4 replies to this topic

[Mark Carver]

Yes it is. No it isn't. Beats me...

 

Back in 2011, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the Universe wasn’t just expanding - it was expanding at an accelerating rate.

 

The discovery led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that our Universe is dominated by a mysterious force called dark energy, and altered the standard model of cosmology forever. But now physicists say this discovery might have been false, and they have a much larger dataset to back them up.

http://www.scienceal...-say-physicists

[Mike in STL]

Idiots

[DJ MC]

As always, I go to my fallback when it comes to astrophysics: Eric Idle.

[aurelius]

Fascinating. If the accelerating expansion is proven to be wrong, that is a bombshell. They've been grappling with that question (constant, accelerating, or collapsing) for the last century. Einstein called it his biggest blunder (he believed there must be an unknown force which he called the "cosmological constant" in his equations), which held the universe in place... neither expanding nor collapsing. Edwin Hubble later proved beyond any doubt that the universe was expanding, so the next question was whether the expansion was slowing down or what - and if it was slowing down, wouldn't it eventually stop and begin to collapse back inward!?! It was hard to conceive of it not slowing down because of gravity, and what invisible force could be at work to cause space's expansion to accelerate? I mean, even the idea of space itself expanding is a bit of a mind-bender because it's believed that there is no "edge" of the universe, where matter exists on one side but there is nothing but emptiness on the other. Wonder what Sheldon Cooper has to say about it.

[RShack]

I suspect part of the mystery here is due to the limitations of the feeble human brain to fundamentally grok whatever the truth actually is...  or maybe it's just the limitation of my personal human brain... in any case, I won't be a bit surprised if they somehow prove that the universe is both speeding up and slowing down all at once...