Green | January 21, 2009 | 17 comments

Will dark energy save the Universe?

source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/01/dark-energy-sav.html

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Dark energy is the deus ex machina of cosmology, able to save even the most inflation-prone calculations from destruction or - worse - being provably wrong. But while we've been busy watching the X-energy apparently accelerating all of creation while hiding in plain sight, some believe it's responsible for much more than that. It didn't just save the universe - no, no, that's far too small scale - it saved INFINITE universes.

Scientists at Princeton and Cambridge say that most of the universe is regularly destroyed. It's space-time-twisted into black holes, in fact, which is about as utterly destroyed as you can get without pissing off Zeus. In each destruction cycle only a small seed of habitable space survives, which grows phoenix-like to provide a new universe due to the apparently all-powerful dark matter.

The model is based on M-Theory - an expanded limit of string theory with an extra dimension, making it only slightly less esoteric than studying the symbolism of Chopin's work in a universe where the Nazis won the war. I'm not saying that M-theory is poorly understood or developed, but they can't even agree on what the 'M' actually stands for. Seriously.

In this model, the universe is a region on a multidimensional membrane called a "brane", and it's only one of many. When these branes collide huge regions of our brane get bunched into extremely uninhabitable black holes, with only a small region of space left for us. Without dark energy to inflate these gaps, a few cycles of this would annihilate everything.
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17 comments // Will dark energy save the Universe?

  • foebea
  • Gargaryun
  • agreeablestatistic
  • TabulaRasa
    • 0
      TabulaRasa  

    • My "brane" gets twisted into a black hole just trying to make sense of it all... but none the less it is very fascinating and I read it anyways

    • 3 years ago
  • daveguy
    • 0
      daveguy  

    • "...less esoteric than studying the symbolism of Chopin's work in a universe where the Nazis won the war."
      ---------
      Like a prose! gg

    • 3 years ago
  • TheColorYellow
    • 0
      TheColorYellow  

    • And the ants probably have relative theories about what's going on in their universe too.

      Sounds like a metaphor for human perception and the effects of negativity.

    • 3 years ago
  • Will_the_Thrill
    • 0
      Will_the_Thrill  

    • I saw a whole special on M-theory on the Science channel. Very interesting stuff. But, the scariest thing besides LHC causing a black hole, is the fact that a guy in England is trying to grow his own universe in his basement, so he can watch it grow and learn about it. He said it will grow and grow and get so big, that it will eventually separate itself from our universe and live on it's own.

      I hope his math is correct... 2012, the year of humans f-ing up BIG. Science dammit!

    • 3 years ago
  • oliholmes
    • 0
      oliholmes  
    • Will_the_Thrill:

      What?? Of course mankind cannot create a black hole. You overestimate us. Just think. We are still using fuel sources that our ancestors ancestors discovered. We are way too young to build a blackhole.

    • 3 years ago
  • gaiusfurius
  • banditalamode
  • JustifyLife
    • 0
      JustifyLife  

    • Dark energy reminds me of the dust energy from Golden Compass and Philip Pullman's books. Maybe scientist and people with fascination and yearning for discovery like Lyra will reveal this entombed mystery.

    • 3 years ago
  • CosmicSpiral
    • 0
      CosmicSpiral  

    • Well, they haven't developed empirical ways to test M-theory.

      Cybexg, that's not the definition of a black hole. That's the definition of an ideal blackbody.

    • 3 years ago
  • Auberella
    • 0
      Auberella  

    • Well, I see dark energy as absolute black. When a substance absorbs all the colors of the light spectrum, you get black. But if all of the light rays were absorbed you wouldn't be able to see the object. So if there is absolute black you would, in theory, have a black hole.

      I don't exactly see how it saved universes and I don't see how one knows it even exists. But, I do see how this makes sense on other levels and scales.

    • 3 years ago
  • bfcooper
  • oliholmes
    • 0
      oliholmes  
    • Auberella:

      You arent even grasping the concepts of black holes here. When an object "absorbs" light, these colours are removed from what the object reflects (and so appears to be the colour of the colours reflected and mixed) But a black hole isnt like a black object (which absorbs all of the visible light electromagnetic waves.
      A black hole is not an object and therefore cannot absorb light, the photons (particles of light sort of) simply cannot escape from the black holes gravity.

    • 3 years ago
  • Eat_Disco
  • cybexg
    • 0
      cybexg  

    • My experience w/ String theory is limited (wrong field). Could somebody explain how the "Big Rip" factors into the small region of space left over -- Does it mean that this cycle eventually erodes to nothing or does the brane collision seed a new ultra dense speck of matter which ultimately undergoes hyper inflation within that small region of space?

    • 3 years ago
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