3 ms·

The premise comes off as a bit of a surprise to me. My understanding had always been that physicists have not reached any majority agreement on which of the out

The premise comes off as a bit of a surprise to me. My understanding had always been that physicists have not reached any majority agreement on which of the outcomes was likely, precisely because of the lack of understanding of the exact nature of dark energy.

mnky9800n 2y ago
It's because these people all sit and talk with each other coming up with more high concept sci-fi rigamarole. occasionally, they share whatever they come up with other physicists but it kind of seems like everyone just shrugs and goes back to whatever they were working on.
- itishappy 2y ago
  I have a very different reading of the 60 years of theories and measurements detailed in the article. The results from the article come from a $50M instrument developed in the past 10 years for this exact purpose.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
thisaccount546 2y ago
Years it was said that we were going to end up with the Big Crunch. Then in the past decade or two, it was said that we’d end up with a heat death. Now it seems like we’re heading away from that direction. Naturally, if you were immersed in the actual research, I’m sure the question would have seemed a lot more unsolved than it was presented. But it wasn’t just presented this way by pop science books; even scientists, when talking to laymen, tend to oversimplify things to a degree that they can become misleading. We’ve seen this discussed when it comes to things like string theory and quantum mechanics. Too many times people are saying “this is what happens” when they should be saying “we have no idea, there are a bunch of different theories, but we fundamentally don’t know.” Whatever happens to the universe, it won’t happen for billions of years. What people think will happen today might not be what they think will happen in ten, a hundred, or a thousand years from now. The research is interesting, but I have to assume that any answer we have now could be completely wrong.
- Percolator 2y ago
  I think there is a very valid argument to be made that what happens in the universe 10^14 years from now is not a valid scientific question. It is really just pseudoscience. It seems an easy bet to handicap that the chance what we know right now happens to be correct to basically be zero.
mr_mitm 2y ago
There is nothing to agree on. You make measurements, see what model fits best, and then ask the model what will happen as time goes to infinity. And we did have a consensus: the standard model of cosmology. It fits the data best, that's how it became the standard model. Many cosmologists don't like the standard model, because it has some theoretical deficiencies. One example: The value of the dark energy density seems highly tuned. Its value is unnatural and there is no known mechanism that could produce such a finely tuned parameter. But what can you do if all observations agree with the standard model? I've been in cosmology grad school ten years ago and would listen to a visiting scientist presenting a novel model that might explain the standard model's shortcomings practically once a week. There is no shortage of speculative models. And as I said, science doesn't work by finding an agreement. You devise experiments that can show that your model explains more than the standard model and let nature find the agreement for you. If there are a few stubborn scientists left that cling to ruled out ideas (Fred Hoyle comes to mind), experience shows that they will die out over time. Euclid is one such experiment my group studied a lot, and it's finally collecting data. Hopefully it helps us find a better model than the standard model, and with all the news in the past few years, it's looking good.
- slowmovintarget 2y ago
  It seems wrong-headed that even the hint of a Creator requires turning theories into pretzels to remove that hint even when it's not proof. The "problem" of fine-tuning isn't really a problem. Why that value? We just don't know yet. Maybe God set it. Maybe we're part of an infinitely large cosmos where our false vacuum has these parameters, and others don't (statistical multiverse / baby universe models). We just don't know, and sometimes it's enough to know that we don't know.
  - karmakurtisaani 2y ago
    You do realize that a creator hypothesis turns all theories to quite a bit more than just pretzels, and raises a lot more questions than it answers?
    - 2y ago

mnky9800n 2y ago

It's because these people all sit and talk with each other coming up with more high concept sci-fi rigamarole. occasionally, they share whatever they come up with other physicists but it kind of seems like everyone just shrugs and goes back to whatever they were working on.

itishappy 2y ago
I have a very different reading of the 60 years of theories and measurements detailed in the article. The results from the article come from a $50M instrument developed in the past 10 years for this exact purpose.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

thisaccount546 2y ago

Years it was said that we were going to end up with the Big Crunch. Then in the past decade or two, it was said that we’d end up with a heat death. Now it seems like we’re heading away from that direction. Naturally, if you were immersed in the actual research, I’m sure the question would have seemed a lot more unsolved than it was presented. But it wasn’t just presented this way by pop science books; even scientists, when talking to laymen, tend to oversimplify things to a degree that they can become misleading. We’ve seen this discussed when it comes to things like string theory and quantum mechanics. Too many times people are saying “this is what happens” when they should be saying “we have no idea, there are a bunch of different theories, but we fundamentally don’t know.” Whatever happens to the universe, it won’t happen for billions of years. What people think will happen today might not be what they think will happen in ten, a hundred, or a thousand years from now. The research is interesting, but I have to assume that any answer we have now could be completely wrong.

Percolator 2y ago
I think there is a very valid argument to be made that what happens in the universe 10^14 years from now is not a valid scientific question. It is really just pseudoscience. It seems an easy bet to handicap that the chance what we know right now happens to be correct to basically be zero.

mr_mitm 2y ago

There is nothing to agree on. You make measurements, see what model fits best, and then ask the model what will happen as time goes to infinity. And we did have a consensus: the standard model of cosmology. It fits the data best, that's how it became the standard model. Many cosmologists don't like the standard model, because it has some theoretical deficiencies. One example: The value of the dark energy density seems highly tuned. Its value is unnatural and there is no known mechanism that could produce such a finely tuned parameter. But what can you do if all observations agree with the standard model? I've been in cosmology grad school ten years ago and would listen to a visiting scientist presenting a novel model that might explain the standard model's shortcomings practically once a week. There is no shortage of speculative models. And as I said, science doesn't work by finding an agreement. You devise experiments that can show that your model explains more than the standard model and let nature find the agreement for you. If there are a few stubborn scientists left that cling to ruled out ideas (Fred Hoyle comes to mind), experience shows that they will die out over time. Euclid is one such experiment my group studied a lot, and it's finally collecting data. Hopefully it helps us find a better model than the standard model, and with all the news in the past few years, it's looking good.

slowmovintarget 2y ago
It seems wrong-headed that even the hint of a Creator requires turning theories into pretzels to remove that hint even when it's not proof. The "problem" of fine-tuning isn't really a problem. Why that value? We just don't know yet. Maybe God set it. Maybe we're part of an infinitely large cosmos where our false vacuum has these parameters, and others don't (statistical multiverse / baby universe models). We just don't know, and sometimes it's enough to know that we don't know.
- karmakurtisaani 2y ago
  You do realize that a creator hypothesis turns all theories to quite a bit more than just pretzels, and raises a lot more questions than it answers?
  - 2y ago