>> The term is really just a placeholder for the fact that something is providing a long-scale repulsive force > How is that not contrived? All the phrase "da

>> The term is really just a placeholder for the fact that something is providing a long-scale repulsive force > How is that not contrived? All the phrase "dark energy" means is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. There must be something which provides this repulsive force (maybe some new particle, maybe some unknown property of the vacuum, maybe some new theory of gravity on cosmological distance scales). Dark energy is simply the generic name to describe this something, whatever it is. It makes no claim as to what is causing the repulsion. It's just a name for an unknown. Calling dark energy contrived is like seeing an equation 6x + 4 = 7 and calling "x" contrived. > Well aesthetics do invoke subjective qualities. Relativity, modifying Newtonian physics, could have be seen as ugly by some. E = mc^2 is so elegant as to seem improbable. The virtue of relativity is that despite overturning a very elegant theory, it creates new, elegant equations of its own. Any theory of gravity that could explain the varying dark matter fractions would necessarily have to do so in some basically arbitrary way (since dark matter fractions vary in an apparently random manner). So any such new theory of gravity would have to be ugly; there could be no redeeming features.