d make the particle heavy to explain absence from experiments, or you’d make it couple in strange ways. Do the authors here do either? Higgs was hard to find because a little bit of both, dark matter is from the couplings entirely (no coupling to the SM). The scalar, I assume, is not dark matter (that is the claim here), so it must couple to SM so unless heavy it most likely should have shown up at LHC. It is a similar problem, but not the same. If it is the couplings and not the mass that should explain the absence then is there anything in the model that would give a hint to how it couples to anything in the SM? I doubt it, because this is basically pure GR work from what I understand, and not QFT. But, I don’t know, I’m just being sceptical here.
