Humbled by the Unexplained Darkness
To all those who believe we now know everything there is to know AND that Science has an answer to everything, here is a truly humbling news report:
Excerpts from a recent NewsWeek story, In ‘Dark Energy’, Cosmic Humility (emphasis mine):
“To the ancients, exploding stars were bad news. To astronomer Adam Riess, poring over data from a telescope in Chile, it looked like supernovas were still cursed. He and his colleagues were measuring the brightness and distance of supernovas in order to figure out the little matter of whether the universe would end in fire or in ice…But when Riess calculated how much mass the universe must have in order to account for the supernova data, he got a negative number. A nonsense answer “negative mass”was the first hint that something was wrong,” he says.
Ten years on, astronomers know what was wrong: their assumption that the universe is decelerating.
…The universe is not decelerating; it is accelerating. A mysterious energy is pushing apart galaxies and space itself, like a crazed toddler with bulging cheeks and infinite lung capacity blowing up the cosmic balloon faster and faster.
…As astronomers mark the 10th anniversary of the discovery of dark energy this fall, they have a new appreciation for how much Copernican humility remains in order. For dark energy revealed that the matter in planets, stars, ourselves and everything we hold dear is a cosmic afterthought, the fallen scraps from the main fabric of the cosmos. And efforts to explain what dark energy is, where it comes from, what generates it are showing that the craziest ideas in astronomy pale next to what nature can concoct.
The best bet for the source of dark energy is the sea of subatomic particles that pop into and out of existence in “empty” space. In 1917, Einstein proposed something like this, only to reject it as his greatest blunder. (The resurrection of this “cosmological constant” led the mother of one astronomer, Robert Kirshner of Harvard, involved in the discovery of dark energy, to ask her son, “So, do you think you’re smarter than Einstein?”) But Einstein might have been right the first time. The evanescent particles give space a stretchiness, pushing it apart.
There’s only one problem: when you calculate how much energy the roiling sea of particles would create, the answer is 100,000 [insert 51 more zeroes] times more than the dark energy. “That’s a large discrepancy even in astronomy,” Mario Livio of the Hubble space telescope institute said at a workshop on dark energy last week. If Einstein’s cosmological constant truly is the source of dark energy, then something else cancels out all but a smidgen of the energy from the popping particles. That something else is anyone’s guess. Worse, the precision of the required cancellation – erase the ink on every magazine ever printed except for exactly one comma, here – strains credulity.
Unless “the” universe is actually only one of many universes. Cosmologists are seriously entertaining that possibility. In the big bang that started our universe, little bits of space might have pinched off, said physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas. Each pocket universe could have different features. In one ours, the improbable cancellation of most of the cosmological constant would have occurred, leaving just enough to explain the dark energy. As for why we happen to be living in that improbable universe, that’s easy: only this feature allows galaxies to form and life to emerge.
If the explanation of dark energy does lie in a multiplicity of universes, more humility will be in order. It will mean that there is no first-principles explanation for why the cosmological constant is just the right size to account for dark energy. In a multitude of universes, some have some properties and others have others, but there is no deeper explanation.
It is a mark of how distasteful scientists find that prospect which would mean that their “why?” brings the answer “just because” that they are considering a “Twilight Zone” alternative. Maybe the reason the universe is accelerating the observation that led astronomers to infer the existence of dark energy 10 years ago, is not that something is pushing it apart. Maybe gravity is leaking out. That would remove the brakes on the cosmic expansion, letting it accelerate just as those 1997 supernova studies showed.
If gravity leaked anywhere within the universe it would still make itself felt, so that leaves undetected hidden dimensions, a whole other space-time we never suspected and might never detect. Humbling indeed.”
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Will we ever know all that is to know?
Readers may also like to read (Highly Recommended): Hindu Cosmology
Related Post: Atoms, Neurons and Consciousness
Dear Sir,
Your blog is on a roll now. it is becoming like the cosmos. It is not a headless chicken like certain others which are least objective and very temporal.
The above information is so mind boggling and so awesome, I do not know how far any of the likes of me will be able to generate sufficient thrust to take it ahead.
The link “Hindu Cosmology”, I am still meandering thru it to understand the wholesomeness of it and I think it will take time for one to comphrehend and get his thoughts together to continue to dialogue on this blog.
The only question I can ask is that with the limited concept that we have of the knowledge of our ancients because of the lackadacsical attitude of our “Christian Education” backround, will it be possible for many of our intellectual friends who frequent your blog to improve on these structures?
Regards,
vck
vck: Thank you for your kind words.
It is indeed mind-boggling (and humbling) to contemplate these things.
I am hoping to get a response from Professor Subhash Kak – who is a very well known in the US and has done some tremendous and ground-breaking work in Indian Science, Mathematis and Astronomy.
Fingers crossed.
Explanation of the universe is testing mathematics to its very limits. Einstein’s cosmological constant came into being as a typical constant of proportionality to establish a steady/cyclic state universe which seemed reasonable at the time on the observations. Present observational data puts it at nearer negative 1 to fit the observation that the universe is expanding. This has thrown our understanding of physics into a cauldron of uncertainty. Nothing in the standard model of the universe ascribed energy to space but this is belied by observations of phenomena of large scale structures. It was thought that matter was created in the initial stages of the big bang by the negative vacuum. Thereafter, conservation of mass and energy principles held true viz E=mc2.
Dark matter has certainly not been pinned down to any identifiable particles that we know of. When we talk of particles, there is to be expected a corresponding field: this is inexplicably confined to gravity with dark matter. Yet there is no denying dark matter which is estimated at 25% compared to normal matter at less than 5%. As gravity is the last of the four forces yet to be comprehensively understood in its fit to the 11 dimensions of the particle model there should be more surprises in store in our understanding of the universe. Dark energy is even less amenable in being pinned down: it has recently been observed that the observable universe is accelerating towards an attractor which we have no means of identifying or measuring.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum physics seems to underpin behavior at the cosmic level through the phenomena of tunneling: this seems to be the one main reason for the universe’s birth and expansion.
“If nothing is our past, it could also be our future. As the universe, driven by dark energy — that is to say, the negative pressure of nothing — expands faster and faster, the galaxies will become invisible, and all the energy and information will be sucked out of the cosmos. The universe will revert to nothingness.
Nothing to nothing.”
Does this not remind of some of the most profound Vedic texts? But this excerpt is from an article about the cutting edge of cosmology!
Also read: https://satyameva-jayate.org/2007/03/07/atoms-nuerons-consciosuness/
From Cosmos may be ‘inherently unstable’ by Jonathan Amos (emphasis added):
…Since detecting the (Higgs-Boson) particle in their accelerator experiments, researchers at the Geneva lab and at related institutions around the world have begun to theorise on the Higgs’ implications for physics.
One idea that it throws up is the possibility of a cyclical universe, in which every so often all of space is renewed.
…
If the calculation on vacuum instability stands up, it will revive an old idea that the Big Bang Universe we observe today is just the latest version in a permanent cycle of events.
“I think that idea is getting more and more traction,” said Dr Lykken.
“It’s much easier to explain a lot of things if what we see is a cycle. If I were to bet my own money on it, I’d bet the cyclic idea is right,” he told BBC News.
Placing this here for the record…
Collapse of the universe is closer than ever before,
Dec 12, 2013:
…A collapse of the universe will happen if a bubble forms in the universe where the Higgs particle-associated Higgs-field will reach a different value than the rest of the universe. If this new value means lower energy, and if the bubble is …more
Maybe it happens tomorrow. Maybe in a billion years. Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball. New calculations from physicists at the University of Southern Denmark now confirm this prediction – and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.
Sooner or later a radical shift in the forces of the universe will cause every little particle in it to become extremely heavy. Everything – every grain of sand on Earth, every planet in the solar system and every galaxy – will become millions of billions times heavier than it is now, and this will have disastrous consequences: The new weight will squeeze all material into a small, super hot and super heavy ball, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.
This violent process is called a phase transition and is very similar to what happens when, for example water turns to steam or a magnet heats up and loses its magnetization. The phase transition in the universe will happen if a bubble is created where the Higgs-field associated with the Higgs-particle reaches a different value than the rest of the universe. If this new value results in lower energy and if the bubble is large enough, the bubble will expand at the speed of light in all directions. All elementary particles inside the bubble will reach a mass, that is much heavier than if they were outside the bubble, and thus they will be pulled together and form supermassive centers.
“Many theories and calculations predict such a phase transition– but there have been some uncertainties in the previous calculations. Now we have performed more precise calculations, and we see two things: Yes, the universe will probably collapse, and: A collapse is even more likely than the old calculations predicted”, says Jens Frederik Colding Krog, PhD student at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP³ – Origins) at University of Southern Denmark and co-author of an article on the subject in Journal of High Energy Physics...
Is this the “pralaya” or the end of “Kaliyuga” mentioned in the Puranas?