Wednesday, January 22, 2003

Misner, Thorne and Wheeler:

Strange things are afoot in cosmology. Physics is now looking with caution at dark energy, which is as wierd as it gets. Observations of high-z supernovae (really, really far away) indicate that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Several lines indicate that dark energy makes up about two-thirds of the critical density in the universe, but an unexpected outcome of this is that this mass is behaving in a way that repels other mass. That is, that the force of gravity can sometimes be repulsive. If true, this will require a pretty fundamental re-write of several areas of physics.

And I haven't even started on the seven hidden dimensions curled up on themselves by string theory, which is one part of the dark energy debate...

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