Personally, I’m a fan of ideas of Quantized Inertia [1] [2] which proposes that Dark Energy does not exist at all.
We’ve been on a wild goose chase after dark energy for 30 years, which so far has proven to be an untestable theory.
Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
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Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#42"...Prof. Young-Wook Lee (Yonsei Univ., Seoul), who led the project said, "Quoting Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I am not sure we have such extraordinary evidence for dark energy. Our result illustrates that dark energy from SN cosmology, which led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, might be an artifact of a fragile and false assumption."" Is he implying that other cosmologists…
It is my impression that dark energy is generally accepted in cosmology. Whether that counts as "proceeding as if dark energy is well evidenced" is perhaps a different question. If everyone believes it's there, but nobody knows what it is, well... there was still something that convinced them that it was there. That something should be evidence. Is it enough to count as "well evidenced"? Perhaps not, especially if th…
I don't know of any other evidence for dark energy, other than that mathematical physicists think the equations would be prettier with some, although they sort of wish there was more. It is quite embarrassing that the value was so close to zero without being zero, so that might be one embarrassment less.
We already knew there was likely to be something fishy about the most distant supernovas, because we have two divergent values for the Hubble constant, one of them based on these same supernovas.
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#43Haha, called it! Feynman warned about this specific phenomenon: basing new physics on the points at the extreme end of your graph, where the measurements are least reliable. In this case, these points correspond to demolition of the most distant and youngest stars in the sample, which could differ in many ways from the common, much more recent events. Low metallicity is a difference that is obvious to every AP, but t…
Does this have any affect on the search for dark matter? Are the two interconnected at all?
This finding would not cast any doubt on the existence of dark matter.
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Is he implying that other cosmologists have proceeded as if dark energy is well evidenced? As a non-cosmologist just reading HN I would say yes. Not quite as extensively as Dark matter though. I personally think that's a mistake too based on my limited research on the topic. If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility in the eyes of the public. That's how invested they are.
> If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility This is nonsense. Scientists have been wrong in several occasions, it is just part of the profession. For example, in the years leading to the discovery of relativity, many physicists believed there was something called "ether" that worked to fix the speed of light that they had evidence to be the same in all directions.
Yeah but that was in an age before clickbait and "In this house, we believe science is real" yard signs.
People are too bought into science as a source for truth instead of being a messy, difficult method of discovery.
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#45To know if the universe is expanding, we need to know the following: how far away things are, and whether they're moving away from us. In an accelerating universe, there's evidence that things were moving away from us slower in the past. The evidence that things are moving away from us is that as the universe expands, the wavelength of any light travelling through it also expands, shifting it towards the red end of t…
That's how I understand it.
But maybe there are other standardizable objects. The sense I got from TFA is that there aren't.
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#46To know if the universe is expanding, we need to know the following: how far away things are, and whether they're moving away from us. In an accelerating universe, there's evidence that things were moving away from us slower in the past. The evidence that things are moving away from us is that as the universe expands, the wavelength of any light travelling through it also expands, shifting it towards the red end of t…
Thanks for the explanation, but I'm stuck on the last sentence of this part:
>evidence of accelerating expansion is that based on the redshift of nearby objects, we would expect distant objects to have a higher redshift than they actually do.
I think what you mean is "than we'd expect them to."
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is my impression that dark energy is generally accepted in cosmology. Whether that counts as "proceeding as if dark energy is well evidenced" is perhaps a different question. If everyone believes it's there, but nobody knows what it is, well... there was still something that convinced them that it was there. That something should be evidence. Is it enough to count as "well evidenced"? Perhaps not, especially if th…
I don't know of any other evidence for dark energy, other than that mathematical physicists think the equations would be prettier with some, although they sort of wish there was more. It is quite embarrassing that the value was so close to zero without being zero, so that might be one embarrassment less. We already knew there was likely to be something fishy about the most distant supernovas, because we have two dive…
Hmm. Is this new result in the right direction to solve the Hubble Constant problem?
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Is he implying that other cosmologists have proceeded as if dark energy is well evidenced? As a non-cosmologist just reading HN I would say yes. Not quite as extensively as Dark matter though. I personally think that's a mistake too based on my limited research on the topic. If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility in the eyes of the public. That's how invested they are.
> If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility This is nonsense. Scientists have been wrong in several occasions, it is just part of the profession. For example, in the years leading to the discovery of relativity, many physicists believed there was something called "ether" that worked to fix the speed of light that they had evidence to be the same in all directions.
When chemists were asked, at the end of the 19th century, whether the the atoms in their molecular diagrams were real, they always said, "No, that's just a model we use." It wasn't until Brownian motion needed actual atoms that they began to say atoms had objective reality.
Cosmologists could learn a lot from 19th-century chemists.
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are very few ways to modify Einstein's Equations and still have them make sense. An easy one is to add a constant term. Such a term is known as the Cosmological Constant, and a positive value for it would result in a constant repulsive force between masses regardless of distance. This results in an accelerating expansion of the entire universe, but, with a supremely small value it only becomes noticeable at lar…
> Dark Energy is a hypothesis for explaining why such a very small cosmological constant might exist, suggesting that the universe is permeated with a constant negative energy field. No, that's not what dark energy is. "Dark energy" is just a general term for "anything that acts like a cosmological constant in the Einstein Field Equation". It could be an actual physical constant, just an inherent property of spacetim…
Thank you for the correction
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Is he implying that other cosmologists have proceeded as if dark energy is well evidenced? As a non-cosmologist just reading HN I would say yes. Not quite as extensively as Dark matter though. I personally think that's a mistake too based on my limited research on the topic. If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility in the eyes of the public. That's how invested they are.
Scientist have no idea what dark matter or dark energy is so it’s not like our world would be overturned. If it turns out to be wrong assumptions, that’s fine. Although it would be embarrassing.
The problem is that these topics get enough press that the general public has heard of them. It's nice that there are no obvious consequences if dark matter or dark energy turn out to be fiction. But the public will hear that "scientists" were wrong about these things they've been talking about for 50 years. Then the public will get another report on a topic like climate change which is also proven by "scientists" albeit different ones. That's an area where the truth of if has real consequences. What are people supposed to think then?