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?

Comments

Dark Energy

[Z00L00K]

To me it seems to be used to explain the unexplainable, much like the aether of former times.

Re:Dark Energy

[Megol]

Then maybe you should try reading about it? It isn't a neo-aether.

Re:Dark Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Real scientists get very worried when they hear the term "scientific consensus". That kind of talk isn't scientific.

Re:Dark Energy

[circletimessquare]

a lot of what popular perception and popular press calls cosmology and astrophysics is pseudoscience

string theory

dark energy

even the big bang theory, commonly accepted, was formulated by a belgian priest: it's basically genesis from the bible. someone stuck abrahamic religion in the middle of "science" and no one seems to question the shaky foundations. it's just put out there without doubt or question according to popular perception and popular press. there's a lot of ways the big bang theory can be wrong and the universe is actually steady state

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

that being said, there is nothing wrong with sketchy theories on the edge of our awareness and our evidence, even fanciful theories on very shaky grounds. because we simply do our best at trying to understand what is going on. nothing wrong with "crazy" theories. as long as we are willing to shuffle our theories on the edge of perception dramatically when we get new evidence

but we need to place them in a separate realm, and not consider them having the same weight as serious, multiply-proven, established, and mundane mainstream scientific theories. they are more like cool trendy academic ideas that come and go over time, nothing more

like phlogiston or lamarckism or phrenology from eras past, or aether as you say

dark energy is just a cheat sheet for an empty area of the page we don't understand (yet), we only have very vague guesses. it cannot be taken very seriously, but its fun to play thought games with it. as long as we keep the discipline of the scientific method, and understand we are are being very preliminary, mostly just mental masturbation

most cosmologists and astrophysicists understand this

but they should be aware that popular perception and popular press does not, and thinks we are talking about these far out fanciful concepts with the same gravitas as the theory of gravity or the science of main sequence stars

Re:Dark Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

even the big bang theory, commonly accepted, was formulated by a belgian priest: it's basically genesis from the bible. someone stuck abrahamic religion in the middle of "science" and no one seems to question the shaky foundations.

Unlike politics where you need to reject ideas because it came from an opposing group, science doesn't care where the idea comes from if it works. The foundations of the Big Bang theory is not its history, but general relativity and the observations that back up things like the FLRW metric. History is only indirectly important in science, in that it is a great pedagogical tool for showing how an idea developed, why some ideas worked and why others failed, for teaching students the process.

Re:Dark Energy

[SuricouRaven]

We've got the hubble expansion and cosmic background. Both of which point strongly towards an expanding universe with a point-like origin. Cosmologists hotly debate a lot of the details, but their agreement on the fundamentals is near-unanimous.

Re:Dark Energy

[Ol Olsoc]

To me it seems to be used to explain the unexplainable, much like the aether of former times.

It's exactly what it is. To scientists, "dark energy" is a placeholder, a spot where they say "We don't know".

In cosmology, the placeholder is pretty important in allowing them to continue working, and not just shrugging their shoulders and stopping.

So just like aether and Phlogiston,(the best word ever invented) the placeholders are stepping stones. When we discover whatever it is, it probably won't be called dark matter, and "dark matter" the name will be placed in the cosmology dustbin along with the other old theories

Re:Dark Energy

[Bengie]

Dark Energy is not a cheat, it is a placeholder. Assuming our measurements are correct, which the discussion of standard candles is challenging, some unknown source of energy is causing our Universe to expand, and that takes a lot of energy. It takes so much energy, that this energy needs to represent 80% of the Universe's total energy.

Unless you plan on challenging the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Re:Dark Energy

[7-Vodka]

You say you proposed a new 'model' yet there is no physics, no mathematics and just woo woo on your link.

Do you know Deepak Chopra? I have a feeling you two would get along nicely.

Re:Dark Energy

[Kjella]

Cosmologists hotly debate a lot of the details, but their agreement on the fundamentals is near-unanimous.

Those who want to believe otherwise rarely let that get in their way, that we're still working out the minute details of complex interactions is an easy way to dismiss everything. See evolution, the climate, medicine, nutrition, ecosystems, pollution, almost everything that doesn't reduce down to a physics/chemistry experiment really.

Re:Dark Energy

[wonkey_monkey]

To me it seems to be used to explain the unexplainable, much like the aether of former times.

The aether was a pretty reasonable postulation given the observations of the time.

It got disproved. Dark energy might. Or might not.

Re:Dark Energy

[AthanasiusKircher]

It's exactly what it is. To scientists, "dark energy" is a placeholder, a spot where they say "We don't know".

That description isn't really accurate, since dark matter and dark energy add important corrective factors to many models, and many scientists spend lots of time trying to model more things involving them... They thus are moch more formalized and manipulated than most " placeholders."

In cosmology, the placeholder is pretty important in allowing them to continue working, and not just shrugging their shoulders and stopping.

I agree to some extent....

So just like aether and Phlogiston,(the best word ever invented) the placeholders are stepping stones. When we discover whatever it is, it probably won't be called dark matter, and "dark matter" the name will be placed in the cosmology dustbin along with the other old theories

Yeah, this goes off the rails a bit. I'd hardly call things like aether and phlogiston "stepping stones" -- they may have been initially, but they became over theorized and explanatory elements in their own right, and they ultimately led to a lot of wasted theorizing and going down blind alleys looking for explanations for things that weren't perhaps even real problems.

The issue with "placeholders" is that they turn a set of unexplained observations into a THING -- they reify or hypostatize it. But because this newly created "thing" has a bunch of unknowns, it may not be a single "thing" at all -- it may be a bunch of things that have some relationship or only tenuous relationships, or they may be derived from various observational inconsistencies that are only seen as "problems" because there are flawed assumptions in the underlying theory.

But the very act of grouping these various problematic observations together and giving them a name may introduce a bias to the way we think about these observations. And ultimately, like phlogiston or something, they can serve as significant impediments to getting to a better theory. I'm not saying there's a better way to do science, but it's important to realize that the nature of theorizing involves steps like this -- creating core concepts or assumptions and running with them for a while. But regardless of how contingent we may think of "dark energy," the fact is that by identifying it as someTHING, it influences the way we think about potential models in ways that we may not be completely conscious of... But 200 years from now people may look back and think of us all as idiots for not seeing the bigger picture.

Re:Dark Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

The aether wasn't invented to explain any particular phenomenon: it was a shim to allow light to be described with the wave theory of the time, which required a medium in which it could propagate. Then there was an experiment (the Michelson-Morley experiment) which explicitly disproved the concept of the aether, and it was abandoned.

Dark energy was invented to explain the relation between the distance of galaxies and the speed at which they're receding from us, which indicates that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. (The distances to galaxies are measured from the brightness of supernovae in them, which is what this article's about.) That's a specific piece of observational evidence that is explained by dark energy.

We might still eventually abandon the idea of dark energy, of course. To do that, we'd need to either (a) find that the observational evidence is mistaken (possible; see this article), or (b) find a simpler explanation that does an equally good job of explaining the evidence.

Re:Dark Energy

[circletimessquare]

the expansion we see is simply a local phenomenon ("local" being many billions of light years across) like the crest and trough of waves on the open ocean. the CBE is a phenomenon that happened a long time ago "locally", and delineates the edge of what we can see

that's just a theory

but it's no worse of a theory than the idea that there is a big bang that encompasses the entire universe, not just what we can see

why is the edge of what we can see = to the edge of everything, period?

proof? the "proof" is a residual prejudice from abrahamic religion in our recent history

i'm not a quack. i am well aware of the history of science and the quackery that has come and gone. i listed such quackery in my comment above

i ask you to conform rigidly to the scientific method and tell me why, with proof, that you are certain that the edge of what we can see = the edge of all that exists

you can't

i am asking you to accept this: it's a deficit of human ego to posit that all we know is all there is

if you are aware of the history of science, note that this is an assumption that has driven discarded beliefs and failed theories constantly overturned in the history of science, geography, and especially astronomy

based on that simple failure time and again in the history of science, i think it's pretty safe to say that the edge of what we know does not equal the edge of everything, period. the big bang is yet the latest iteration of this human weakness, this bias of ego, this assumption that has failed time and time again

Re:Dark Energy

[TapeCutter]

much like the aether

...and gravity, it is a model that fits our observations.

Re: Dark Energy

[circletimessquare]

i am not saying the steady state theory is correct. i am saying we cannot say the big bang theory is authoritatively correct

everything about the big bang theory proves local expansion, not necessarily all expansion

i am simply saying that we have no proof that the edge of all we can see == the edge of all there is

which has been a common fallacy throughout the history of science, especially astronomy. it's egocentrism, a simple common human weakness

can you tell me conclusively that the edge of all we can see == the edge of all there is?

you can't. you really can't. simply because we cannot peer beyond the CBE. that proves there is nothing beyond? there is no proof there IS something beyond. but there is no proof there isn't, either

i am not asking you to discard the big bang theory

i am not asking you to embrace the steady state theory

i am asking you to stop believing, falsely, that we have authoritative proof that the edge of all we can see == the edge of all there is

that's being a quack?

Re:Dark Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

2. the big bang theory simply says that the edge of all we see == the edge of all there is

This is incorrect. You can read the wikipedia article on observable universe for a basic introduction. The Big Bang theory is consistent with an infinite universe too. There is no assumption that we can see the edge of the universe, and you can find many examples of people papers discussing how things beyond the CMB could potentially affect things we do see and setting a lower bound on the size of the universe. But they clearly state it as a lower bound. Otherwise, sizes given for the universe, usually explicitly although sometimes implicitly, refer to the size of the observable universe.

Re:Dark Energy

[Will.Woodhull]

I sort of agree with the above, up to a point.

I have a very simple view of physics, which works well enough since I'm not involved in any of its messy internals. It goes like this:

Physics is similar to Calvin Ball, in that you make up the rules as you go along. But unlike Calvin Ball, all but one of the rules is malleable; all but one rule can be changed at any time.

The one absolute, unchangeable rule is that every other rule in physics has to allow every mechanism that any engineer successfully builds to function. In other words, if an engineer constructs something that violates the rules of physics, then physics has to change. This applies to the engineering that goes into constructing experimental equipment. Even equipment as simple as that used in the double slit experiments that caused the physics of light to suddenly become more complicated than it once was.

Engineers rule.

Re:Dark Energy

[circletimessquare]

nothing you said contradicts anything i said

you seem to be reacting to the use of my term "cheat sheet," which is a turn of phrase that you are placing extra meaning into that i did not imply. you are reacting to that extra assumed meaning

because from where i am sitting, we are in perfect agreement

so i apologize for using an inexact phrase

Re:Dark Energy

[Crashmarik]

I think there are two big differences:
1) Scientists are willing, even eager, to be proven wrong about this and find a better explanation.

You haven't met many of the horribly obnoxious people who wind up in cosmology have you ?

Really surprised this managed to find a friendly review committee.

Re:Dark Energy

[thrich81]

The neutrino was in the same state for a while -- a hypothesized, unobserved entity needed to make the equations balance. Now we have three different neutrinos plus their antiparticles.

Re:Dark Energy

[Will.Woodhull]

I'd hardly call things like aether and phlogiston "stepping stones" -- they may have been initially, but they became over theorized and explanatory elements in their own right, and they ultimately led to a lot of wasted theorizing and going down blind alleys looking for explanations for things that weren't perhaps even real problems.

But that is what is happening with dark energy. It is being used as corrective factors to make other parts of physics work out, in much the same way that adding more epicycles was used by pre-Cupernicus astronomers to make the motions of the celestial bodies work out.

The core problem here seems to be that the "laws" of thermodynamics are wrong. There is probably some reformulation of those that would make dark energy and dark matter disappear in the same way Cupernicus made all the epicycles disappear. That reformulation might even make other things easier to deal with, such as the way the evolutionary patterns of life currently violate the concept of entropy.

Re:Dark Energy

[angel'o'sphere]

The first law of thermo dynamics simply says the the total energy in a system is constant.

I can not see how that is relevant to your standpoint or the discussion.

Re:Dark Energy

[circletimessquare]

i like that

i response with a quote from the great mystical philosopher donald rumsfeld (i'm joking... about him being great or a philosopher, the quote is real, and a good quote, to give him credit):

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.

We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

the simple point is the big bang theory cannot and does not say that the limit of all we see == the limit of all there is

but this is the unfortunate popular perception of the big bang theory, that it authoritatively states that we *know* there was creation point, and no time nor space existed before, or outside

this bad popular perception is rooted in religious bias (genesis)

and it must be clarified by scientists that no, the big bang theory does not prove genesis

there could be more outside the edge of what we can see. there might not be, either. we simply don't know one way or the other

Re:Dark Energy

[mcswell]

Agreeing with you, AC: Saying the Big Bang is wrong because it came from a priest is simply ad hominem, and displays a deeply anti-religion bias.

Re:Dark Energy

[Ol Olsoc]

It's exactly what it is. To scientists, "dark energy" is a placeholder, a spot where they say "We don't know".

That description isn't really accurate, since dark matter and dark energy add important corrective factors to many models, and many scientists spend lots of time trying to model more things involving them... They thus are moch more formalized and manipulated than most " placeholders."

I call that placeholders, something we don't quite know about that is used to make the theory fit. It isn't a problem, and it's how cosmology moves forward. Most of it fits, but there's this "little anomaly."

So just like aether and Phlogiston,(the best word ever invented) the placeholders are stepping stones. When we discover whatever it is, it probably won't be called dark matter, and "dark matter" the name will be placed in the cosmology dustbin along with the other old theories

Yeah, this goes off the rails a bit. I'd hardly call things like aether and phlogiston "stepping stones" -- they may have been initially, but they became over theorized and explanatory elements in their own right, and they ultimately led to a lot of wasted theorizing and going down blind alleys looking for explanations for things that weren't perhaps even real problems.

You just described exactly what dark matter has become. Dark matter as a word has become something that isn't actually "matter" in the way we think about matter. It's something else, but it's dark matter. Is it dark? Is is matter? Does it matter? It's now a thing.

The issue with "placeholders" is that they turn a set of unexplained observations into a THING -- they reify or hypostatize it.

Which is exactly what has happened to dark matter. I think you spent so much time looking for something to disagree with me about that you missed the point that we're darn close to exactly agreeing.

Re:Dark Energy

[AthanasiusKircher]

There is probably some reformulation of those that would make dark energy and dark matter disappear in the same way Cupernicus made all the epicycles disappear.

Random history of science note -- what you say about Copernicus is a myth and a complete misunderstanding of his theory, which basically required just as many epicycles as geocentric models at the time.

Copernicus -- and Galileo later on -- insisted on circular orbits, which still required plenty of epicycles and didn't actually simplify the math as much as the myths claim.

It was Kepler and his elliptical orbits (which Galileo rejected) that actually got rid of the need for epicycles permanently. Once one bought into Kepler's ellipses, it actually made heliocentrism more reasonable. Copernicus's model was just swapping one set of epicycles for another.

Re:Dark Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

To me it seems to be used to explain the unexplainable, much like the aether of former times.

The cases are precisely dissimilar. The luminiferous aether was predicted by theory but was never observed by experiment. Dark energy is observed by experiment and was unanticipated by the cosmological theory.

Re:Dark Energy

[AthanasiusKircher]

I think you spent so much time looking for something to disagree with me about that you missed the point that we're darn close to exactly agreeing.

I find your interpretation of my post odd given that I *explicitly* noted that "I agree with you to some extent." I do agree with a lot of what you said, and I wasn't really looking to disagree.

That said, to me your term "stepping stones" implies a stepwise progression going in the right direction, as when one uses stepping stones to cross a creek or something -- that term usually indicates something that is used to progress toward a goal. My point is that these "placeholders" can also function as impediments toward progress, thus being the OPPOSITE of stepping stones.

Perhaps we agree, and that's great. But I was trying to add something on that was not explicitly stated in your previous comment and in fact seemed contradictory to the implications of your terms. And if I indeed "described exactly" what you think some of these terms mean (thanks for your agreement), then hopefully I've added something to the thread.

Re:Dark Energy

[buchner.johannes]

Dark energy can also be measured from the CMB radiation, through the angular size of anisotropies and through baryonic acoustic oscillations in the large scale structure.
And the constraints from these *independent* probes are consistent with the results from supernovae, all pointing to the presence of an acceleration of the universe at late times. It is not so that we rely on a single tool here!
Also, TFA states that their finding that a different class of supernova is dominant at high redshift does not attack the presence of dark energy, only its exact value (of energy density).

Re: Dark Energy

[ceoyoyo]

Because we can't ever observe or in any way interact with anything beyond our visual horizon. You can tell stories about what's "outside" all you want, but they're just stories. Until they have some impact, even just in principle, on the universe we can interact on, they're completely irrelevant.

Re:Dark Energy

[Will.Woodhull]

Thank you very much for the Donald Rumsfeld quote. I was trying to remember it the other day and while I had the sense of it right, I was not as succinct as Rumsfeld and my memory kept offering Oppenheimer as the author even though I was sure that wasn't right. So naturally Google was no help.

Sometimes its better to not know something than to know it wrong...

Re:Dark Energy

[Will.Woodhull]

Of course you are right and I stand corrected. I did not research the literature. My bad.

Re:Dark Energy

[Livius]

much like the aether of former times.

It *is* the aether of former times, minus the materials sciences metaphors.

Everyone agrees there's *something* in the 'vacuum' - why not call it aether?

Re:Dark Energy

[Livius]

No-one is questioning expansion;this is about rate of expansion.

Re:Dark Energy

[friedmud]

we can not ignore the assumptions that take root in popular media and imagination

Why not?

Regardless of what the populace thinks... science will continue. It's been that way since the beginning: scientists push knowledge forward and society comes along when it's convenient.

Re:Dark Energy

[Livius]

I'd hardly call things like aether and phlogiston "stepping stones" -- they may have been initially

That would be the 'stepping' part in the definition of "stepping stones".

Re:Dark Energy

[Will.Woodhull]

Oh, I agree. Sometimes corrections work out well enough for the engineers to make fancy new things. Physics doesn't have to be right. It only has to be right enough.

As to neutrinos and antimatter and all that subatomic mess. Once it was simple: Bohr atoms and neutrons, protons, electrons, and photons. Then the physicists had to start adding corrective wavicles, like neutrinos, then quarks, then multiple different types of quarks, etc, etc. Now we've got this huge particle accelerator to find even smaller, more powerful, and shorter-lived whatevers to glue everything together. Modern physics is the physics of the absurd.

What is bound to happen is that somebody playing with esoteric maths of fractals or set theory or topology or something else out of left field is going to discover something really simple, like a way to look at things where every quark, every star, every galaxy, and every other part of the physical universe is simply the way the entire universe expresses itself in that particular context. And while the physicists of that day are arguing over how that can be reconciled with classical physics and string theory, some engineer somewhere will look at it and say "ah-hah!" and build a network of star gates. And that engineer will unwittingly midwife an entirely new physics.

But getting back to your point, it is very much important to recognize that something is probably wrong even though it works well enough for the purposes at hand. Otherwise you are accepting some basic premises on blind faith, and that kind of religious belief is indeed blinding one to other possibilities.

Re:Dark Energy

[friedmud]

*I* am only asking that you use the Shift key on your keyboard every now and again!

If you want to be taken seriously you should really start with good sentence structure, proper paragraphs and punctuation. Your double spaced scrawling looks like the work of a child and you will be treated as such. All of this undermines your already eccentric views to the point where no one can take you seriously.

Re:Dark Energy

[The Other White Meat]

Why is it that literally EVERY physics related article has at least one nut-job who thinks all of the (sane) physicists are wrong, and that his incoherent ramblings are the one true theory of everything.

Re:Dark Energy

[MrBigInThePants]

Nope.

Weak evidence necessarily leads to weak conclusions which are more likely to be wrong.

In this field such weak conclusions are the *strongest* available and thus the ones most discussed.

This is common and acceptable in the fields that are harder to study such as anthro, psycho and thero physico. Everybody who is credible in those fields understands this and probably finds it more exciting than a field with "less" to discover.

Reporters on the other hand just report whatever shit they think is click bait and people click on this shit even if it is just to moan about it.

Re:Dark Energy

[Tablizer]

The same priest says we are never getting flying cars.

Re:Dark Energy

[Prune]

I propose a new slashdot moderation option: -1 Crackpot. This guy's almost as bad as "Uncle Al" Schwartz.

Re:Dark Energy

[HiThere]

That link starts off interesting, and by about the 5th or 6th page becomes just polemic. You need to rewrite every page after the 1st, giving more attention to your theory and less attention to lambasting others.

I *am* of the opinion that when you do this you will end up with many fewer pages, but quite possibly with some decent questions that need to be addressed. E.g., how does your theory account for the proportions of Hydorgen and Helium in the universe. Etc. Don't concentrate quite so much on problems that current theories have trouble with, and pay more attention to deriving the solutions that the current theories have apparently valid answers for. Yes, you need to point out places where your theory is better, but it's even more important to show that you can answer correctly everything that the current theories have correct.

Re:Dark Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are referring to Einstein, someone who grew up reading books by leading scientists, had a formal education in physics, and continued to keep up to date with theories and experiments and had connections to many people in the field, that is no longer just a "simple" patent clerk in this context. And that still doesn't explain why some such people show up in response to every related story.

Some of the posters here on Slashdot just keep copy-pasting statements with very little change or response to discussion. They also tend to reply only to easy to dismiss criticisms, like those that made an obvious reading comprehension fail or posts that are just insults/trolling or otherwise content free. But at the same time ignoring any detailed or serious replies (or ignoring 90% of such replies, going off on tangents), and never incorporate any suggestions or advice into their ideas.

They're not looking for discussion, they're just looking for validation or up mods from uninformed. If you post the same wrong stuff enough times on Slashdot, it inevitably gets modded up from time to time faster than it can get noticed by someone who can make a coherent counterpoint. Then sometimes momentum just means the comment stays modded up despite unmodded or down modded replies, regardless of how trivial it is to see the replies are right by looking at something as simple as a textbook.

Re:Dark Energy

[HiThere]

1) Different people mean different things by consensus. E.g. some people mean unanimous agreement.

2) You have correctly described much popular commentary in the general press, but there often is an actual consensus underneath what they are saying, they just aren't accurately describing it. And sometimes it's whole-cloth invention. And sometimes its "Many people I've heard from when I asked about it and could get someone to talk to me."

3) The checks and balances are monopoly ownership of the public media and the 1st amendment. Whoops!

Re:Dark Energy

[HiThere]

What do *you* mean by aether that you can assert that Dark Energy isn't neo-aether? I think what he meant was a sketchy theory that didn't have any really solid evidence, but was widely accepted before being disproven. And that he was asserting that it would eventually be disproven.

Your assertion that it isn't what he meant is questionable.

Re:Dark Energy

[circletimessquare]

science serves the public interest. you should care, because it effects you. science does not occur in some ivory tower isolated from other concerns in the world. if the beliefs of antivaxxers means you get infected or the beliefs of climate change deniers means your house floods, you should care what the average person thinks

Re:Dark Energy

[dpilot]

Someone on this topic need to mention, "Timecube." There, I've fulfilled my duty.

Re:Dark Energy

[jfdavis668]

Phlogiston was in the same state for a while - and stayed that way.

Re:Dark Energy

[sg_oneill]

even the big bang theory, commonly accepted, was formulated by a belgian priest: i

And newton was practically a religious fundamentalist, Algebra was invented by a muslim cleric (Al-Gebra!) and so on.

The reason we are fairly confident about the big bang is because we have [i]very strong evidence[/i] for it, namely the microwave radio background which more or less lets us *look at* the big bang, or at least its aftermath, and a whole slew of other observations, including the fact the universe seems to be redshifting away from a central point.

Dark matter is a popular theory because it makes the math work. Its not a pseudoscience, its an unproven theory, and there IS a difference.

String theory, ehhhhh thats a bit more on the edge. The problem with string theory is we don't know how to falsify it. It does have the property that it answers a lot of questions, but it seems to be unfalsifiable so whilst its not really fair to call it a pseudoscience, until someone figures out a way to disprove it (And if supersymetery is disproven by the LHC , then it might well be that disproof), or of course prove it, then its more an abstraction than a first class science theory.

Re:Dark Energy

[anonymous_echidna]

Einstein was a "patent clerk" to support himself during his PhD in physics, because he had annoyed too many people at the Zurich polytechnic to find a mentor to sponsor him as a TA. Those brilliant 5 papers that were published in 1905 were basically for the PhD. Using the word "simple" to describe Einstein is not even wrong.

Re:Dark Energy

[tnk1]

More specifically, we would be looking to disprove the *need* for a placeholder like Dark Matter or Dark Energy, and not the existence of any one possible candidate.

All we have now are a bunch of requirements for "something" which will make observations match existing theories/models. Some have taken that need one step further and suggested some candidates which could fulfill the requirements for the "something".

That said, no one has been able to strictly prove that the need for the required matter/energy is actually real and not some error in the model or in the observations, let alone anything which would actually fit the requirements.

However, the naming of the placeholder has given a lot of fuel to the popular notion of those concepts being a "thing" which needs to be found or disproven. Just like people believe that the "aether" is a thing that was disproven. In reality, it was the need for something like an "aether" which was ruled out. There could be something like an "aether" as conceptualized by some, but if such a thing exists, it is not the thing we needed to answer the questions we had at the time.

It is important to point this out, because ruling out dark energy or dark matter in the current context doesn't mean that something like it doesn't exist, it just means that it is no longer needed to answer these specific questions. Admittedly, if the requirements are specific enough, this is usually the same thing as the discarded notion being imaginary, but it is important to keep the context of the investigation and its conclusions in mind. We may have an instinctive idea something is correct or beautiful, and we may find it difficult to let go of that notion, so it is important to understand that discarding the use of such a concept is not ruling it out, only setting it aside because it is no longer necessary for the next steps.

I have no idea if something will be found, but until it is, we should certainly keep asking whether we have done our experiments correctly or if our understanding of the observations is accurate.

Standard candles not being standard is a fairly big deal. You need things like that to aid you in making measurements of distance for theories that span the observable universe. The Type Ia supernova standard candle has been critical for measurements at around 100 Megaparsecs and above, because they are about the only thing luminous enough to be made out at those massive distances, while still having predictable standard characteristics. This is because they can actually rival the luminosity of the entire rest of the galaxy that they are part of when they go off. Not much else can do that, and nothing else that I am aware of is expected to do it in a standard way no matter where in the universe that it happens.

There are other ways to measure distance, but the Type Ia supernovae are very widely used and studied for this reason, and so this bears some watching.

Having said all that, we didn't just measure the expanding universe based on the supernovae, the CMB and Baryon acoustic oscillations as a "standard ruler" seem to give the same data about an expanding universe. So, probably not as big a deal as has been suggested.

Re:Dark Energy

[circletimessquare]

so don't respond, don't read, don't ever look at a post of mine again

agreed?

good bye

Re:Dark Energy

[Immerman]

Heat is visible, for one. It's only our eyes that didn't evolve to see it. Plenty of other animals, and many of our telescopes can see it just fine.

Re:Dark Energy

[Immerman]

Doesn't the entire concept of Dark Energy challenge the 1st Law? If space is expanding at a constant rate through time (and I believe the available observations suggest it is), then the energy fueling that expansion must itself be constantly increasing to fill the increasing amount of space. Otherwise we'd see an exponential decay in acceleration as a finite amount of expansion energy became increasingly diffuse.

Re:Dark Energy

[Megol]

Both dark energy and dark matter have been verified in _several_ ways making those two very hard to replace by other mechanisms. Not impossible but anything pointing to another mechanism would be a proper paradigm shift, something that is extremely unlikely.

TL;DR Both dark energy and dark matter have solid evidence and is very unlikely to be disproved.

Re:Dark Energy

[Immerman]

At the risk of being a smart-ass, how is heat that's decoupled from all normal interactions with matter meaningfully classified as heat for any normal context.

Of course the original ACs comment is... questionable... to begin with. "the particles in space material containing heat"?

Re:Dark Energy

[Immerman]

Thermalization in that context is a largely unrelated phenomena, referring only to the speed distribution profile of the constituent particles, rather than any sort of latent heat in them. Yes, it's similar in principle to the manner in which heat is stored in a monatomic fluid, except that a normal fluid can transfer heat to surrounding/immersed objects through particle collisions, whereas dark matter cannot. Though I suppose there would llkely be some minor heat leakage with co-located normal-matter as DM particles gravitationally interact with individual atoms.

Re:Dark Energy

[beastofburdon]

Agreed. Scientists should be willing and eager to be proven wrong, but this is not and never has been the case. Ego gets in the way nearly every time. It is extremely hard for anyone to admit that an idea that you pioneered, or just something that you took for granted to be true for many years could be wrong.

Re:Dark Energy

[HiThere]

I agree that the phenomena that the term Dark Energy is used to describe are real. The theory...not so much so. Is there even an agreed upon theory?

FWIW, recently the "standard candle" of supernova brightness has been called into question, so the data may not mean what people have thought they meant.

Re:Dark Energy

[sg_oneill]

In fact, the fact the observable limit tells us was that universe "banged" some finite time ago. In a solid state universe we would have infinite amounts of light coming from infinite distances. And we don't. Whilst this doesn't speak to whether the universe is infinite or finite in size, it does tell us quite conclusively that light has only had a certain number of billion years to propagate, meaning that it *started* , which pretty much rules out the solid state theory.

Throw in a tonne of other evidence for the big bang, and I really don't think its a controversy anymore, outside a few theoreticians on the edge.

Re: Dark Energy

[sg_oneill]

i am not saying the steady state theory is correct. i am saying we cannot say the big bang theory is authoritatively correct

Science isn't very good at conclusively proving things, but its awfully good at disproving things.

For the steady state theory to be true, a few things must be true. We would have near amounts of light bombarding us, since the universe would have been around for an infinite amount of time at an infinite size thus being able to shoot infinite amounts of light in all directions for the forever that preceded. This *clearly* is not the case.

Secondly theres none of this "local" vs "non local" observation in the steady state universe. Its *premised* on uniformity in the universe, that is anywhere in the steady state universe looks the same as anywhere else. This is a problem, because we know that whilst the universe is kinda isotropic in some respects, its certainly not perfectly so. Theres nowhere in the steady state theory for the "but what if its different over the horizon" argument to hide, because 1) No horizons in the steady state, and 2) Steady state predicts perfect spatial isotropy. 3) Steady state predicts perfect temporal isotropy. This *can't* be true . Where are the radio galaxies in the local neighborhood. Where are the quasars. Things are DIFFERENT now then when we look back a bunch of billion years (away)!

Theres also the fact that General Relativity is incompatible with the steady state theory, for reasons outside of my mathematic skillset to fully understand.

Finally theres the MBR, and this is the big one. We know the MBR is basically a black body radiation. Something "banged" that isn't banging now.

To wit

The steady state model does not appear to agree with the observed dL versus z relation or with source counts ... In a sense, the disagreement is a credit to the model; alone among all cosmologies, the steady-state model makes such definite predictions that it can be disproved even with the limited observational evidence at our disposal. The steady-state model is so attractive that many of its adherents still retain hope that the evidence against it will disappear as observations improve. However, if the cosmic microwave background radiation . . . is really black-body radiation, it will be difficult to doubt that the universe has evolved from a hotter, denser early stage. - Steven Weinberg

Steady State is a dead theory , and its been dead for the better part of a century. Time to give it up bro.

Re:Dark Energy

[Bengie]

Maybe because without Dark Energy, what we're observing would require energy being created. In other words, to ignore that the energy must already exist, means you accept that the energy is magically being created. We know there is extra energy, but we assume it has already existed. Saying "Dark Energy" does not exist is ludicrous, the only question remaining is "what is it?".

Re:Dark Energy

[Bengie]

I think it's because space has an average energy of zero, so creating space can be done without consuming energy, but still requires energy to exist in order for it to happen. I could be entirely wrong.

Re:Dark Energy

[Bengie]

There is a line to be drawn between not being a grammar nazi and just mashing the keyboard. Many people draw that line at "at least try to do some proper grammar". I'm pretty good at just reading and ignoring basic mistakes, but like the GP pointed out, it is bad, so bad that it is distracting.

Re:Dark Energy

[Immerman]

Well, that's one of those place where we *know* our theories are broken - General Relativity requires that the energy in empty space is exactly zero, while Quantum Mechanics requires that it be positive.

There's also the fact that, even ignoring expansion energy (which must be created along with the new space to keep the expansion rate constant), you also increase the gravitational potential energy of the universe: insert a little extra space between Earth and the Sun and you push both slightly out of each other's respective gravitational wells - and since gravity wells extend to infinity you do the same to every pair of stars in the universe that the bit of space is between. Of course that might also be related to the reason that expansion doesn't appear to be happening within galaxies - perhaps new space can only be created when the energy delta is low enough, such as in intergalactic space.

DIfferent thinking to gravity

[__aabppq7737]

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.

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[Required Snark]

Ohh, the math on that is way over my head.

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[TheCarp]

I would think this case would be easy to distinguish from others. Basically if matter itself were expanding the way we often talk about space as, yes I could see this constant expansion pressure looking a lot like gravity but, anything on the surface that was expanding would also be moving further away from anything next to it, so if you built a structure, the walls of the structure would suffer increasing internal stress from the expansion AND its corners would be pulled away from eachother by the ground expansion.

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[Hognoxious]

If you're inside the object, only the radius below you counts. Theoretically. I mean who spends significant amounts of time underground?

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[Bengie]

Dark Energy is just the least crazy idea. One of those reasons is that assuming our standard candles are still valid, objects are moving away from us faster than light, which is impossible with currently accepted solid theory. The only way to get this to happen is to allow space itself to expand, which is where Dark Energy comes in. Expanding space takes energy, a very calculatable amount.

If I had to choose between Dark Energy and expanding space or not expanding space and object moving through space faster than c, I'm going to go with Dark Energy until more information is discovered or the form of measurement of the expansion of space is invalidated.

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[Bengie]

I think he was trying to use it as a "for example" instead of an actual valid idea. In order words, pretend there is a uniquely new way of thinking about stuff that does work.

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[__aabppq7737]

Yes, for the record, this is Scott Adam's idea

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's just me, but I'd think that the least crazy idea is that any unchecked assumptions may be in error.

This doesn't really have any predictive power though...

Of note here, no one checked the standard candle for validity before.

This is completely false. Because of the importance of standard candles, they have been heavily tested, and there had been multiple proposed ideas in the past of how they could be "non-standard." Most of those ideas didn't pan out at all, and some turned out to be too subtle of an effect to matter. The difference here is data backing up the idea pretty well.

What you're saying is like seeing a long standing bug in an important piece of code, and then assuming that means no one has ever debugged the code or even thought that a bug could exist. On going efforts and a long standing bug are not mutually exclusive, which is why such efforts continue.

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[PPH]

who spends significant amounts of time underground?

Slashdotters.

These jokes just write themselves.

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[nedlohs]

That the sun that planet orbits doesn't get closer and closer would be a pretty good indication that the "everthing is doubling in size" explanation for "gravity".

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[Bengie]

We haven't measured things moving away from us faster than light

We have measured red shifts that indicate a rate of over 2c moving away from us. An object moving faster than light can still be seen if it was in our light cone at the time it emitted the light.

Re:DIfferent thinking to gravity

[Bengie]

We have measured red shifts that indicate a rate of over 2c moving away from us.

No, we have not. There is no defined redshift for speeds faster than c. The largest redshift we have is for the z~1100 for the CMB, which corresponds to a velocity of 0.999998c.

You may want to do a bit of reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... Quote: Due to the expansion increasing as distances increase, the distance between two remote galaxies can increase at more than 3×10^8 m/s

This is old news. I assume you're trolling or willfully ignorant.

Re:Aether

[Anonymous Coward]

"We" being nutcases, right?

No, the aether doesn't exist. If you're going to claim "the vacuum of empty space is the aether", then you'd be just as well calling it the FSM, and then claiming the same thing. Words are supposed to mean something. If you're gong to use a private language definition of the word, please stop talking to anyone.

Dark energy appears to be doing just fine

[ecotax]

According to Ethan Siegel, dark energy isn't written off, we just know a bit more about it.

Re:Dark energy appears to be doing just fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Quoting myself:

That's from the blogger with lots of pretty pictures. The first article linked to, which ends with a link to the paywalled original, rather claims
'The authors conclude that some of the reported acceleration of the universe can be explained by color differences between the two groups of supernovae, leaving less acceleration than initially reported. This would, in turn, require less dark energy than currently assumed.

"We're proposing that our data suggest there might be less dark energy than textbook knowledge, but we can't put a number on it," Milne said. "Until our paper, the two populations of supernovae were treated as the same population. To get that final answer, you need to do all that work again, separately for the red and for the blue population." '

Re:Aether

[Anonymous Coward]

On the internet, apparent aether refers to whatever people want when they want to sound disparaging about a particular idea they don't like. Within physics, it pretty specifically refers to a medium for electromagnetic waves, that for most of its versions in history was a fluid of some type. If people on the internet want to redefine it to mean anything permeating space so they can treat things like dark energy, they should at least be consistent then and acknowledge things like gravity and wavefunctions that also permeate space, among a whole bunch of other physics concepts. In that sense, we've known the "aether" to be real since components of Maxwell's equations started coming together with ever present electric and magnetic fields.

Link to the full article, freely available

[StupendousMan]

The summary has a link to a paywalled article (silly Ethan). The full article is freely available to all on the arXiv preprint server:

      http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.1706

I'm peripherally involved with the supernova field, though I study only the nearby examples. There has been for years the understanding that IF a difference should arise between the nearby events that we can study well, and the distant events which appear dimly and vaguely, AND if we did not realize that such a difference existed, THEN we could reach incorrect conclusions.

Scientists in the field have worried about this for years. It's not a sudden new realization.

It's very pleasant to see that a space telescope -- SWIFT -- which was built to study one type of object (gamma ray bursts) has turned out to provide vital information on a different type (supernovae). Since it is in space, it can detect ultraviolet light, and so show us that some nearby supernovae emit different amounts of ultraviolet light, even though they appear similar in the optical region. This UV difference hints at differences in chemical composition between supernovae, which may indeed be significant when we try to study very distant events with other telescopes.

Fortunately, light from those distant events is redshifted into the optical regime, so we can use very large ground-based telescopes to see the same UV light and compare it to the nearby events.

It's a very interesting field to follow: things change on timescales of 3-5 years. And yes, we are more aware of the uncertainties in the business than some news articles might imply.

Re:Link to the full article, freely available

[Antique Geekmeister]

> There has been for years the understanding that IF a difference should arise between the nearby events that we can study well, and the distant events which appear dimly and vaguely, AND if we did not realize that such a difference existed, THEN we could reach incorrect conclusions.

Thank you for being so clear. I hope that your colleagues appreciate the rigor of your thinking.

I've actually become suspicious, as an educated layman, about the other underlying assumptions that may confuse our cosmological models. For example, as we look more closely at nearby stars, we're finding more and more planets and cold, intrastellar bodies that would be very, very difficuclt to observe because they're barely above the temperature of interstellar space, and not close enough to stars to reflect easily noticed light. So it raises a very interesting question of "how much matter is in a star's Ooort cloud", and "how much matter is in interstellar or intragalactic space? If a significant amount condensed into small solid bodies earlier in the history of the universe, they'd be quite difficult to take into effect or even notice except as gravitational effects affecting the overall mass of the universe and Big Bang expansion.

I'm beginning, personally, to suspect it as a mudane source of the "Dark Matter" which is showing up in our larger models of the universe. Have you seen anyone exploring the idea?

Re:Link to the full article, freely available

[Michael Woodhams]

In addition, big bang nucleosynthesis models place strong limits on how much baryonic (protons, neutrons) matter there can be and it is not enough to be the dark matter.

More to Dark Energy Measurements

[PaulMattSutter]

*If* this result holds up, it doesn't sink dark energy - it will only be a small correction to the measured value using this particular probe. We have multiple, independent measurements of the existence of dark energy, from the early-universe Cosmic Microwave Background, to the late-universe feature in the galaxy distribution called the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation. In fact, for quite a few years supernova haven't been the principle method of measuring dark energy, because we've suspected issues such as this.

*If* this result hold up, and corrected measurements of dark energy from supernovae are in tension is all other measurements, then that will be interesting and require further study. However, despite having the confirmation of the existence of dark energy for several years, we haven't measured its exact properties very well yet. These corrections will probably shift things around inside known error bars.

For all the aether-claimers: we don't know what dark energy is. We've observed an acceleration to the expansion of the universe and called it "dark energy". This is a name given to an observed phenomena. The Nobel Prize was awarded to the original supernovae groups because it has been *repeatedly, independently* verified, using completely different sets of cosmological probes. This is like observing and measuring the observational reality of gravity without having a theory to explain it, but that doesn't mean that gravity doesn't exist.

Re:Aether

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh. Does that mean I can use the word "aether" to refer to government surveillance?

The Force

[jfdavis668]

Maybe the Dark Side isn't winning.

Re:The Force

[Irate Engineer]

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Re:standard mumbles

[bmo]

I vote for steady state

It doesn't matter what you vote for or what you believe. The data says you're wrong.

To head off this inevitable statement: "But this debate proves that we don't really know anything!"

No, no it doesn't. Read this before you go any further:

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

--
BMO

Funding

[PPH]

If Dark Energy turns out to be a placeholder for a revision to the model for gravity, it could be explained by some smart physicist sitting in his office tweaking the model to fit observations.

If Dark Energy is an acutal force, there may very well be a particle associated with it. And we can discover this particle given a large enough collider (and by implication the funds to build and operate it). If I were an physicist, I know which argument I'd support in order to ensure job security.

Wrong on many counts

[justthinkit]

You are, of course, wrong on many counts.

Perhaps you need a refresher on what a model is.

A conceptual model is a model made of the composition of concepts, which are used to help people know, understand, or simulate a subject the model represents.

and

conceptual modeling are the necessary means that humans employ to think and solve problems

As to there being no math, all this does is prove you haven't reviewed my theory. So how on Earth can you comment on something (let alone get an up mod) when you obviously haven't read it?

Your statement that there is "no physics" in my theory is so far from reality that I must conclude that I am trying to reason with a troll. Which I will stop doing, immediately.

Re:Wrong on many counts

[Prune]

Hey look everyone, it's the new "Uncle Al" Schwartz equivalent -- except this one isn't spamming newsgroups with his crackpot theory, but slashdot. It remains to be seen if this incarnation will be as obstinate and persistent as the original.

Re: Aether

[ceoyoyo]

Quantum field theory proposes all-pervading fields that give rise to all observed phenomenon. The Higgs field even has nonzero energy everywhere, and light is a disturbance that propagates through the electromagnetic field. That hits all of the common points for the turn of the century aether theories.

Einstein's relativity itself is a very aether-like theory in that one of the most popular interpretations is a geometric description of curvature in all-pervading space.

You've clearly bought into the "silly aether" folk mythology. There were many theories of aether, some of which were quite compatible with the Michelson-Morley results.

Re:Nice try

[Anonymous Coward]

The aether theories made some specific predictions, and even after several revisions to that, every single one was found to disagree with observation. Even if you attempt to rebrand some different new concept as an aether theory, that is just a semantics trick and doesn't change that original set of theories were found wrong.

Re:Aether

[Livius]

Words are supposed to mean something.

That never stopped "dark energy".

Re:Nice try

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you can't prove I'm wrong about the aether not existing, therefore have to accept my claim.

Re:Aether

[blue trane]

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.

Re: Aether

[smaddox]

Well I hadn't previously really considered this, but in a way the current understanding of the duality of light and matter and the sea of virtual particles that fill empty space isn't too far off from the concept of an aether.

Re:Aether

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Slashdot clickbait headlines

[MobyDisk]

Headline: Supernovae May Not Be Standard Candles; Is Dark Energy All Wrong?
Summary: Does this mean dark energy may not be real, or that it may just be slightly weaker than we previously thought?
Articles: It is slightly weaker than we previously thought. Not significantly though.

"dark" energy is stupid

[slashmydots]

Dark matter aka matter that doesn't interact with other matter or most radiation and simply causes gravity is unlikely but plausible. Dark energy, energy that doesn't interact with matter but does interact with matter to accelerate it outward doesn't even make sense at a basic level. I thought expansion was based on the dopplar effect on wavelengths of light from all stars. Since when was it based on supernovae?

Re:Nice try

[Bengie]

If it can't be falsified nor verified, then it does not exist.

i always imagined

[SupRcoW]

I have always imagined dark matter to not be able to radiate itself being to fine grained, in space there is no temperature, no complex atoms structures because no atmospheric pressure to form these oxygen atom configurations. the ingredients for light are just not in space as they are on earth, if a burn can not happen in space, light can not come in to existence, only like the sun does it chemically. i think dark matter consists of many particles together but all are so fine and in there indivisible form not able to radiate light because a super tiny particle can only hold a little heat, not enough to radiate hot enough for generating visible light, therefore I think dark energy is just heat, or temperature seen from a distance. so space material containing heat or not. if not, the material is in a complete rest state. (space) I theorize a maximum distance light can travel, once it has lost its velocity and heat of the particle it comes to rest and becomes space material itself. the particle wave only happens on earth, not in space as direct sun or starlight cant be seen in space. the wave or the burn part of the effect only happens on earth. we can only measure lights speed or the particle velocity WE give a certain particle. our particle stream we generate always originates on earth, even if we send a laser light signal to the moon and back it has already been limited to the speed of light (on earth under atmospheric pressure). if we were to measure the velocity of light in space where both points are completely in space and the length was long enough could we see a difference. except were not there yet, we never know exactly the time a particle leaves its origin point in space we only have a measuring point once it arrives, never do we know how long it has travelled.

Re:i always imagined

[SupRcoW]

I also think the bible will be proven right, as above, so below, meaning all the matter distribution ratios will be proven the same on any scale of dimension. atoms are the same matter to nothingness ratios as in space, especially now less dark energy is needed, all we have to do is accept black holes as just matter, not a hole but a perfect unlit non light radiating, but even light absorbing body, count this mass with all the visible mass and you get the same ratios as found on the smaller scales. all known matter is spread out over space evenly. visible solid and invisible non-solid particles.

Re:Aether

[TapeCutter]

Of course we're not on a balloon, everyone knows we are the raisins in an expanding pudding.

The republic of science

[TapeCutter]

Don't talk nonsense and dress it up as "scientific". "Scientific consensus" is just the modern phrase for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science". People who complain about the meaning of either term are not scientists, they are usually partisan political hacks who have never heard of Karl Popper and think AGW is a some kind of gigantic conspiracy to take away their SUV.

Re:Aether

[Vitriol Angst]

Thank You!

I've felt alone on this issue for so long. The removal of the "aether" happened around the time when Physicists adopted Einstein's theories (after apposing them tooth and nail for so long) and Quantum Mechanic became the trend.

I've always felt that the "particle of the week", the Higgs Boson, and Dark Matter were all attempts to compensate for two phenomena; today's physicists MUST explain everything with a particle, and they MUST not say that space is made of the aether. Though the Holographic and "Pixel" Universe theories come close.

And then there's that whole "light is a particle and a wave conundrum" that seems like just a fight against common sense. Microwaves make up a larger spectrum than visible light in the EM band, and then you've got radio waves. ALL of them are waves. Only when we get to this distinct frequency where the wave moves in a narrow direction, is there a question of particles. If the other EM energies are all waves, why suddenly would visible light be a particle?

Quantum phenomena occurs because waves only distribute energy on interfering peaks, and "empty space" is a thing, and it's just not part of our 4 dimensions -- and THAT is what gravity pushes against. So there; that's going to take about another 20 years for someone to work up the math and accept, or we'll have a Higgs Boson -anti-dark matter particle to explain it.

Re:Dark matter doesn't exist

[SupRcoW]

I think you are right in that dark energy or heat is contained in side dark matter, since the particles in dark matter are very small it can not contain much heat or energy..... therefore is hard to find.

Re:Title doesn't match article

[tnk1]

Dark energy is *not* confirmed, but the need for something like it to explain the observations has not been removed by the change in the standard candle. So, contrary to the headline: it is still status quo.

More specifically, instead of a Type Ia supernova always having the exact same characteristics throughout the universe, they discovered that there are two types of Type Ia supernovae. They are still standard, but now there are two standard sub-types.

Since we assumed that all of them were exactly the same, that may have messed up calculations that were expected to be more accurate than they actually are. Now instead of saying that object is 1.6 Mpc away by this method, it is now either 1.6 Mpc away or 1.2 Mpc away because there are now two possible types of Type Ia supernovae. However, because both sub-types are actually standard, one of the two of those is correct and you could, in theory, account for that.

Anyway, using the CMB and BAO a s a "standard ruler", they independently verified the current figures for the expansion of the universe, so this new discovery has not kicked the legs out from under the investigation. Indeed, it is possible that even if supernovae were the *only* way of making this measurement, the recalculation would still have required dark energy, just not as much as was expected.

Re:Aether

[Vitriol Angst]

A lot of people are not getting why Quantum "phenomena" can be explained as a wave on a medium (like water) and they think it's just happenstance and wave functions just crop up everywhere (yeah, sure, like the Golden Rule!).

If there are waves -- what do they propagate through? A particle doesn't lose mass propagating EM fields -- only energy, or more exactly; inertia or heat. Sound does not transfer in space, because it is a vacuum. But that's only because sound is a wave function that passes along molecules.

Shouldn't it be proved that there IS NO MEDIUM for waves like light to propagate through? Seems to me that the Photon as more than a "point at which a specifically tuned field collapses" is a more reasonable answer than making one band of EM field have a particle and not finding particles in microwaves (for instance). And as an exercise -- can someone explain WHY they oscillate back and forth as waves on an ocean do if there is not a medium? I can only come up with a way to explain oscillations in a vacuum by looking at a straight line in 8 dimensions -- which still doesn't rule out a medium in a co-incident dimensional group (another 4 dimensions).

Anyway, I'm frustrated because I can conceptualize most of what is said in Quantum Mechanics, and other than the math -- it sounds like they are describing a Platypus and not a beast that could actually live. There are indeed simple explanations that can satisfy the double slit experiment with waves alone, and also Quantum Mechanics -- as long as EVERYTHING is really a wave. And particles are waves -- they just fold in on themselves in our 4 dimensional space.

The thing I've pondered for the longest time is "why physics is a law"? -- meaning; why do things HAVE to be equal and opposite? We've observed that, and Newton and a few others have proved that it happens -- but I want to know why. And "how do things move" based on Einstein's theory of Relativity because, when I was 12, sure, I spent three days wrapping my head around the basic concept -- but it didn't make sense with a lot of different vectors. It took me years to realize it was another concept that people nodded their heads and echoed "E=MC2" without really understanding. You've got people who can't get beyond the accomplishment of understanding that two photons don't hit at twice light speed, and after that, they take a nap.

The idea that Space/Time stretches for two photons colliding but shrinks if they separate starts to break down if you think of a star where it's often the case that a photon is both arriving and leaving another at relativistic speeds. It means that EITHER; each particle has it's own relativistic space/time or motion takes place in a higher and lower dimensional group. And what does it mean to shrink and stretch space in such a small area?

However, if we say that SPACE is a thing and is moving; then relativity is the "pressure on space/time" -- and it works out a lot nicer conceptually to think of velocity and gravity as pressure. So as the Gravity goes up in a star, it takes more energy/speed to reach light speed -- and it works out a lot like turbulence. As a bonus, we can say that gravity on a planet or a star may have less effect on local objects than on the galaxy itself -- and thus, noting that a lot of galaxies are MUCH HEAVIER than predicted, we can be OK with the fact that gravity may be a lot more powerful than predicted -- but it's pushing on SPACE itself. Where there is a lot of matter and light -- there's more pressure and turbulence, so the objects are not being forced towards other objects. I mean, why don't electrons merge with protons and why didn't the Universe get all clumpy after the Big Bang? Math models predict what we see because they are tweaked that way. But If I've got a room full of magnets and toss them around, they clump up because ALL they do is attract each other. If Gravity is JUST an attractive force -- it's pretty lazy about it.

A balloon with helium "shoots up" in our heavier atmosphere because of equalizing pr

Re:Aether

[serviscope_minor]

No, science has never disproved the aether.

Inas much as you can't disprove anything. However, the isotropy of the speed of light essentially suck the ether as a theory, because the anisotropy of the earth moving relative to the ether was one of the big predictions, especially given Maxwell's laws. Then along came relativity and stuck the boot in.

The aether made predictions which didn't come true. The theory was modified to fir the observations, which is not ususual. However in the case of the aether it became more and complex and eventually, all of the phenomena were explained without the aether. That left the luminiferous aether as a really cool name but lacking any predictive or explanatory power, so it was dropped.

I think it's very unlikely the aether will return, because physics has moved on very far since the aether was the best explantion for the physics.

Re:Aether

[Anonymous Coward]

Microwaves make up a larger spectrum than visible light in the EM band, and then you've got radio waves. ALL of them are wave

Microwave photons are quite regularly used in experiments on chip and tabletop based cavities, including a lot of quantum computer researching setups.

There is no sudden cuttoff, it is all just a matter of scale. Just like when determining when you can describe something as a wave or not in classical electromagnetism, if the frequency is high enough or distances large enough, waves are fine, but if you need to look at things close or small enough, you need to look at more exact near field calculations instead of far field approximations.

Quantum phenomena occurs because waves only distribute energy on interfering peaks

Except it is near impossible to make a realistic quantum mechanics setup that prevents the wavefunction from spreading out everywhere. Even if there are preferred locations, there is no completely "empty" location between them.

And if you're going to rage arbitrarily against the Higgs boson, might as well against neutrinos and antimatter, other examples of particles being suggested by theory before being directly measured.

Re:Aether

[Anonymous Coward]

If there are waves -- what do they propagate through?...Shouldn't it be proved that there IS NO MEDIUM for waves like light to propagate through?

Why is there a need for a medium? What observational difference does it make if there is a medium or not? Aether theories provided observational differences that could be tested. If there is no observational difference, then science can't provide an answer one way or another.

"point at which a specifically tuned field collapses"

I don't think that is a reasonable description of a photon even in mainstream science.

r than making one band of EM field have a particle and not finding particles in microwaves (for instance)

QM doesn't say this at all, and there is nothing special about any particular band of electromagnetic waves. It would be equally wrong as asking why classical EM says the band of visible light is special, because you can use geometric optics there, but need to treat radio frequencies like waves.

Treating a photon like a particle in QM is an approximation that works really well in some situations, just like treating light like rays in classical EM works really well in some situations but is still in an approximation. And just as how geometric optics gets replaced with quasi-optics, physical optics, or full solutions of the Maxwell's equations depending on how much approximation you can or can't use for a given situation, the particle or wave behavior under quantum mechanics are just approximation for the underlying wavefunctions and you can always default to the wavefunctions if you are going out of regimes where the approximations work.

can someone explain WHY they oscillate back and forth as waves on an ocean do if there is not a medium?

Because Maxwell's equations seem to work, and they allow for oscillation from the inherent nature of electromagnetism. If that answer is not satisfactory, realize that for any model or theory of reality, you can keep asking, "Why?" and at some point reach a statement for which the answer is, "Because that is the way it looks like things work." You can try adding another layer to explain things, but if it doesn't provide any testable changes and adds complications, you haven't gained much if anything.

Anyway, I'm frustrated because I can conceptualize most of what is said in Quantum Mechanics, and other than the math

This sounds like someone saying they can understand a book without reading it. Maybe you're right, but you can't really check, just like a person who's read a book can actually check to see it says the words they think it does. A lot of people who can do the math have complained of how difficult it can be to conceptualize, and that while small sections can be conceptualized, they ultimately involve analogies that fail.

Considering the difficulty you are having with wave-particle duality and other things, maybe you can't conceptualize things as well as you can. As for example, there is no issues or paradoxes with the wave-particle duality when it comes to evaluating the math.

It means that EITHER; each particle has it's own relativistic space/time or motion takes place in a higher and lower dimensional group.

Relativity is completely self-consistent in the former case, that inertial frames are described for each location and velocity, and you can freely transform from one to another with a change of coordinates.

Re:** CORRECTION **

[HiThere]

You definitely need a medium, but the nature of the medium is highly questionable. (You need something to keep all distances from being in the same place, and a sea of virtual particles counts as a medium.)

More precisely to the point, any manifold can be considered a medium to those things that are embedded within it, as it applies constraints to what they can do, defines their neighbors, etc. And moving is done WITHIN the manifold. Please note that this doesn't even need to have a consistent metric to be true, much less any resistance.

Perhaps you use the word differently, but I'm not aware of any formal definition. (Dictionaries don't count, as they are never precise enough when talking about physical phenomena.)

Re:Aether

[Bengie]

Aether described a medium in space, not space itself. The whole reason the idea was created was because they thought light couldn't travel through the vacuum of space.