Dear Lay Person,
This description may take a while to go through, but, it will be intuitive. Dark Energy and Dark Matter are two of the most vexing issues in science today. And yet with a rather simple change in how we think about our universe, our expectations change and Dark Energy becomes something we expect instead of something that is shocking.
You may have heard scientists claim that about 70 percent of the universe is made up of Dark Energy (about which we know close to nothing). You may also recall that the idea that energy must be conserved in all reactions used to be a fundamental tenet in physics. but even that has been thrown out the window in accepting the form of dark energy currently agreed upon.
Another 20 percent of our universe is supposed to be made up of Dark Matter (about which we also know close to nothing. We have ruled out most all of the “reasonable” possibilities such as neutrinos, very dim stars, moons, and rocks that don’t glow brightly like stars.
If the dark mass was made of those, it would make sense, and, we would have found them by now. But it is not. So we are now on a quest to find some entirely unknown particle. And scientists have been slowly lowered into this pot like the proverbial frog that doesn’t jump out when the water heads toward boiling.
This leaves 5% of the stuff in the universe that is the 100% of stuff we actually know about. Stars, gas clouds in galaxies, planets, and the computer I’m typing on are all made of that 5% of real stuff we all know about.
Why has the scientific community come to agreement that 95% of our universe is made of things we know nothing about? It has taken a long time to arrive at our current situation. A lot of work has been expended, and the mysteries have held their ground and revealed precious little about where the solution exists. In frustration and after the exhaustion of reasonable ideas that were proven wrong by experiment, the scientific community has arrived at consensus.
95% of our universe is made of stuff we have never held, touched, or put into a bottle. Why did this agreement come into existence?
The answer is simple. We have equations that tell us things behave a certain way, and the universe is doing a different set of things. if we hold onto our theoretical ideas, then our observations must be wrong (by 95% in this case). If instead, we hold onto what our eyes, ears, and instruments have actually measured and detected, then we need to re think our physical “laws”.
Let me give you a very simple way to understand our universe. To do this, first I need for you to let go of what you think you know, and follow along on a journey into a new, perhaps science fiction, universe where the laws for how things work are different.
In this universe, there exist no forces of attraction.
Now we of course know that an apple falls to the ground. So what does the above statement really mean? It doesn’t mean things do not accelerate toward one another. Rather, it simply means that a proton in my pinky finger, does not reach out across 2 million light years to every proton in ever star of the Andromeda galaxy, and pull with a zillion teeny rubber bands.
The notion of a force of attraction, if you think about it carefully, is a notion you have long accepted, but in fact, never understood how the two objects exerted the “pull”. “It’s a force field” the teacher says………..ok, fine, how does the force pull? The teacher has no answer.
The simple (but wrong) way to understand how to make this transition, is to think in terms of gravity. We are told there are countless neutrinos passing through our bodies every second. They pass right through the earth with only a tiny number being filtered out. Every time a neutrino strikes our body, it imparts a little push.
But we are hit by more neutrinos from above because the earth filters many of them out. this means we are pushed down harder than we are pushed up. While this is true, it is not a large enough push to explain gravity. But you should now get the idea that there can be different ways for a force to manifest such that two objects are pushed toward one another.
If we know nothing about the true nature of how the force works, and retreat into mathematics, then it really doesn’t matter what’s going on at a fundamental level. But, if we are later confronted by something odd, like say, Dark Energy and or Dark Matter, we would do well to remember that our original formulation lacked any explicit description for how the force was communicated.
We do NOT know that gravity is a force of attraction. All we know is that two nearby objects are caused to accelerated toward one another.
So far so good. Now you asked to learn about the most challenging problem in physics today, and for me to describe it so a lay person can understand it. So please bear with me, we’re about half way there.
The original thought was, “There are no tensile means for transferring action” or “There exist no forces of attraction”.
It shouldn’t take very long before you realize that this statement bans all particles. If nothing can hold onto anything else, then, the center of a particle cannot hold on to or pull on, the outer portion of itself.
And yet we observe things that appear to be, particles. What other options might we have?
On pages 316 to 317 of “A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity” by Whittaker, E. T. (Edmund Taylor), 1873-1956
We find that a pulsating sphere in a compressible aether will accelerate toward another sphere pulsating 180 out of phase (pulsing oppositely) whereas two spheres pulsing the same, will repulse one another.
The property “pulsation” is what Bjerknes and others used to explain the electric force in Electro-magnetism.
Before you recall your teacher telling you that Michelson and Morley proved there is no ether, let me point out that the aether here is not the ether MM considered. MM were searching for a medium to carry light. Here, Bjerknes is using the aether as the ocean within which all material objects exist. The electron (his pulsing sphere) IS matter. And it is nothing but a pulsation in and of, the aether.
We are seeking Dark Energy so you can skip this list if you want and you won’t have missed a thing. But if you’re curious, here are some further topics one could explore:
1) Matter is made of oscillations within the aether
2) The waves are, Electric “fields”.
3) To persist, and to maintain their phase relationship, there MUST ALSO EXIST a structure of waves to which the pulsations are coupled. T
4) That structure of standing waves IS, spacetime
5) Nuclear strong force is a pulsing sphere to pulsing sphere direct coupling
6) EM is pulsing sphere to spacetime to pulsing sphere coupling
7) Nuclear Weak force is just an exchange of differently phase coupled pulsing spheres
The nuclear strong force, nuclear weak force, and electromagnetism all have in common that they deal with ways pulsing spheres interact due to ***phase*** interference. But there are other ways pulsing spheres can interact……………and remember, when I say pulsing spheres I’m simply saying, “matter as we know it to exist”. I’m just describing it differently than as being a particle.
A pea like particle has no waves. So the wave particle duality makes no sense. In contrast, a spherical standing wave as taught by Bjerknes, has both waves and a central point of convergence for those waves. It has, in other words, a “location” we can point to and say, “It is over there”.
We are almost there.
8) Gravity results not from phase interference, but rather from a frequency interference.
A frequency interference, to first degree, just causes a pulsing sphere to move slightly back and forth as the frequency of the in coming waves, beat against the oscillation of the pulsing sphere. BUT, a portion of that in coming frequency mis matched wave energy gets scattered.
Just like in the neutrino example, if the pulsing sphere scatters in coming mismatched frequency waves, then, it will recoil away from those waves.
The earth, therefore, filters out some of those waves arriving from the distant (red shifted, frequency mismatched) universe.
Now, you can understand gravity for what it truly is. A mechanism that pushes nearby objects toward one another.
Two ships on the ocean know this force all too well. When ships pull alongside one another, the waves lapping on the outside of their hulls, force the ships into one another. We also know this force as the Casimir force.
Now, what property of Bjerknes’ pulsing spheres might stand in for the property we know as “Mass”?
The answer is rather simple. the pulsing spheres are spherical standing waves. I’ll convey a two dimensional version for simplicity.
Imagine a fishing bobber on a mirror flat, infinite, lake. The bobber moves up and down to send outward a series of circular waves to cover the entire infinite lake. Now, freeze those waves and reverse their direction. We now have a series of waves converging into a center location. As each wave hits center, it runs into itself and then heads back outward again.
We wind up with a series of waves moving in and out at the same time. This standing waves structure takes on a completely different dynamical appearance, but its important to remember, its just formed by convergence and reflection. This reflection at the center results in a piling up of the medium…. water in our lake example and aether in our spherical standing wave aka electron model.
Long story short, Mass simply corresponds to a portion of the medium within which the wave structure exists. Mass, corresponds to a quantity of aether.
You almost certainly know one important equation no matter what your scientific background happens to be. That equation is Einstein’s famous E=mc^2.
The standard interpretation of this equation that your teacher may have taught you, and which I will ask you to forget, is that Energy and Mass are two forms of the same thing. This is wrong.
Notice that the equation does not say, E = m.
If it did, then Energy and Mass would be two forms of the same thing.
What the equation actually says is that the Energy that will be observed in the “observed” products of a nuclear reaction is equal to the mass that disappears, times the speed of light squared.
I just told you that mass corresponds to a quantity of the aether that made up the standing wave. And aether is also what fills the entire ocean we call a universe. In other words, what we call empty space, is in reality, an ocean of aether.
When a star drives fusion reactions in it’s core, mass confined within hydrogen nuclei is released, and the products of fusion have a lot of energy. This is what causes the sun to shine. But, we have a rule in this universe:
Aether is conserved in all interactions. If aether is “stuff” then it would make no sense for that stuff to magically appear and disappear (as mass is supposed to do in our universe.). Instead, the aether must be emitted and become part of, the universe.
And since what we call empty space is just a portion of that aether ocean with standing waves we call spacetime within it, the fact that aether is emitted in the core of the sun means that what we call empty space must be flowing out of, the sun. All stars are emitting space.
And all galaxies are emitting space. And that space, the ocean of aether, can be measured and has the property, “mass”.
Thus, we can understand Dark Matter as simply being the stuff we have in one breath been calling “empty space” and another breath we have been calling it “a seething, energetic, quantum vacuum where virtual particles pop into and out of existence”. The Dark Mass of a galaxy is simply the space between the stars, to which we previously have ascribed, “nothingness”.
Finally, now that we understand that stars are emitting what we call space, we can answer the original question: “What is Dark Energy?”.
I’m going to skip a detailed description of what a black hole must have space flowing into it, and why it must have a core where that inward flowing aether rams into itself with so much pressure that it is forced to condense. But before our universe was born, there must have been a universe sized black hole into which an enormous quantity of aether had flowed and condensed into a universe sized black hole core.
When that core breached confinement, it exploded and boiled sending it’s contents racing outward in what we call the Big Bang inflationary epoch. Our universe of contents exploded into a previously existing ocean of aether and all of our universe of matter is expanding outward like raisins in a loaf of bread as it is so often described.
The problem recently discovered is that the galaxies (raisins) are increasing the speed with which they are racing away from one another. They are accelerating.
Notice that the fact that they are accelerating doesn’t bother you?
You now know that space is flowing out of all of the galaxies in the universe. And you know that gravity is not a long range force of attraction that reaches outward and pulls on other galaxies. It is a force originating in the distant universe that pushes nearby galaxies toward one another. So there is no reason the expansion of the universe should have been slowing down.
Within this model, we expect that the expansion of the universe would just coast along, or, it would accelerate. This is opposite to what physicists believe we ought to think. They thought the universe would be coasting along or slowing down due to the attraction force of gravity.
And given that we know that stars and by extension, galaxies of stars are emitting more of what fills the entire universe, the only thing we can expect is that the expansion MUST be accelerating. We don’t know how much without equations or math. But it must be accelerating, period.
You may now listen to any talk given by a leading physicist / cosmologist on the Dark Energy problem and just smile, because you understand what they don’t.
Dark Energy is the ultra simple result of stars emitting space.
If this doesn’t quite make sense yet, just think back to when you last watched a rocket ship blast off of a launch pad. You see huge billowing clouds of gas that used to be contained within the rocket engines. That cloud of gas pushed the earth’s atmosphere away from the launch pad.
If you had billions of rockets blast off at the same time and general location on earth, you would feel a wind pushing away from the center of all of the rockets. If you watched a floating helium balloon, you would notice it being moved away from the launch area.
In the same manner, all of the stars in all of the galaxies in all of the universe, are emitting the medium out of which the universe is made, aether. So the expansion is increased as a result, and we observe that the universe is accelerating in it’s rate of expansion.
Interestingly, so called Dark Energy is nothing more or less than the continuation of Inflation. matter consists of the last droplets of aether that failed to boil away during the inflationary epoch. Today, fusion replaces boiling as a far slower, but otherwise the same, process.
And rather than Mass to Energy conversion reactions, we should think of fusion reactions as being
Mass to Space conversion reactions, and the equation we all know and love should have another term:
E = mc^2 + space
It takes about 100 Joules of energy to create a cubic meter of space, or, equivalently, it takes around a trillionth of a gram to create a cubic meter of empty space.
In summary, Dark Energy is what happens because stars emit space.
Ross Tessien