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Dark Energy May Be Changing
SpaceAdmiral writes "Nature is reporting that Dark energy, the hypothetical energy driving the universe's expansion, may not be as constant as previously thought. According to new research the strength of dark energy may be very different now than it was when the universe was young."
...extraordinary evidence to support it. I'm not an expert on this
topic (will hear more about it from local experts for sure), but
it doesn't sound a statistically significant claim to me.
For the life of me I can't recall a false study about something...
I think it's about pulsars / neutron star. Astronomers found the
first few pulsars and found them to be aligned in a similar
orientation. This provoked a few new thoughs and fresh ideas
among the community...but later only to realize that the first few
detections happened to be a freak series of coincidence; further
observations revealed that other pulsars orient in many different ways.
Choosing random samples is important here. I'm not sure how carefully
that thought process has been applied here by this author (i.g., that
is what Adam Rees alludes to, I think).
We have to be careful since some people tend to see what they want
to believe in.
Didn't we recently conclude that dark matter didn't really need to exist at all?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There's already a few comments openly questioning and in some cases deriding the concept of dark energy. I think this could well be fallout from String Theory's current fall from grace.
It's looking more and more like String Theorists are on the wrong track. I think this may have bred a new skeptisism in people with regard to the more "out there" physics theories.
The whole debate about Intelligent Design may also be playing a part. There's been a very public question about "what is science". String Theory has already come under fire from this, and it's understandable that some other theories such as Dark Energy might also be brought under the spotlight of a new skeptisism.
This might be stifling for scientists, paticularly those with more outlandish sounding, but still reasonable hypotheses. But ultimately I think it will be good for science. No one should blindly accept any scientific theory without sufficient evidence. And supplying that evidence can only further validate the theory. In this sense, skeptics are good for science.
May the Maths Be with you!
A longer article on this in the NY Times says that other astronomers doubt this result.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
You're confusing dark matter and dark energy, and no, a non-constant dark energy doesn't ruin anything. The point of dark energy, like any theory, is to explain our observations. If our observations indicate that the universe is expanding in a weird way, we may need a weird explanation to account for it.
No, we modify the theory to fit the observations. That's why we replaced a theory with no dark energy by a theory with dark energy, and may need to replace that with a theory involving time-varying dark energy. These modifications are driven by new observations.
Nonsense. What is true is that more and more observations have proven to be consistent with dark matter, and so it is becoming harder and harder to come up with an alternative that is also consistent with all that evidence. That is exactly the process by which new theories become accepted.
You're joking, right? Dark matter is postulated precisely because it has a great many observable consequences. We observe it through gravity.
Actually, we can attribute any of our observations to the actions of a divine creator, and thus "support" his existence. The reason why that's not considered scientific is because the divine creator hypothesis makes little in the way of specific, testable, and falsifiable predictions regarding independent phenomena. But dark matter, like all other good scientific theories, does.