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Scientists may have discovered a flaw in their understanding of dark energy
- nabla9 3y ago> The key words are “might” and “could.”
- readthenotes1 3y agoWhich also apply to dark {energy, matter}, the flying spaghetti monster of cosmology...
- nabla9 3y agoIncorrect.
- hgtresd 3y agoScientists: our calculations are consistently and dramatically different than our observations, even when accounting for every externality we can imagine, there must be something that we are unable to probe that accounts for this disparity, let’s call it dark energy Lay people: science says the universe is mostly dark energy spewed from the maw of the dark beast Scientists: with better instrumentation and modeling it appears we may have identified what we got wrong originally about dark energy Lay people: but we already knew the dark lords are known for their treachery and deceit You: science and religion are the same
- wussboy 3y agoNailed it.
- readthenotes1 3y agoNot quite. Scientists: we got something we can't explain. let's make something up for which we have no evidence other than there's stuff we can't explain. We'll keep pondering whether we can figure out how to detect what we just made up because we got nothing so far. Theologian: we got something we can't explain. let's make something up for which we have no evidence other than there's stuff we can't explain. Me: both have faith in their models
- chuckadams 3y agoAs someone wittier than me said, “I’d rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question.”
- hgtresd 3y agoIt should be noted that I only dragged religion into the discussion because of the “flying spaghetti monster” analogy which is a reference to a famous atheist’s mocking of religion. That said, concepts like faith and belief are wholly independent of religion. So if you want to denounce religion from your critical reasoning it is unnecessary to claim you also denounce the concept of “faith”. How can anyone do anything without faith? Why are getting in that vehicle? I have faith/believe it will take me to my destination. Why are you fastening your seatbelt? I have faith/believe in the science that shows it will provide protection in the event of a collision.
- pixelsort 3y agoDo not from faith that which can be had more readily by way of resignation, apathy, or indifference. Faith is just their fragile cousin.
- tichiian 3y agoTrue, both use a filler name like "god" or "dark energy" for gaps in understanding they cannot explain. But the big difference is: Scientists are happy about "dark energy" being explained away and made superfluous. The filler being smaller or vanishing is progress. A scientist's job is to fill the gaps with proper explanations. Theologians are the opposite, the filler is their whole reason and purpose. If you take away the filler by providing proper explanations, theologians will resist in any way possible. Progress for them is sowing doubt on all scientific explanations and spreading the influence of their filler on everything.
- datavirtue 3y agoIt's what Jesus would have wanted.
- 3y ago
- naikrovek 3y ago> Which also apply to dark {energy, matter}, the flying spaghetti monster of cosmology... they are both very real, as they are both known to us because of direct and indirect observation. i don't understand the "dark matter isn't real" crowd, because it is very much real, and we observe it. we can measure it. we don't know what it is comprised of, but we know it's real.
- mellosouls 3y agoBetter to use non-gated sites, plenty of coverage around eg. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/dark-energy-might-not-be-constant-after-all/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/dark-energy-might-no... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/04/biggest-ever-3d-map-universe-dark-energy-data-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/04/biggest-ever... Etc
- digging 3y agoAppreciated. NY Times, although not unique in this way, is not a link I'm clicking for astronomy news...
- ackfoobar 3y agoSpeaking of the coverage of STEM stuff in NYT, here's another recent example. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cyberattack-linux.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cybera... > His job involves developing a piece of open-source database software known as PostgreSQL, whose details would probably bore you to tears if I could explain them correctly, which I can’t.
- demondemidi 3y agoWow. Being proud of being ignorant is generally something I associate with modern MAGA republicans, not journalists. But then again, this is the NYTimes, a hotbed of nepotism over talent.
- itishappy 3y agoIMHO, that doesn't read like pride in ignorance. I suspect most NYTimes readers aren't looking for a deep dive on PostgreSQL internals, myself included. He does get into the context surrounding xz Utils and their relevance to the world at large a few paragraphs later. > But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data compression tools called xz Utils, and wondered if it was related to the earlier errors he’d seen. > (Don’t worry if these names are Greek to you. All you really need to know is that these are all small pieces of the Linux operating system, which is probably the most important piece of open-source software in the world. The vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies — run on Linux, which makes its security a matter of global importance.) I think this does a good job to indicate the general level of his audience.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoSabine?
- NullHypothesist 3y agoThis will be potentially comforting news to a young Alvey in Brooklyn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1-OmAICpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1-OmAICpU
- denton-scratch 3y ago> it would eventually push all the stars and galaxies so far apart that even atoms could be torn asunder If that's what expansion driven by dark energy does, then why hasn't it already happened? And where did the reporter get this factoid?
- itishappy 3y agoThis isn't quite how I understand the expansion of the universe. The interesting thing is it affects space itself, so the more distance between objects, the more space there is to expand. This does try to pull stuff apart, but it's quite slow so it doesn't take much to overcome it. Even gravity (the weakest force) is enough to keep stars and galaxy clusters bound together. Atoms are way to small to be affected. This changes if you allow Dark Energy to vary with time, but the paragraph in the article assumes it's constant. > If the work of dark energy were constant over time, it would eventually push all the stars and galaxies so far apart that even atoms could be torn asunder...
- empyrrhicist 3y agoDepends if the expansion is accelerating or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyXTQ9do-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyXTQ9do-c
- itishappy 3y agoAgreed, and I've edited my comment to include this.
- taylodl 3y agoThat's not necessarily true. If Dark Energy is a property of the vacuum state of space and it's a force acting opposite of gravity, then the further apart those objects become then the more those objects will accelerate from one another. That's what leads to an accelerated expansion of the universe. That doesn't change the fact that gravity can overcome Dark Energy. To wit, the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies are on a collision course. Yes, Dark Energy is working to drive those galaxies apart, but gravity is winning and the closer those galaxies get to each other then the strong gravity is going to become. Gravity gets stronger as the distance between objects decreases, Dark Energy gets stronger as the distance between objects increases. That is if Dark Energy is a property of spacetime. Since we don't know what Dark Energy is we can't say for certain, but it appears to be a property of spacetime and if that's the case then this statement is true.
- mindaslab 3y agoIs there a non paywall version of this article?
- thekevan 3y agohttps://archive.is/xOhg1 https://archive.is/xOhg1 I just went to https://archive.ph/ https://archive.ph/, entered the URL of the article and it produced that
- thekevan 3y agohttps://archive.is/xOhg1 https://archive.is/xOhg1
- crmd 3y agoI wonder if this can lead to revision of “vacuum energy” theories. The idea that empty space simply has a uniform, non-zero energy level is a disappointing and kind of anti-climatic explanation for one of the greatest mysteries of physics and hints that our best models of the universe have huge gaps.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoThat seems very counter-intuitive. Energy usually comes from a difference between two things. How could there be uniform energy everywhere? It's paradoxical.
- snarkconjecture 3y agoIt makes more sense if you've learned general relativity.
- hinkley 3y agoIf mass has energy, and mass creates space, who is to say that the energy isn’t smeared out across the universe? We’ve detected gravity “waves” now.
- AprilArcus 3y agoWell that's just what the Higgs field is, a scalar field with a nonzero vacuum expectation value. So the existence of a field of this kind isn't just possible in principle, it's been experimentally verified.
- snarkconjecture 3y agoYup. On which note, the Higgs' symmetry breaking should really have changed the vacuum energy density by something orders of magnitude larger than the density of dark energy...
- layer8 3y agoIt might not be everywhere, just by happenstance in the region that contains our observable universe.
- 867-5309 3y agowhat about astrophysicists..?
- jwuphysics 3y agoI am an astronomer and was at a conference when this headline broke. Obviously we ignored this and read the actual papers, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03002 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03002. There you can see that the dark energy equation of state parameter w0 = -0.99 +0.15/-0.13, which is not at all significantly different than w0 = -1. That is, no time evolving dark energy. When combined with other cosmological results, the joint analysis slightly favors w0 > -1 rather than w0 = -1 at the ~2.5sigma level or so, but it depends which other results you factor in.
- dventimi 3y ago[flagged]
- danielbln 3y agoYou have no newspapers that are worse?
- dventimi 3y agoIf someone wanted to argue that The Washington Post is worse, I wouldn't put up a fight.
- yareal 3y agoNYT is a rag, for sure. But "worst" is clearly hyperbolic.
- dventimi 3y agoI'm not being hyperbolic. Its influence cannot be overstated, and therefore neither can be the consequences of its journalistic malpractice. Numerous sordid examples spring to mind, but I won't list any here. A moment's reflection on just the last 23 years alone ought to do the trick.
- throwitaway222 3y agoI'll wait til Reginald Barclay gets modified and connected to the holodeck before I'll believe science and scientists on nearly... anything. They'll be wrong for the next 1000 years. Almost nothing holds. I'll live my life til I'm 95 and they'll say they were wrong about cancer, gravity, speed of light, electricity, etc...
- omnicognate 3y agoThat's headline writers, not scientists...
- junon 3y agoIf this is the mentality everyone had we'd still be giving lobotomies. Yes, "science" (rather, the vast army of people conducting science, and all of their own respective human inclinations, biases, and faults) has "gotten things wrong" more times than it's gotten them right. That's how science intrinsically works. Meanwhile, sticking your head in the sand and doing nothing, solves nothing.
- throwitaway222 3y agoLobotomies were done by the scientists
- jcranmer 3y agoThe Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949 was awarded for the discovery of the therapeutic value of lobotomies, which is the most controversial of all the scientific Nobel Prizes awarded (the Peace Prize and Literature Prizes routinely court controversy for rather obvious reasons).
- thaumasiotes 3y agoSure, the Peace and Literature Prizes routinely court controversy. But the Prize in Medicine being given to the discovery of the therapeutic value of lobotomies can easily be more controversial than any Peace or Literature Prize, even if those categories are more often controversial than Medicine is.
- mounceyboy 3y ago[dead]
- snarkconjecture 3y ago"Ah yes, you wanted to know where the electro-weak mixing angle came from, didn’t you? It’s the sum of the angle of tilt of the Earth’s axis, and the angle of inclination of the Moon’s orbit. Well, not exactly, because the particle experiments are more difficult to do than the astronomical ones, but it’s pretty close." This is absurd crackpot nonsense.
- HansHamster 3y agoThis is truly amazing, fractal levels of nonsense. I can't stop reading and I'm waiting for the "hah! gotcha!", but it just goes on and on...
- jiggawatts 3y agoIt just needs some random words either in bold or highlighted with the entire palette of colours, then it wouldn’t look out of place with the mad rambling nonsense scrawled on a large piece of cardboard held up the homeless guy around the corner from my place.
- wizzwizz4 3y agoAbsurd crackpot nonsense it may be, but it does have at least one point. > So, let’s begin by pointing out the obvious: the Large Hadron Collider is a Large Horizontal Collider. It is flat. Almost all other experiments are horizontal. I doubt a Large Vertical Collider, stretching 8% of the way to space, would find something different: the main purpose is to give the particles lots of energy. But, I mean, it might. We haven't checked. (For a less crackpot example, as of 2014 nobody'd tried the Michelson-Morley experiment vertically: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/99448/105169 https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/99448/105169) Science is all about checking things: that's what distinguishes the empiricists from the rationalists. Robert A. Wilson is committing the cardinal, and very human, sin of going "other people don't know what they're talking about, therefore I'm right" – and that's what makes him a crackpot. (Well, that and the incessant prediction-free, reasoning-by-analogy that's like an exaggerated Eliezer Yudkowsky or Stephen Wolfram.) He claims to have refuted things that he simply… hasn't. But he's not wrong about the "other people don't know what they're talking about" bit. Robert, if you're reading this, I'd appreciate an explanation of "I looked at the mathematics, and that’s what they are, real honest-to-goodness Standard Model common or garden gluons." from https://robwilson1.wordpress.com/2024/03/28/god-spins-coins/ https://robwilson1.wordpress.com/2024/03/28/god-spins-coins/. I'm pretty sure you just imagined it, because your writing style matches the way I think when I'm overexcited and imagine things, but if you do have some kind of mathematical argument, I'd probably find it fun to read. (And perhaps enlightening: by my lay understanding of the standard model, they should be photons, but I don't really understand anything about particle physics.)
- seeknotfind 3y agoWhat does this mean for Post-Quantum Gravity?
- scotty79 3y agoIt's possible that spacetime expansion oscilates: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330726290_Confirmation_of_Inflaton-like_Oscillations_in_the_Scale_Factor_from_the_Pantheon_Compilation_of_1048_SNe1a https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330726290_Confirmat... Main frequency is around 7 times per age of the Universe. Secondary one is around 10.5 times. When I look at it, I think that dark energy is just ultra strong low frequency gravity wave coming from rotating ultramassive objects far outside of our observable universe and way older than our little local shenanigans we call Big Bang.
- briantakita 3y agoIs clouds of plasma in a dark state considered in these calculations?
- danparsonson 3y agoThere's not even a single mention of transient unicorn fields so I don't know how anyone takes this seriously.
- briantakita 3y agoPlasma is a "unicorn field"? Explain how its replicated in a lab. Have interstellar clouds been observed in space? Is there a possibility that we are not able to observe all interstellar clouds in space? Has "dark matter" been replicated in a lab?
- eigenket 3y agoClouds of plasma would be a possible explanation for dark matter. Dark energy is very different and not really related in any obvious ways. That aside, clouds of plasma don't really work as an explanation for dark matter either. Plasma interacts with light in ways we understand quite well, which means we would see it in astronomical observations.
- datavirtue 3y agoThe universe is THOUGHT to be 13.8 billion years old. Rather the consensus is that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. Why are people so afraid to qualify statements like this? Do they genuinely think it's settled? Is it thought to reduce the reporting to an intolerable level of low credibility for the masses? It reduces the credibility for me when they fail to qualify these types of statements of fact.