If the two competing ideas are “equally wild,” couldn’t they be equally wrong?
Tag: dark energy
There is more than one kind of dark energy?
Paul Sutter: By allowing for multiple quantum fields to generate dark energy, it might be possible for string theory to still be relevant in our universe, as these models may not be stuck in the “swampland.”
Dark matter and dark energy as 21st century Ptolemaic epicycles? – Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts
Why can’t they find dark matter, despite much search? Sheldon: The old joke is that a man is looking under a lamppost one night. The policeman asks what he is doing. “Looking for my keys” he replies. “Did you lose them here?” “No, but the light is better over here.” (And the funding is better for some research than for others.)
A Nobelist explains: I invented the correct universe
Throw in a multiverse and pop science will believe. Hey. We can’t help that.
Rob Sheldon dishes on dark matter and dark energy
Rob Sheldon: My takeaway is that dark energy is “pathological science,” using the words of Irving Langmuir to describe N-rays or polywater. It is science at the edge of messy data, finding what one is looking for by using poor statistical methods. It is precisely what astronomers are trained NOT to do, and therefore this whole Nobel Prize thing is a corruption of what had been a relatively unstained field.
Sabine Hossenfelder: Are dark matter and dark energy scientific?
Hossenfelder: “So, what’s the scientist to do when they are faced with such a discrepancy between theory and observation? They look for new regularities in the observation and try to find a simple way to explain them.” Okay but the question of whether the terms “dark matter” and “dark energy” correspond to anything that actually exists could be a different one.
Rob Sheldon on dark energy: Does it exist?
Sheldon, our physics color commentator, writes to say, “I’ve mentioned before that Subir Sarkar at Oxford has questioned the existence of “dark energy” and by implication, the award of the 2011 Nobel prize. Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog links to a 7 minute summary of the Nobel prize and Sarkar’s work: But even more compelling is her Read More…
Dark energy critics are outnumbered, we are told, and its defenders are digging in
At Inside Science: “While most scientists still seem to believe that dark energy remains on solid ground, no one yet has any firm idea what it actually is.” Maybe dark energy is cosmic consciousness? Don’t laugh before you read this: “Could information be—at long last—the missing dark matter?”
So then maybe we ARE privileged observers
Researcher: “Our analysis is data-driven but supports the theoretical proposal due to Christos Tsagas (University of Thessaloniki) that acceleration may be inferred when we are not Copernican observers, as is usually assumed, but are embedded in a local bulk flow shared by nearby galaxies, as is, indeed, observed. This is unexpected in the standard cosmological model, and the reason for such a flow remains unexplained.
In case you wondered why dark energy is “the biggest unsolved problem in the universe”
Ethan Siegel: Why does empty space have the properties that it does? Why is the zero-point energy of the fabric of the Universe a positive, non-zero value? And why does dark energy have the behavior we observe it to have, rather than any other?
Hossenfelder: Could the problem with dark matter come down to using wrong equations?
Sabine Hossenfelder: Given how much brain-power physicists have spent on trying to figure out what dark matter and dark energy is, I think it would be a good idea to definitely settle the question whether it is anything at all. At the very least, I would sleep better.
Ethan Siegel: How we can get a universe from nothing?
Siegel: In order for inflation to end, that energy has to get converted into matter and radiation. The evidence strongly points to that happening some 13.8 billion years ago.
Astrophysicist: Nothingness” may be the answer to our cosmic questions; Rob Sheldon responds
Rob Sheldon: This article illustrates the reason why the scientific method is going extinct, not just in Darwin’s circular logic, but also in physics and cosmology.
Rob Sheldon: Are multiple measurements “closing in” on dark energy? Nope.
If the results had been at all positive, the presser would have likely said “Confirmation!!!!” or something like that. Seeing as the new results are neutral or faintly negative, “closing in” is the best they can manage.
Dark matter vs. dark energy in a world where neither have been discovered
Hossenfelder’s clarifications will at least help us understand what we are all confused about.