Disk galaxies and their dark halos as self-organized patterns
  Galaxies are built by complex physical processes with significant inherent
stochasticity. It is therefore surprising that the inferred dark matter
distributions in galaxies are strongly correlated with the observed baryon
distributions leading to various `Baryon-Halo conspiracies'. The fact that no
dark matter candidate has been definitively identified invites a search for
alternative explanations for such correlations and we present an approach
motivated by the behaviors of self organized patterns. We propose a nonlocal
relativistic Lagrangian theory for a `pattern field' which acts as an
`effective dark matter', built on the idea that defects in this pattern field
couple to the baryonic matter distribution. Our theory accounts for the gross
structure of cold disk galaxies. We compute galactic rotation curves and derive
various galaxy scaling relations including Renzo's rule, the radial
acceleration relation, and the existence of the Freeman limit for central
surface brightness.
