Albert Einstein told physicist George Gamow that the greatest blunder of his life was his introduction of a “cosmological constant” designated by Λ, the Greek letter lambda. In his 1915 theory of general relativity, Λ, a sort of ubiquitous “anti-gravity,” keeps the universal static, neither expanding nor contracting. But in 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that the universe is expanding — hence Einstein’s “blunder” remark.
Fast forward to 1998, when two teams of cosmologists determined that the rate of expansion was accelerating. Since all matter is attracted to other matter by gravity, the cause for this acceleration couldn’t be particles (which mutually attract) but some mysterious repulsive field permeating everywhere and everything: dark energy. Which, in its simplest form, is Einstein’s cosmological constant: not a blunder but a stroke of genius.
The teams used distant type 1a supernovae to detect this cosmic acceleration. A supernova is a massive, violent, short-lived explosion as a star ends its life. What’s special about type 1a supernovae is their uniform brightness, so by measuring their apparent luminosity, astronomers can calculate their distance, like observing the apparent brightness of a known wattage light bulb. In addition, their red-shifts (when wavelengths from receding objects “stretch out,” aka the Doppler shift), establish how fast they’re moving away from us. By comparing the apparent brightness (hence distance) and red-shift (hence receding velocity) of some 110 type 1a supernovae, the two teams deduced that the expansion of the universe was increasing with time.
Soon we, the lay public, were told, in the form of slick pie-charts (see illustration), that ordinary observable (baryonic) matter — the atoms that make up you, me, Earth and stars — constitutes a mere 5 percent of the mass-energy of the universe. (According to general relativity, mass and energy are interchangeable.) Another 24 percent comes from “dark matter” (the stuff that makes galaxies rotate faster than they “should,” perhaps a new form of sub-atomic particles); while the bulk (71 percent) comes from “dark energy.”
Note: (1) Dark energy isn’t dark, it’s transparent (dark things absorb light); (2) despite apparently violating the law of conservation of energy, the strength of dark energy per unit volume stays constant in an expanding universe. This means it’s destined to swamp all other forces (which become more diluted as the universe expands) and assures that the universe will never contract back on itself, but will expand forever.
Which is pretty much how things have stood since 1998. Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter, leaders of the two “accelerating expansion” research teams, received Nobel Prizes for their work in 2009. Then, in a bombshell paper published last October in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, a fresh team of researchers question the findings of Riess and Perlmutter, who, the team said, were working from skewed samples of supernovae. Instead of measuring accelerating expansion, Riess and Perlmutter were misled by our galaxy’s local motion relative to the cosmic microwave background (a sort of frame from which all motion can be compared). After examining fresh data for 740 “non-skewed” type 1a supernovae, the current authors conclude, “the cosmic acceleration … may be an artifact of our being non-Copernican observers, rather than evidence for a dominant component of ‘dark energy’ in the Universe.”
The new paper had barely hit the internet before other cosmologists began picking it apart — followed by rebuttals by the original authors. Such is the way of scientific progress. However, if it’s shown to be correct and expansion of the universe isn’t accelerating, then dark energy appears to be a non-existent boondoggle. Meaning, our universe may ultimately implode upon itself under the force of gravity rather than (as predicted by dark energy) keep expanding, cooling all the while. Wouldn’t you rather everything ends in a dramatic “big crunch” than in an endless whimper?
This article appears in Tarnished.
You’d like things to end, perhaps biased by your own biological DNA methylation ( in a limited environment, the alternative is endless growth or cancer. An unlimited environment so often desired by the psychopathic limited in the thin skin of biological earth, with its complex sharingecosystems, appears at present to occur, although excluding an insignificant system-dependent organism composed of only the four or so most common local elements).
But please don’t conflate such presumption and consequent jealousy with reality dwarfing your capacity to comprehend.
Even biological life, largely carbon-dependent and constantly so active that even your most lasting physical object, your femur, is totally composed of new atoms and molecules inside of 11 years,
Motion, or flux, is the sole constant – energy. That we , or stars, accrete and finally disperse is a product of that constant flux.
Theoretically, (to limited thinkers) random distribution is the far future. But looking up into the random distribution of the very stars, we find huge variation, fierce massive stars and present black holes, , and on minute scales, virtual “particles” coming into evanescent being , seemingly occurring as “space” stretches, and immediately winking out (mostly, as far as we can tell.
When encouraged as a young teen to study Einstein’s work, I looked, responding to the physicist who was pushing me, “these equations do not necessarily support any actual existence of matter, just apparent variations in the shape of an unknown field.
What ARE the topes, shapes that other equations define as “one-dimensional” strings, or several dimensional membranes, fluctuating?
That we cannot connect basic components of the energy densities that constitute matter, is of little significance, when we ourselves had senses evolved only for the utilities of temporary persistence and motion within a constrained biosphere in concert with myriad other organisms, all temporarily acquiring moderately electron-balanced atoms and molecules, essentially inviting them to spend a bit of time (whatever THAT is!) moving in and through some replicating organism , then setting them free to find other such associations.
Philosophy is limited, dead-endish.
Affect – emotional experience and states, rule ur thinking , efficient at our scale to persist for a while. Brains,, you see, have evolved over time as heuristic predictors – using experiences, and simulation (memory, association) to engage in persistence. Our brains are naturally self-interest-biased, and ALL our conceptualizing and machinations are involved in rather social interaction, distorting all information toward the perceived utility of the individual agglomeration, the organism that grew the particular and unique brain.
It doesn’t MATTER what we like, and to whimper although excoriated as “miserable” by some social-dominance-oriented user of the word, is always and only a social signal, largely emitted by a subadult or injured animal.
I respond quite compassionately to whimpers, unlike the psychopathic, and recognize their utility and meaning, again, ENTIRELY social and signaling distress in a finally optimistic way.
Bangs, the neurohormonal thrillers of psychopaths – consider war and pleasure killing and the phony presumption of superiority that bangers desire – have no universal meaning.
Time was certainly shaped differently when all was plasma, heat.
Yet the question that has NOT been addressed is, “How anisotropy?”
Nothing is isotropic, even light bends in response to mysterious gravity.
The author appears to have miscalculated his opinions and questions as having far more gravity than they do in reality. Discovering something weighty but consistent, some couling constant K pulling at tensors, , is not inherently different from messing with bacteria, and noting an infection of a penicillium mold pushing them away, at bay. It may have some functional value at some scale; after all science has consistently been conflated with mere engineering, an occupation desiring to dispense with offensively (to engineers) variables.
I want to puke at philosophy.
Meanwhile the more acute intelligence of wolf and hawk merely observe, not demanding information fit into their known past, but willing to contain it. This, whether or not it become key to assessing whether some future concentration of energy demonstrate variation affecting lunch.
Vectors and tensors, you see . . .
Well yeah, obviously
Great interview supporting “no dark energy” POV:
https://youtu.be/B1mwYxkhMe8