Latest news with #DarkEnergy
Globe and Mail
9 hours ago
- Science
- Globe and Mail
Crisis in science is turning Nobel laureates into fighters for scientific revolution
Global news media as well as prominent scientists are highlighting the crisis in both physics and cosmology, and predicting a major scientific revolution. This week, an article appeared in The Atlantic magazine [titled 'The Nobel Prize winner who thinks we have the universe all wrong']. It featured Adam Riess, who won a Nobel Prize for the shocking discovery that the expansion of universe is accelerating, due to Dark Energy. But now he thinks that the theory must be wrong. The article warned about scientists talking of revolution. A growing number now say that the 'standard model of cosmology' should be replaced. Adam Riess is among them. Way back in 2013, in a conversation with WIRED, David Gross, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned about the crisis in physics and advocated a revolution. ['Nobel laureate says physics is in need of a revolution'; WIRED; Peter Byrne]. An article in NewScientist (Dan Hooper) was titled 'The four puzzles that tell us a cosmological revolution is coming'. Another article in Live Science (Kelly Dickerson) was titled 'Why a Physics Revolution Might Be on Its Way: Physics may be turned on its head soon'. Global newspapers (BBC News, The New York Times, The Guardian, Forbes, et al) are raising alarm over the crisis in both physics and cosmology. Actually, science is in crisis, because nature does not draw clear lines between biology, chemistry, physics, math, and cosmology. Such demarcations are human-made, and artificial. After all, biology is based on chemistry, which in turn is based on physics. Global news media as well as prominent scientists are predicting that a BIG scientific revolution is imminent. A scientific revolution is INEVITABLE because of four strong reasons: 1) All three conditions are satisfied. The three key steps to overthrow and replace any accepted scientific theory are: a) Reproduce the successes of the presently accepted theory. b) Explain what it cannot. c) Make new predictions that differ and can be tested. 2) Physics and cosmology are both in crisis due to wrong notion about the shape, size and workings of the universe. The universe is actually like a (hyper) balloon, and is expanding. 3) Science rests on faulty Math. Luckily, the mistakes are so easy to comprehend that even the common people can easily understand what is wrong. A baker can understand, and so can butchers or cobblers. 4) Einstein was wrong. His concept of four dimensional SpaceTime continuum is the biggest mistake in science. Time itself is NOT the fourth dimension; time emerges from motion along 4th space dimension. Every scientific revolution in the past has ended up having enormous social and cultural influence. For example, Copernicus's helio-centrism threatened human sense of being right in the center of the universe (and hence the 'sun centric model' was bitterly opposed by the powerful church but ultimately all oppositions proved futile. In fact, the church had to issue a public apology recently for its role). Darwin's theory of evolution challenged the intuition that humans were fundamentally different from other animals. People during that time were outraged and dismissed it as plain nonsense. Yet, yesterday's nonsense ended up as today's commonsense! Einstein's relativity upended all faith in common sense ideas about the flow of time. Time started mixing with space for very fast moving objects, and time revealed its character as another dimension! The upcoming scientific revolution shall be the greatest ever, and force humans to change the way of thinking about the most basic features of the universe, including the nature of space and time. Space and Time underlies Physics and Cosmology, and are the most fundamental concepts imaginable in entire Science. It will be a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science. The scale of social and cultural impact of the upcoming scientific revolution is quite unthinkable. A scientific revolution is unstoppable. No one can stop a revolution whose time has come. [194 National Anthems tunes have been merged into a single tune using World's most intelligent, musical A.I. software 'Emmy', to create this United Nations Anthem (World Anthem). Kindly watch and share: ] Mr. Joseph T. Kurien (a former Cochin University graduate) is an independent researcher and a part-time science writer. He presently works in Manappuram software and consultancy. Media Contact Company Name: Manappuram software and consultancy Contact Person: Joseph T. Kurien Email: Send Email State: Kerala Country: India Website:
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Dark Energy experiment challenges Einstein's theory of Universe
The mysterious force called Dark Energy, which drives the expansion of the Universe, might be changing in a way that challenges our current understanding of time and space, scientists have found. Some of them believe that they may be on the verge of one of the biggest discoveries in astronomy for a generation - one that could force a fundamental rethink. This early-stage finding is at odds with the current theory which was developed in part by Albert Einstein. More data is needed to confirm these results, but even some of the most cautious and respected researchers involved in the study, such as Prof Ofer Lahav, from University College London, are being swept up by the mounting evidence. "It is a dramatic moment," he told BBC News. "We may be witnessing a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Universe." The discovery of Dark Energy in 1998 was in itself shocking. Up until then the view had been that after the Big Bang, which created the Universe, its expansion would slow down under the force of gravity. But observations by US and Australian scientists found that it was actually speeding up. They had no idea what the force driving this was, so they gave it a name signifying their lack of understanding - Dark Energy. Although we don't know what Dark Energy is - it is one of the greatest mysteries in science - astronomers can measure it and whether it is changing by observing the acceleration of galaxies away from each other at different points in the history of the Universe. Several experiments were built to find answers, including the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at the Kit Peak National Observatory near Tucson Arizona. It consists of 5,000 optical fibres, each one of which is a robotically controlled telescope scanning galaxies at high speed. Last year, when DESI researchers found hints that the force exerted by dark energy had changed over time, many scientists thought that it was a blip in the data which would go away. Instead, a year on, that blip has grown. "The evidence is stronger now than it was," said Prof Seshadri Nadathur at the University of Portsmouth "We've also performed many additional tests compared to the first year, and they're making us confident that the results aren't driven by some unknown effect in the data that we haven't accounted for," he said. The data has not yet passed the threshold of being described as a discovery, but has led many astronomers, such as Scotland's Astronomer Royal, Prof Catherine Heymans, of Edinburgh University, to sit up and take notice. "Dark Energy appears to be even weirder than we thought," she told BBC News. "In 2024 the data was quite new, no-one was quite sure of it and people thought more work needed to be done. "But now, there's more data, and a lot of scrutiny by the scientific community, so, while there is still a chance that the 'blip' may go away, there's also a possibility that we might be edging to a really big discovery." So what is causing the variation? "No one knows!" Prof Lahav admits, cheerfully. "If this new result is correct, then we need to find the mechanism that causes the variation and that might mean a brand new theory, which makes this so exciting." DESI will continue to take more data over the next two years, with plans to measure roughly 50 million galaxies and other bright objects, in an effort to nail down whether their observations are unequivocally correct. "We're in the business of letting the Universe tell us how it works, and maybe it is telling us it's more complicated than we thought it was," said Andrei Cuceu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, in California. More details on the nature of Dark Energy will be obtained by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid mission, a space telescope which will probe further than DESI and obtain even greater detail. It was launched in 2023 and ESA released the new images from the spacecraft today. The DESI collaboration involves more than 900 researchers from more than 70 institutions, around the world, including Durham, UCL and Portsmouth University from the UK.
BBC News
19-03-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Dark Energy experiment shakes Einstein's theory of Universe
The mysterious force called Dark Energy, which drives the expansion of the Universe, might be changing in a way that challenges our current understanding of time and space, scientists have of them believe that they may be on the verge of one of the biggest discoveries in astronomy for a generation - one that could force a fundamental early-stage finding is at odds with the current theory which was developed in part by Albert data is needed to confirm these results, but even some of the most cautious and respected researchers involved in the study, such as Prof Ofer Lahav, from University College London, are being swept up by the mounting evidence. "It is a dramatic moment," he told BBC News."We may be witnessing a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Universe."The discovery of Dark Energy in 1998 was in itself shocking. Up until then the view had been that after the Big Bang, which created the Universe, its expansion would slow down under the force of gravity. But observations by US and Australian scientists found that it was actually speeding up. They had no idea what the force driving this was, so they gave it a name signifying their lack of understanding - Dark Energy. Although we don't know what Dark Energy is - it is one of the greatest mysteries in science - astronomers can measure it and whether it is changing by observing the acceleration of galaxies away from each other at different points in the history of the experiments were built to find answers, including the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at the Kit Peak National Observatory near Tucson Arizona. It consists of 5,000 optical fibres, each one of which is a robotically controlled telescope scanning galaxies at high year, when DESI researchers found hints that the force exerted by dark energy had changed over time, many scientists thought that it was a blip in the data which would go away. Instead, a year on, that blip has grown."The evidence is stronger now than it was," said Prof Seshadri Nadathur at the University of Portsmouth"We've also performed many additional tests compared to the first year, and they're making us confident that the results aren't driven by some unknown effect in the data that we haven't accounted for," he said. 'Weird' results The data has not yet passed the threshold of being described as a discovery, but has led many astronomers, such as Scotland's Astronomer Royal, Prof Catherine Heymans, of Edinburgh University, to sit up and take notice."Dark Energy appears to be even weirder than we thought," she told BBC News."In 2024 the data was quite new, no-one was quite sure of it and people thought more work needed to be done. "But now, there's more data, and a lot of scrutiny by the scientific community, so, while there is still a chance that the 'blip' may go away, there's also a possibility that we might be edging to a really big discovery." So what is causing the variation?"No one knows!" Prof Lahav admits, cheerfully."If this new result is correct, then we need to find the mechanism that causes the variation and that might mean a brand new theory, which makes this so exciting."DESI will continue to take more data over the next two years, with plans to measure roughly 50 million galaxies and other bright objects, in an effort to nail down whether their observations are unequivocally correct."We're in the business of letting the Universe tell us how it works, and maybe it is telling us it's more complicated than we thought it was," said Andrei Cuceu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, in details on the nature of Dark Energy will be obtained by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid mission, a space telescope which will probe further than DESI and obtain even greater detail. It was launched in 2023 and ESA released the new images from the spacecraft DESI collaboration involves more than 900 researchers from more than 70 institutions, around the world, including Durham, UCL and Portsmouth University from the UK.
