So was there a study over the last couple months showing evidence that the strength of dark energy is not consistently isotropic/homogeneous in space and time?
And if this study happened… how reliable/definitive is it?
I saw a popular press article that seemed to be saying this, but it was a popular press article and those mangle physics studies all the time.
@mcc zero info about dark energy is reliable/definitive.
some evidence which some scientists interpret as 'dark energy' is reliable/definitive. dark energy is just a blank placeholder until they figure out what the evidence actually means.
@mcc I'm increasingly strongly of the opinion that the whole dark matter and dark energy stuff is a phlogiston-level cock-up, and that there's something else going on -- either a subtle misinterpretation of the observations that means we don't need them at all, or there's some completely different effect, like that thing reported recently with the wobbly spacetime, which seems to account for the observations of galactic structure, at least.
@darkling this would be the most intellectually satisfying conclusion but unfortunately there are places in the cosmos where it appears we can actually measure the density of dark matter and in some places effectively take photographs of it
@mcc@darkling I'm looking forward to this, and especially to how it will complement the recent discovery* that the void has a non-Newtonian rheology. (Currently on mobile, will update with references when I get up.)
The chaos gremlin part of me is rooting for dark energy to turn out to be inconsistent in strength over space and time because last I looked into that the leading way of modeling that was something called "Quintessence", and I think it would be frickin hilarious to have serious physicists and physics vloggers and so forth having to go to the press and public and say "Quintessence" with a straight face
Consider the incredible potential hilarity of, in ten years, the science status quo being "Okay, so there's gravity, where things move toward mass. but there's also a force which pushes mass away from each other, but not consistently, it just does it more sometimes, less other times. and there's also something pulling mass toward points in space where there's nothing directly measurable, but that's not consistent either, it just happens according to a distribution measured by where it happens."
And potentially there's nothing we can do about it because potentially this isn't even a problem in our theory and that's actually maybe just how the universe works.
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" now downgraded to "The Reasonable, Moderate Effectiveness of Mathematics"
This does seem like a good moment for the MOND crew to do some ambulance chasing though. Bullet cluster observations take your pet theory off the table but maybe nonhomogenous dark energy puts it back on
@mcc I readily accept that tiny physics essentially boils down to "reality is made out of something incomprehensible", because once physics stops being about shapes bumpin around I have a really hard time following what's going on.
Astrophysics / physical cosmology on the other hand is like all shapes for the most part, so I completely understand the motivation that leads one to take a shot at answering the pressing question of "how did all these shapes get here and where are they going"
@mcc I think the point where it clicked that tiny physics was a lot more exciting and terrifying than they made it sound in school was when @mym explained to me that the word "particle" is used by physicists in roughly the same way as the word "widget" is by programmers
@mcc I don't see why it would require NASA getting knocked down a peg. If anything, it's probably evidence of another universe or something outside of our universe pulling on our own. That would go a loooooong way toward explaining why the various pushing and pulling we're seeing is inconsistent.
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