Friday, June 17, 2011

Dark Energy is Fiction - Time Itself is Leaking Away!

Talk about a subject that is going to polarize discussion! Dark energy has been the darling child of astronomical physics for the better part of the last decade and now some researchers are calling it little more than junk science? This can not be going well for proponents.

But the question still has to be, if there isn't any such thing as Dark Energy, then what is pushing the universe apart at an ever increasing rate. Well me hearties tiz something right out of science fiction. Time is Running Down.

From the Daily Galaxy article:
  • The idea that time itself could cease to be in billions of years - and everything will grind to a halt - has been proposed by Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain.
  • They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down.
Wow, what a way to get the skull jello wigglin huh? But think about it - distance, speed and age all have time constituents and for the most part, C is constant because of T(time) if you have to start factoring in a delta v for time things get really squirreley! (oh and don't call me out on delta v for time, you know what I mean...sheeeeeeeesh!)

Anyone remember Exhalation by Ted Chiang. It was originally played on Star Ship Sofa and I replayed it (I loved the reading that they had done so I asked to use that!) anyway Ted's story was about beings that powered themselves with compressed air, but found that their vacuum environment was being normalized and since there was less power potential the people were slowing down ever so slowly. Chiang nailed the present theory several years ago!

Ok, well I drifted off track some. As the present expansion theory explains, since light is redshifting from distant galaxies and the more pronounced the red shift the faster they are receding, hence the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. However as the article points out:
  • the accuracy of these measurements depends on time remaining invariable throughout the universe.
  • If time is slowing down, ... our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space dimension. Therefore the far-distant, ancient stars seen by cosmologists would from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.......
Wild huh?

Read the rest of the Daily Galaxy article here


2 comments:

Blizno said...

Brilliant.

I have never accepted "dark matter" as an adequate explanation for observations.

My suspicion of "dark matter" explaining the "missing" mass of each galaxy is that we simply don't understand gravity well enough. At galactic scales, gravity may behave differently than it does at stellar-system scales.

I don't have anything to say about "dark energy". The observation that the universe is accelerating its expansion is more than I can grasp.

Beam Me Up said...

Thanks for the comment Blizno
I dont know enough to really talk intelligently but it would seem to me that Dark Energy and Dark Matter were little more than place holders in their respective fields until understood better.