A Quote by Adam Riess
Einstein wrestled with a problem back before we even knew the universe was expanding, and he was looking for a way to keep the universe from collapsing. And so he discovered, in his theory of gravity, something like this dark energy - he called it a cosmological constant - could play this role, pushing things away.
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We've known for a long time that the universe is expanding. But about 15 years ago, my colleagues and I discovered that it is expanding faster and faster. That is, the universe is accelerating, and that was not expected, but it is now attributed to this mysterious stuff called dark energy which seems to make up about 70 percent of the universe.
Much later, when I discussed the problem with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. But this "blunder," rejected by Einstein, is still sometimes used by cosmologists even today, and the cosmological constant denoted by the Greek letter ? rears its ugly head again and again and again.
We account for all the matter and energy that we're familiar with, measure up how much gravity it should have, it's one-sixth of the gravity that's actually operating on the universe. We call that dark matter. It really should be called dark gravity. We don't know what that is.
If it [the universe] was expanding fairly slowly, the force of gravity would cause it eventually to stop expanding and then to start contracting. However, if it was expanding at more than a certain critical rate, gravity would never be strong enough to stop it, and the universe would continue to expand forever.
One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!
The fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat.
1. The energy of the universe is constant.
2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.
I got fascinated by the idea that our universe itself is comprised mostly of dark matter and dark energy. Things that we can't perceive at all, and we've only discovered that relatively recently. So it's almost as if our universe is the foam on the ocean of things that we can't see, or know, or perceive, and yet we feel the affects of those things right and left.
We need a theory that goes before the Big Bang, and that's String Theory. String Theory says that perhaps two universes collided to create our universe, or maybe our universe is butted from another universe leaving an umbilical cord. Well, that umbilical cord is called a wormhole.
We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive.
Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy effects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away.
In fact, current cosmological observations indicate that the average density of matter and energy in the universe is equal, within measurement errors, to the critical density for which the total energy of the universe was exactly zero at the beginning.
Einstein comes along and says, space and time can warp and curve, that's what gravity is. Now string theory comes along and says, yes, gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism - all together in one package, but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see.
Dark matter is one of the dominant constituents of the universe, which piled up in certain parts of the universe due to gravity, and in those regions, galaxies were formed. It is the unseen thing that holds the universe together.
The universe is expanding, and every second that you're alive, the universe is bigger than it was a second before. There's nothing in front of us, exactly, other than the future, and there's no space for the size, the density of the universe to go. Because it's expanding at every point simultaneously.
You know, there's black holes and what - could there be wormholes? Could - might there be a multi-verse? These are all fascinating frontiers. What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? And what was around before the universe? And do we have access to higher dimensions?
Astronomers have been bewildered by the theory of an expanding universe, but there is no less expansion in the moral infinite of the universe of man. As far as the frontiers of science are pushed back, over the extended arc of these frontiers one will hear the poet's hounds on the chase.
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