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Well GR is potentially very wrong both at very large scales (seemingly requiring dark matter and dark energy) and very small scales (due to known present incomp
by feanaro 8y ago
Well GR is potentially very wrong both at very large scales (seemingly requiring dark matter and dark energy) and very small scales (due to known present incompatibilities with quantum mechanics). It's only been shown to be a highly accurate model everywhere in between.
- drjesusphd 8y agoI think both dark matter and dark energy are perfectly consistent with GR. Hitherto unobserved matter would contribute to the stress energy tensor and dark energy is (I believe - has this changed?) the cosmological constant.
- feanaro 8y agoYes, they are consistent. In fact, they are the result of the following line of thinking: given that we are observing unexpected results once we account for (using the GR paradigm) all the clearly apparent mass and energy, what else could we change so that GR doesn't have to change? In other words, the consistency with GR is already baked in. That's not to say that the approach doesn't have huge merit. One model for dark energy is indeed the cosmological constant, but there are other approaches, most notably quintessence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_(physics)).