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'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

nytimes.com

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Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#51

Post by HappySweeney »

padangitik wrote: post #49
thom wrote: post #27

Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…

I love this comment but I don't understand the "linked list" reference. What aspect of physics/the universe is that referring to? Also why does the maximum speed enable sharding? Struggling with that part too haha.

It's so space can expand without increasing the Planck length

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#52

Post by padangitik »

HappySweeney wrote: post #51
padangitik wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this comment but I don't understand the "linked list" reference. What aspect of physics/the universe is that referring to? Also why does the maximum speed enable sharding? Struggling with that part too haha.

It's so space can expand without increasing the Planck length

Ohh I think I understand. Thank you!

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#53

Post by api »

thom wrote: post #27

Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to i…

So the first lead coder was this Lucifer guy. Wrote the whole code for the physical universe layer in like days on Red Bull and maybe speed.

Unfortunately he was shady and found to be embezzling from the company so he was fired. Only then did the team actually look at that code. Absolutely incomprehensible mess, and it looked like he left back doors in so he and his pals could manifest weird stuff in the universe and fuck with the inhabitants.

Like get this... a human draws a five pointed star on the ground and says some weird stuff and it trips some code that looks like obfuscated malware that calls out to a dodgy server, but we can't remove it because the whole thing is a giant spaghetti monolith.

The Lord put together a proper team of angelic hosts to rewrite the whole thing using solid software engineering practices, but of course that was aeons ago. But when it finally does ship we will get a new heaven and a new Earth with a whole list of promised features.

Archangel Michael, who is in charge of the project, keeps moving the deadline back, but he says they're making progress. It's a microservice architecture.

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#54

Post by IanCal »

thom wrote: post #42
flopunctro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment reminded me, with a smile, of Scott Alexander's Unsong: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unsong-available-in-paperba...

I too enjoyed Unsong, but I've never gone back and reread it because I found the chapter about The Broadcast so haunting.

It is a very well written, truly horrible chapter.

It doesn't have a huge bearing on the story, so can be skipped - and I think a lot of people probably should.

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#56

Post by Sapere_Aude »

Why do people still waste time and money on these post hoc theories of Dark Matter / Dark Energy, which were invented to explain anomalies in the conventional cosmological model like galaxy rotation curves?

We neither have direct evidence nor do we not have alternative explanations - to the contrary. They shouldn't even qualify as scientific theory, since they are neither falsifiable, have no predictive power or are supported by any independent experimental confirmation.

Oh,there are presents under the Christmas tree, it must've been Santa Claus!

They are patchwork "solutions" at best and by far not the only explanation for what's happening.

It's the aether rehashed.

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#58

Post by [deleted] »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #22
mr_mitm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you got that I'm confusing something. For what's it worth, my name is in the author list of that paper.

>where you got that I'm confusing something From the idea that the constant that equates to dark energy in the stress energy tensor is not commonly thought to be a constant. People didn't call it that way as some joke. This isn't even up to astronomers, this is something that mathematicians will tell you. And it could potentially cause some real trouble not just for our models of the universe but for the basic mathem…

[deleted]

Re: 'More than a hint' that dark energy isn't what astronomers thought

#60

Post by drpossum »

Sharlin wrote: post #40
mr_mitm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We measure neutrinos and gravitational waves as well. It's much more difficult though.

In the end, to be fair, we measure both of them with photons (quite literally – GWs with laser interferometry and neutrinos by looking for Cherenkov flashes).

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