Dark Energy

Unlike most human endeavors, when science gets new data which contradicts old assumptions, it changes what is considered true rather than digging in its heels to defend what it previously declared to be true. Of course, there are usually a few who refuse to adapt but it’s a small minority.

A couple of weeks ago a possible bombshell hit the world of astrophysics. Dark Energy makes up, we think, about 68% of the universe. Science still doesn’t know what this Dark Energy is but there’s a lot of it. That’s the terminology given to the force that was constantly causing the expansion of everything. We’ve known for some time that some galaxies are moving away from us. What we didn’t know for a long time is that everything is speeding up. Logically, if this movement was simply the residual effect of the Big Bang, instead of speeding up we would, however incrementally, be slowing down which was the old assumption.

Now, we have a possibility this energy, whatever it is, fluctuates. It seems to grow stronger or weaker over time, possibly even reversing or fading away. It’s the first real clue we’ve gotten in about 25 years about the nature of dark energy.

It’s the work of a large international collaboration called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI. The group has just begun a five-year project to create a three-dimensional map of the positions and velocities of 40 million galaxies across 11 billion years of cosmic time. Whew!

The assumption was the initial findings would simply validate what had been previously believed. Instead they found conflicting data which has only a one-in-400 chance of being a statistical fluke.

The astrophysicists can’t explain it all and I’m certainly not going to try. What I can say is, we can only get a glimpse of about .001% of the universe. When we look up at the night sky we see only a tiny, tiny, fraction of even a tiny part of what’s out there.

That we can only even see a tiny bit and cosmic forces are still incomprehensible, we should be both humbled and proud; humbled because we are such a microscopic bit in infinity and proud that we possess awareness and life and the ability to even try to grasp it at all.

If reality on a cosmic scale is beyond our comprehension, why do we feel we have the capacity to make declarative statements about how we should judge the attempts of others to make sense of life and ultimate questions?

We’re all limited, finite creatures who start from our particular cultural assumptions about life and declare our particular truth. Where we get into trouble is when we declare that someone else’s idea of truth is a threat to our truth so those heretics must be suppressed or even eliminated. That does not mean that nothing is sacred, nothing is true, but it does mean our response to someone else’s truth should be tempered with humility, not self-righteousness.