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Supernovae May Not Be Standard Candles; Is Dark Energy All Wrong?
StartsWithABang writes: The accelerated expansion of the Universe — and hence, dark energy — was discovered by taking the well-understood phenomenon of type Ia supernovae and measuring them out to great distances. The results indicated that they were fainter than expected, and hence more distant, and hence the Universe's expansion must be accelerating. But new results have just come out, showing that supernovae may not be standard after all. Does this mean dark energy may not be real, or that it may just be slightly weaker than we previously thought?
To me it seems to be used to explain the unexplainable, much like the aether of former times.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Imagine a planet with one nerd on it. Every second, the planet and the nerd individually double in size. Because of this, the nerd feels a downward pull because he's expanding downward toward the planet and the planet's expanding upward toward the nerd. This theory is yet unconfirmed; AFAIK it cannot be proved because we possibly live in that world.
"Dark Energy" could just be a different way of thinking about gravity, much like the previous paragraph could be how our real universe works.
No, science has never disproved the aether. It was ruled out for social reasons. When that social reality changes, science will probably bring it back. Yves Couder's experiments with silicon "walkers" bouncing on a liquid substrate, with which he can recreate Young's double-slit experiment on a macroscopic scale, would fit nicely with aether theory. But that fit is ignored by physics, because of the social ramifications of bringing back aether theory.
I don't know who's modding this up, or where you got the idea that Couder's experiments fit nicely with aether theory. The experiments have nothing to do with aether theory, other than showing some mechanical analogues of particular systems. They don't show a fluid basis for all of quantum mechanics, just a particular experiment. While the experiments are nice, this shouldn't be surprising considering the basis of quantum mechanics is wavefunctions, which do show a lot of similarity to waves in general (wave equations are a common solution in a lot of areas of physics, because it is such a simple and common differential equation). Heck, the Schrodinger equation and variations of it are used heavily in modeling water waves in certain regimes.
But this has nothing to do with the idea that mechanically there is a fluid providing the mechanism behind electromagnetism or quantum mechanics. At best you get to an interpretation of some aspects of quantum mechanics, but it doesn't make any observable difference and remains an interpretation.
This is rather unlike aether theories of yore which made predictions, predictions that turned out to fail. If after multiple revisions & variations, with multiple follow up experiments to each revision of theory resulting in disagreement and lower bounds, is a "social reason," then so be it. But that doesn't sound like what you are saying. Considering the famous Michelson–Morley experiment wasn't the start or the end of it, with many experiments both in the decades before and decades after, that wasn't just a group of theories failing for social reasons.