Cosmologists say universe leaves them in the dark

The News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne) ^ | 10/20/03 | Tom Siegfried (Dallas Morning News)

[LiteKeeper]

YEC INTREP - COSMOLOGY

[per loin]

I'll take a crack at it:

D=E x T^2

Where:
D=the darkness of the energy
E= the measureable anti-gravitational strength of the energy
T= age of universe

[RightWhale]

"The answer will come from a better understanding of physics."

So stated with Christian Certitude. Where are the young, radical philosophers gone? Berkeley, sure, but not all. Some are going back to the point Descartes made his fateful decision to base all on a reality of mathematical logic and geometrical physics. Go back to that crossroads and look for the other road, the one overlooked, a pure science not phenomenalism, not psychologism, not geometrism. Some shubbery might need pruning to see the road: it's an unused road.

[BioForce1]

Chemistry was a confused area of science in about 1600.

By 1900 the periodic table had cleared up most of the confusion. By 1906 the gross internal structure of all atoms was understood and by 1930 the fine structure of all atoms could be understood using very elegant mathematical models. By 1975 the internal structure of the atomic nucleus was very well understood using new mathematical models.

All physical science reduces observation to mathematics. If we could get NASA to shut down the space station and shuttle program then maybe we could start doing some real physics and astronomy and get to the bottom to how the universe really works and the largest and smallest scales.

[RightWhale]

I'll go along with shutting down the ISS on the grounds that it is producing neither science nor scientists. If the aim is to do science they would get a lot done in ordinary labs with that kind of funding. They could even have had the superconducting supercollider up and running by now.

[Conspiracy Guy]

What do a bunch of make up artists know about the universe? This is insane. I think I'll ask my barber for tax advice next. Sheesh.

[delapaz]

Dude!

you can't write a paragraph like that without writing 3 more paragraphs explaining what you mean by that :-).

[LibWhacker]

I'm kind of glad they've been thrown into a bit of disarray by the discovery of dark energy. I was a little disappointed back in the early 90s when everyone was saying we were on the verge of discovering a Grand Unifying Theory that would explain everything there was to explain about the universe. Better the mystery never ends, imho.

[Conspiracy Guy]

That is exactly what I was thinking. YOu beat me to it.

[RightWhale]

You may not have had the pleasure of listening to a lecture by our resident philosophy of art historian who condenses 4 times as much into each sentence and goes like that an hour at a time. If your lecture notes need more space than a single index card, you will need to retire to the library and try again next year. OTOH, it might be that if the 3 people in the world that understand her at all were present, each could give the same lecture in even more condensed form.

[RightWhale]

We have probably all had those thoughts one time or another. Somewhere in the million posts of FR, it has probably already been said more than once.

[RightWhale]

they've been thrown into a bit of disarray

Alan Guth needs wider recognition. And like somebody said on FR a few days ago, dark energy/dark matter may be the aether of our day.

[Conspiracy Guy]

; )

[biblewonk]

Mumbo jumbo.

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

Sure, astronomers know that about two-thirds of the universe's matter-energy content is the peculiar dark energy.
... cosmologists clamoring for clues to the dark energy's identity haven't yet solved an even older mystery, the identity of most of the universe's matter. About a third of the universe's mass-energy budget is "dark" matter, some alien form unlike the ordinary proton-and-neutron stuff making up everything on Earth.

Can someone give an armchair physics explaination of "dark energy". I understand that dark matter is hypothesized in order to explain the fact that the amount of visible matter doesn't seem to account for certain gravitationally-related phenomenon [In fact, there was an article around here just the other day concerning this]. But, what is the deal with "dark energy?" This isn't the quantum foam thing, where energy supposedly appears and disappears more or less at random out of nothing, is it?

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

Can someone ...

Okay, I got off my a$$ and did a search. Plenty of info on dark energy.

[RightWhale]

Dark energy is like gravity, except it pushes rather than pulls.

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

Dark energy is just like gravity, except it pushes rather than pulls.

Equating "energy" to "gravity" doesn't make much sense too me. If it is truly a repulsive force (in which case they should have called it something like "dark gravity" or URF, Unknown Repulsive Force) then what does it act on? What does it push? Normal matter? Dark Matter? The "fabric" of space-time? Or is it really just another Einsteinian Comsmological Constant, plucked out of thin air to explain the unexplained.

[RightWhale]

Strangely, I have never had a problem with the idea of negative gravity. Assuming the universe is half matter and half anti-matter, the net force [gravity] ought to be repulsive. Inside a given galaxy would be predominantly matter or anti-matter, not both, so internally gravity would be of attraction. Between galaxies there would be both gravity and anti-gravity fields and the net would be repulsive, as we see, with knots and assemblages of either matter or anti-matter galaxies, not both together. It's probably a naive view, but what do whales know.