On Thu, Apr 4, 2024 at 6:00 PM Brent Meeker <meekerbr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "*The next question will be what causes DE to change?"* That is a very good question but nobody has a very good answer, but at least now we know that's the correct question to ask. Assuming of course this result holds up and dark energy has really been getting weaker over time, if it turns out to be true then the people who discovered this are almost guaranteed to get a Nobel prize, they would certainly deserve it. It opens up the possibility that dark energy might eventually drop to zero or even become negative and the universe could end in a big crunch. *> "When it was just the cosmological constant there was no change to be > explained."* Actually I think it makes a theoretical physicist job a little easier. If as previously thought, dark energy was an intrinsic part of empty space and you use quantum mechanics to figure out how large it will be you get a value at least 10^120 times larger than what is actually observed. If the value was exactly zero there is hope that when we know more about quantum mechanics than we do now somebody will figure out how things cancel out and we get exactly zero, but if the value is ridiculously tiny but not zero then you have to figure out how to cancel out everything* EXCEPT* for one part in 10^120. How in the world do you do that?! But if dark matter is not an intrinsic part of empty space then it must be caused by a field, sort of like the inflation field that caused everything to expand enormously just 10^-36 seconds after the big bang and ended about 10^-33 seconds after the big bang. But the dark matter field would be MUCH weaker than the inflation field. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> dmf > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3WYH_Sjt8EZ4xqkgPUCkNwYRMY2kmvDsgHgm76EhSsyQ%40mail.gmail.com.
