Main frequency is around 7 times per age of the Universe. Secondary one is around 10.5 times.
When I look at it, I think that dark energy is just ultra strong low frequency gravity wave coming from rotating ultramassive objects far outside of our observable universe and way older than our little local shenanigans we call Big Bang.
I wonder if this can lead to revision of “vacuum energy” theories.
The idea that empty space simply has a uniform, non-zero energy level is a disappointing and kind of anti-climatic explanation for one of the greatest mysteries of physics and hints that our best models of the universe have huge gaps.
Vacuum energy is the product of the uncertainty principle though - the Casimir force is the result of the fact that in any given volume of free space there's a certain number of standing electromagnetic waves which could fit, and thanks to quantum mechanics these are in fact quite real.
Put a pair of parallel conducting plates between a given bounded volume though, and interesting thing happens: while shorter, higher energy standing waves can still fit between them, the longer, lower energy ones cannot.
As a result, there is now no longer an unbounded number of virtual photons between the inside plates and the outside ones, and this manifests as a very slight force on the plates because you now have a higher energy on the outside then on the inside. But it's a lossy process: the plates can only exclude longer, lower energy wavelengths, so there's a very finite upper bound on how much energy any given arrangement of this system can produce since as you move the plates closer together the remaining energy inside grows much faster then the energy outside (shorter virtual wavelengths).
If you're wondering how this affects you: it's all around you. Vacuum energy - the Casimir force - is believed to account for most of the force known to be due to van der Waal's forces in chemistry - i.e. the basic force which sticks non-ionic, non-covalent things together. The difficulty of removing dust for example, is being driven by that.
EDIT: "Dark Energy" - which is what's being discussed here, is very different.
I think vacuum energy is best described as a product of the mathematical model used to describe reality with an accuracy of 10 decimal places. From that perspective it seems a very reasonable deduction.
Wave functions can be seen as the sum of polynomial terms.
So a wave function of: x^3+3x^2+4x could be expressed as its coefficients [1,3,4].
Now if any of those coefficients are allowed to be zero, then you’d have, say, [0,3,4] for your polynomial which simplifies to an identical polynomial [3,4].
This just reduced the dimension of the problem by 1, but a wave function in n dimensions is fundamentally different than one with n-1 or n+1.
If you could reduce the dimension of a problem by zeroing a coefficient and still get accurate calculations then then “curse of dimensionality” would be moot because you could just keep reducing the dimension until the problem was tractable and then reverse the process to build back up to the original problem.
Unfortunately, the pigeon hole problem creeps up when the additional states of the higher dimension lack a direct analogue to its lower dimension.
Think of a binary tree. At each element draw two new elements branching from it on a line below. Allowing any leaf to be 0 effectively removes it and all of its parents and children from the model. So in order to retain the full tree all values at each leaf must be greater than 0.
Except reality has zero requirements to conform to mathematical models even if ours sometimes work to 10 decimal places there’s other cases they don’t work at all.
Sure, but trying to apply models from areas they work to areas they don’t is a mistake.
As soon as you step outside the area a model provides accurate answers you need to stop using it because some unaccounted for factor is now significant. It’s a depressingly common mistake. Read up on what people used to say about breaking the sound barrier despite known examples of bullies etc doing so. People literally knew the model was wrong in that region and yet they still used it to make predictions.
In the preface to Sussman and Wisdoms Functional Differential Geometry they state, "One way to become aware of the precision required to unambiguously communicate a mathematical idea is to program it for a computer."
I bring it up now because natural language is just so difficult to employ in describing a concept that is itself a distillation of its description unambiguously. You can /say/ a mathematical operation is 'associative', but how do you /define/ associativity without just giving the mathematical expression?
All that to say, it's difficult to communicate these ideas, but I am unsure what your message here is?
I find what you wrote above to be an accurate account of the development of science, but I fail to see why it warrants the exacerbated tone or how it applies to what's being discussed.
What model is being applied here? What area does said method 'work' in, and how does the problem in question 'step outside the area [the] model provides'?
What model do you prefer for vacuum energy? How does it accurately model observation while affording a vacuum energy of 0?
My posts had no deeper meaning. I personally don’t feel elegant mathematics really implies anything about the physical universe, but that doesn’t imply anything beyond the need for experimental evidence.
Are you aware of any experiment that suggests it, beyond the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe? Because IMO an explanation that only shows up after an observation and also only applies to a single observation isn’t a deeper explanation than the observation itself. (Edited for clarity.)
> The standard model seems fine without vacuum energy > 0
This a bit confusing due the vacuum energy being a part of standard model.
> Are you aware of any experiment that suggests it, beyond the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe?
Yes. Heisenberg uncertainty, the BCS theory of superconductivity, the Higgs field. Also, the paper you linked provides a few.
>> However, to my knowledge no one has shown that source theory or another S-matrix based approach can provide a complete description of QED to all orders.
Quantization of electrodynamics.
>> In QCD confinement would seem to present an insuperable challenge to an S-matrix based approach, since quarks and gluons do not appear in the physical S-matrix.
Quantum chromodynamics.
But ultimately, the paper you linked is uninterested in showing that the vacuum energy is 0, and rather is intended to show that from their formulation the Casimir effect is able to be explained away without a vacuum state > 0 under certain conditions. This important distinction is central to the paper.
>> Even if one could argue away quantum zero point contributions to the vacuum energy, the problem of spontaneous symmetry breaking remains: condensates that carry energy appear at many energy scales in the Standard Model.
That said I’m skeptical of their methods. Since you are clearly an advocate for this paper, can you explain the crux of the paper, namely:
>> Casimir forces can be calculated without reference to the vacuum and, like any other dynamical effect in QED, vanish as α → 0.
What is even meant by allowing the fine structure constant to go to 0?
Because the stability of the standard model requires it to be constant.
And how a model that allows such a thing is a better representation of what is “real“.
Because the conclusion gets a bit wishy washy as it moves from the rigor of its maths to philosophy. (“real” vs “unreal”)
>> Still, no known phenomenon, including the Casimir effect, demonstrates that zero point energies are “real”.
In that regard I think the author would agree with my gp that rather than worry about “real”ness, to look at vacuum state as a consequence of the model we use to describe what we collectively accept as “real”.
Why would a disappointingly simple explanation be a hint that there are gaps in our models? Or am I parsing that part wrong?
I disagree that it's really that simple an explanation, though. Our best theoretical prediction for dark energy is that it should be denser by dozens of orders of magnitude. It's not remotely clear why the actual value seems to be so small, especially since it's not exactly zero.
> It's not remotely clear why the actual value seems to be so small, especially since it's not exactly zero.
It is very clear actually: one or both of the models producing the conflicting result are wrong. Smart money's on both, because we have good other reasons to think each of them is wrong.
That seems very counter-intuitive. Energy usually comes from a difference between two things. How could there be uniform energy everywhere? It's paradoxical.
Well that's just what the Higgs field is, a scalar field with a nonzero vacuum expectation value. So the existence of a field of this kind isn't just possible in principle, it's been experimentally verified.
Yup. On which note, the Higgs' symmetry breaking should really have changed the vacuum energy density by something orders of magnitude larger than the density of dark energy...
Universe is infinite. It means, that we can zoom up infinitely AND we can zoom down infinitely, which means that space always filled with something, and this something have a temperature.
> Universe is infinite. It means, that we can zoom up infinitely AND we can zoom down infinitely, which means that space always filled with something, and this something have a temperature.
I'm not sure this follows. The set of positive integers is infinite. It means that there's always a larger integer, but it doesn't mean there's always a smaller one, or an infinite number of integers between 1 and 10.
This is only true if we pick a scale with a fair infinite-sided dice.
If it is as we suppose that the universe started all squeezed into a point at the beginning of time, and then explosively expanding out from there, then I don't see why we would expect a uniform distribution like that.
Having four legs doesn't follow from something being an animal just because there are examples of animals with four legs. A chicken is also an animal.
Having four legs is accidental to being an animal, just as there being an infinite number of elements between any two elements in a set is accidental to its cardinality being infinite.
There’s one theory that the Big Bang happened when that energy state changed. That change affected how all matter interacts with each other and a completely new configuration of the universe was born at the new speed of light.
And it could change again. We’d all be dead before we knew what was happening.
Let’s sincerely hope there isn’t a region with lower energy anywhere near us. If the vacuum energy here collapsed to a lower energy level you can kiss all current structured matter goodbye.
The universe is THOUGHT to be 13.8 billion years old. Rather the consensus is that the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
Why are people so afraid to qualify statements like this? Do they genuinely think it's settled? Is it thought to reduce the reporting to an intolerable level of low credibility for the masses? It reduces the credibility for me when they fail to qualify these types of statements of fact.
From what I've read, that is entirely wrong. Expansion is very weak compared to gravitational forces, which is nothing when compared to the electromagnetism that binds atoms into molecules, which is nothing when compared to the strong force holding the nucleus together.
Everything from atoms to galaxies are safe in regards to expansion. Galaxy clusters (maybe) and up would be disrupted by expansion.
In a big rip scenario, the scale factor goes to infinity in a finite time. The author is correct on this one. Whether we are in a big rip scenario or not is not entirely settled, even though it's more on the unlikely side and just became a tiny bit more likely, considering the new measurements.
Big rip scenarios are inconsistent with dark energy having a constant value of w=-1, which is what the author is discussing in that paragraph. The article is wrong.
This isn't quite how I understand the expansion of the universe. The interesting thing is it affects space itself, so the more distance between objects, the more space there is to expand. This does try to pull stuff apart, but it's quite slow so it doesn't take much to overcome it. Even gravity (the weakest force) is enough to keep stars and galaxy clusters bound together. Atoms are way to small to be affected.
This changes if you allow Dark Energy to vary with time, but the paragraph in the article assumes it's constant.
> If the work of dark energy were constant over time, it would eventually push all the stars and galaxies so far apart that even atoms could be torn asunder...
That's not necessarily true. If Dark Energy is a property of the vacuum state of space and it's a force acting opposite of gravity, then the further apart those objects become then the more those objects will accelerate from one another. That's what leads to an accelerated expansion of the universe.
That doesn't change the fact that gravity can overcome Dark Energy. To wit, the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies are on a collision course. Yes, Dark Energy is working to drive those galaxies apart, but gravity is winning and the closer those galaxies get to each other then the strong gravity is going to become.
Gravity gets stronger as the distance between objects decreases, Dark Energy gets stronger as the distance between objects increases. That is if Dark Energy is a property of spacetime. Since we don't know what Dark Energy is we can't say for certain, but it appears to be a property of spacetime and if that's the case then this statement is true.
Have you ever tried contributing to a Wikipedia article? It's a nightmare due to the other contributors who'll revert all your changes and fight you on everything and it's not worth the effort.
Yes, I've been contributing for two decades as a drive-by editor. I'm occasionally reverted; I suck it up, I don't own these articles. I don't get into fights. I avoid editing articles about politics, especially about nationalist hot buttons. I also move gingerly around some history articles, which are often patrolled by fanatical revisionists.
When the universe was dense, gravity dominated. As it expands, dark energy gets more and more important. From Ars Technica's article:
"If dark matter gives rise to the gravity that holds the universe together, then dark energy is the counter-force pushing the universe apart. Very early in the universe’s existence, dark matter dominated. Everything was closer together, so its density was higher than that of the dark energy, and its gravitational pull was stronger so the early galaxies could form. But as the universe continued to expand, the dark matter density, and hence the gravitational pull, decreased until it was less than that of the dark energy. So instead of the expected slowdown in the expansion rate, the now-dominant dark energy began pushing the universe apart at ever-faster rates."
Still hoping for micro-black holes as the solution as the early universe density must have been enough for some to form. Also, where's the anti-matter gone?
Could just be the anthropic principle at work : in a ridiculously large universe, we live in a tiny fraction of it where local fluctuations in the respective distributions of matter and antimatter have happened to favor matter. (And the observable universe is even smaller than that.)
Well, if we suppose all the anti-matter is in those black holes, we kill two birds with one stone. It’s ridiculous, I know, but your remark made me realize that an anti-matter black hole is essentially indistinguishable from a ‘normal’ one.
Both of those are pressureless, so they could be dark matter but not dark energy.
Except that primordial black holes are ruled out (as 100% of dark matter) by various observational bounds, and antimatter would be just as visible as normal matter and not "dark" at all.
Clouds of plasma would be a possible explanation for dark matter. Dark energy is very different and not really related in any obvious ways.
That aside, clouds of plasma don't really work as an explanation for dark matter either. Plasma interacts with light in ways we understand quite well, which means we would see it in astronomical observations.
Plasma is a "unicorn field"? Explain how its replicated in a lab. Have interstellar clouds been observed in space? Is there a possibility that we are not able to observe all interstellar clouds in space? Has "dark matter" been replicated in a lab?
Scientists: our calculations are consistently and dramatically different than our observations, even when accounting for every externality we can imagine, there must be something that we are unable to probe that accounts for this disparity, let’s call it dark energy
Lay people: science says the universe is mostly dark energy spewed from the maw of the dark beast
Scientists: with better instrumentation and modeling it appears we may have identified what we got wrong originally about dark energy
Lay people: but we already knew the dark lords are known for their treachery and deceit
Scientists: we got something we can't explain. let's make something up for which we have no evidence other than there's stuff we can't explain. We'll keep pondering whether we can figure out how to detect what we just made up because we got nothing so far.
Theologian: we got something we can't explain. let's make something up for which we have no evidence other than there's stuff we can't explain.
True, both use a filler name like "god" or "dark energy" for gaps in understanding they cannot explain.
But the big difference is: Scientists are happy about "dark energy" being explained away and made superfluous. The filler being smaller or vanishing is progress. A scientist's job is to fill the gaps with proper explanations.
Theologians are the opposite, the filler is their whole reason and purpose. If you take away the filler by providing proper explanations, theologians will resist in any way possible. Progress for them is sowing doubt on all scientific explanations and spreading the influence of their filler on everything.
"Scientists are happy about "dark energy" being explained away"
Is that why Einstein a nobel for his work on Brownian motion instead of relativity? I asked that sarcastically because it is well known that some of the powerful "Scientists" were very unhappy with relativity...
Einstein got his Nobel price for his work on the photoelectric effect (basically a small part of what became quantum mechanics).
Special and general relativity were too new and revolutionary (and admittedly strange) so that at the time, safer bets were considered for the price.
The strangeness hasn't gone away, relativity does still take some getting used to, as does quantum mechanics. But all of those are proven scientific theories backed by experimental and observational data such that they are accepted as true within the margin of error for the corresponding data (as always in science). All predictions that could be tested stood true, we just have some predictions for extreme cases that are contradictory and currently not confirmable by experiment or observation.
Scientists, even back then, with time and data, came around to accept relativity.
Dark energy isn't like that. Dark energy is an observed problem in cosmological data we cannot explain. The expansion of the universe in some phases of it's development is faster than it should be. When we plug that data into our current cosmological theories, it looks like the energy content of the universe is higher than it should be by observation. Because it is energy and have not been able to observe it, we call it "dark energy". Explanations such as "the data is wrong", "the theories are wrong, here is a different one", "gravity is different, try this alternative to general relativity" and stuff like that haven't yielded any satisfactory theory that would fit the observations. So we are stuck with this problem called "dark energy". We haven't solved it yet.
Basically we are like before 1900, where there was no quantum mechanics, just some strange experimental results that called for a new theory that somebody had yet to invent.
It should be noted that I only dragged religion into the discussion because of the “flying spaghetti monster” analogy which is a reference to a famous atheist’s mocking of religion.
That said, concepts like faith and belief are wholly independent of religion.
So if you want to denounce religion from your critical reasoning it is unnecessary to claim you also denounce the concept of “faith”.
How can anyone do anything without faith?
Why are getting in that vehicle? I have faith/believe it will take me to my destination.
Why are you fastening your seatbelt? I have faith/believe in the science that shows it will provide protection in the event of a collision.
> Which also apply to dark {energy, matter}, the flying spaghetti monster of cosmology...
they are both very real, as they are both known to us because of direct and indirect observation. i don't understand the "dark matter isn't real" crowd, because it is very much real, and we observe it. we can measure it. we don't know what it is comprised of, but we know it's real.
I am an astronomer and was at a conference when this headline broke. Obviously we ignored this and read the actual papers, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03002. There you can see that the dark energy equation of state parameter w0 = -0.99 +0.15/-0.13, which is not at all significantly different than w0 = -1. That is, no time evolving dark energy. When combined with other cosmological results, the joint analysis slightly favors w0 > -1 rather than w0 = -1 at the ~2.5sigma level or so, but it depends which other results you factor in.
NYT's headline is sensationalistic in the sense that astronomers didn't get anything wrong. Ten years ago, when I was in grad school, all my group did was study models with a dynamic dark energy component because it was a very common opinion among cosmologists that LCDM won't be the final answer, even though it fit the data best, because there are theoretical problems with it. If there are no observations that rule out a cosmological constant, you cannot justify introducing new parameters, so what we did is trying to figure out if and by how much certain future surveys (we were focused mostly on Euclid) could see a difference between LCDM and your favorite dynamic dark energy model.
So while this is a very exciting development, it's not like astronomers world wide are now in despair that they got something wrong. I've been out of academia for a while now, but I bet it's a welcome and overdue change in our view on the universe.
> His job involves developing a piece of open-source database software known as PostgreSQL, whose details would probably bore you to tears if I could explain them correctly, which I can’t.
Wow. Being proud of being ignorant is generally something I associate with modern MAGA republicans, not journalists. But then again, this is the NYTimes, a hotbed of nepotism over talent.
IMHO, that doesn't read like pride in ignorance. I suspect most NYTimes readers aren't looking for a deep dive on PostgreSQL internals, myself included. He does get into the context surrounding xz Utils and their relevance to the world at large a few paragraphs later.
> But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data compression tools called xz Utils, and wondered if it was related to the earlier errors he’d seen.
> (Don’t worry if these names are Greek to you. All you really need to know is that these are all small pieces of the Linux operating system, which is probably the most important piece of open-source software in the world. The vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies — run on Linux, which makes its security a matter of global importance.)
I think this does a good job to indicate the general level of his audience.
I'm an engineer, I can't explain the cellular energy generation pathways in eukaryotes. Someone can, most of us would find it boring, and I can't explain it. I'm not proud of it, I just recognize my limits of my knowledge and don't pretend to know more.
Then cut out all the baloney and stick to the facts. That's the problem with Gen-Z, you were never taught how to read a newspaper, just tweets and tiktoks. We're screwed.
Fair enough - newspaper coverage can only give so much detail.
But as a physicist and long-time reader I have come to really appreciate the high quality of the articles by this NYT reporter (Dennis Overbye) on physics and related disciplines.
I like that the Ars article has a nice historical explainer for those of us who don't follow universal expansion closely enough but enjoy reading the history again every so often. And good for sharing w/ the kids.
"Ah yes, you wanted to know where the electro-weak mixing angle came from, didn’t you? It’s the sum of the angle of tilt of the Earth’s axis, and the angle of inclination of the Moon’s orbit. Well, not exactly, because the particle experiments are more difficult to do than the astronomical ones, but it’s pretty close."
It just needs some random words either in bold or highlighted with the entire palette of colours, then it wouldn’t look out of place with the mad rambling nonsense scrawled on a large piece of cardboard held up the homeless guy around the corner from my place.
Absurd crackpot nonsense it may be, but it does have at least one point.
> So, let’s begin by pointing out the obvious: the Large Hadron Collider is a Large Horizontal Collider. It is flat. Almost all other experiments are horizontal.
I doubt a Large Vertical Collider, stretching 8% of the way to space, would find something different: the main purpose is to give the particles lots of energy. But, I mean, it might. We haven't checked. (For a less crackpot example, as of 2014 nobody'd tried the Michelson-Morley experiment vertically: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/99448/105169) Science is all about checking things: that's what distinguishes the empiricists from the rationalists.
Robert A. Wilson is committing the cardinal, and very human, sin of going "other people don't know what they're talking about, therefore I'm right" – and that's what makes him a crackpot. (Well, that and the incessant prediction-free, reasoning-by-analogy that's like an exaggerated Eliezer Yudkowsky or Stephen Wolfram.) He claims to have refuted things that he simply… hasn't. But he's not wrong about the "other people don't know what they're talking about" bit.
Robert, if you're reading this, I'd appreciate an explanation of "I looked at the mathematics, and that’s what they are, real honest-to-goodness Standard Model common or garden gluons." from https://robwilson1.wordpress.com/2024/03/28/god-spins-coins/. I'm pretty sure you just imagined it, because your writing style matches the way I think when I'm overexcited and imagine things, but if you do have some kind of mathematical argument, I'd probably find it fun to read. (And perhaps enlightening: by my lay understanding of the standard model, they should be photons, but I don't really understand anything about particle physics.)
Ooh, a new one came out yesterday. https://robwilson1.wordpress.com/2024/04/07/zombie-physics/ The only crank-like part of this is the brashness, and a cursory inspection of the linked paper reveals nothing obviously incorrect. Indeed, it elaborates on several things I described as "prediction-free, reasoning-by-analogy" in my previous comment. When I have a couple of months spare to learn all the maths he's using, I'll look into this further.
Leaning further towards the "sometimes overexcited" hypothesis. If this is crankery, it's very well-disguised.
I'm not being hyperbolic. Its influence cannot be overstated, and therefore neither can be the consequences of its journalistic malpractice. Numerous sordid examples spring to mind, but I won't list any here. A moment's reflection on just the last 23 years alone ought to do the trick.
I'll wait til Reginald Barclay gets modified and connected to the holodeck before I'll believe science and scientists on nearly... anything. They'll be wrong for the next 1000 years. Almost nothing holds. I'll live my life til I'm 95 and they'll say they were wrong about cancer, gravity, speed of light, electricity, etc...
Science: We should act on the best information we have available and seek to improve the quality of that information over time.
You: I'm gonna just make up my own information and wing it, I guess.
Science being wrong is a good thing, it means we are learning and removing falsified information. At every point in time, science will be invalidating the previous state of the art, and at every point in time the current science will seem naive and simple in the future.
Expecting nothing to hold is great, it means we're learning and growing as a species. The alternative is ignorance.
Not really? Science on Covid has been continuing and scientists have been making recommendations based on what we know. At the beginning, we knew little, today we know more.
That's the curse of being a scientist: building and validating theories knowing that in the worst case you'll never live long enough to find out how wrong they actually are. Getting disproven is a lucky outcome. Please tell us if you think you have a better process to get answers to complicated questions...
If this is the mentality everyone had we'd still be giving lobotomies.
Yes, "science" (rather, the vast army of people conducting science, and all of their own respective human inclinations, biases, and faults) has "gotten things wrong" more times than it's gotten them right.
That's how science intrinsically works. Meanwhile, sticking your head in the sand and doing nothing, solves nothing.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949 was awarded for the discovery of the therapeutic value of lobotomies, which is the most controversial of all the scientific Nobel Prizes awarded (the Peace Prize and Literature Prizes routinely court controversy for rather obvious reasons).
Sure, the Peace and Literature Prizes routinely court controversy.
But the Prize in Medicine being given to the discovery of the therapeutic value of lobotomies can easily be more controversial than any Peace or Literature Prize, even if those categories are more often controversial than Medicine is.
