Comments on: Dark is the new black

By: Bjorn Saw

Bjorn Saw — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:14:49 +0000

Dear Colin,

Sounds good! I do not have the academic background to understand exactly what you mean but it resonates with my own understanding. Singularity especially. Are you speaking about what propels the universe’s expansion, and/or of the force that will make dark energy obsolete?
I enjoy the theory of the singularity that is located in all and every point in space, and as such being the “place” in which a black hole collapses, and at the same time being that place of origin where from the Big Bang emerged 13.7 billion years ago. Together with the understanding of the ever continuous emergence of spacetime from that very source, as layers upon layers in breathtaking velocity. Light being the expression and the creation and the vehicle of spacetime, that propels the expansion of the universe.

By: Colin Slater

Colin Slater — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:25:48 +0000

There is no such thing as dark energy – it is all leverage. If you accept that at some point when a black hole forms and becomes a singularity the laws of space and time become meaningless then if you have a supermassive black hole one side of the universe and over the other side you have another then at some point in the collapse on each one the laws will break down. This means the conditions become identical and with space and time out of the picture the two points snap together. Therefore you can have any number of black holes but one and only one singularity.
From the above everything else falls in to place. Dark energy is replaced by leverage – the side of the supermassive black hole, immediately above the singularity point, closest to the next one will collapse (and be compressed) through the point fractionally earlier than the opposite side (which will be stretched). Thus the black holes will move away from each other taking their galaxies with them. The driving force being the matter falling in to the (one and only singularity). If you accept the single singularity then it must lie at the centre of the universe. As the supermassive black holes snap to the singularity then the matter pouring in has to pass through all that lies between although because space is no longer meaningful there is no distance at all. Therefore the singularity occupies a point at the centre of the universe at the same time as occupying all points between. Spread the mass of the singularity across the universe and you have a week force somewhat like gravity. There is more but I don’t know how much this post will take before it collapses into a black hole of its own!

By: AndrewG

AndrewG — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:35:56 +0000

Dark matter I can kind of get. Maybe it is dark in the sense that it gives off no radiation. Dark energy though???? Shouldn’t it be anti-gravity, if it does what we think it does?

By: Stephen

Stephen — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:58:35 +0000

Dark Energy. Dark Matter. Not as bad names as “Brown Dwarf”, “Planetary Nebula”, “LGM 1″.

There aren’t any black dwarf stars yet. Should they be renamed “dark dwarf stars”?

I think i’ll go out and discover an asteroid. I’ll name it after Pamela. She has publicly stated she doesn’t want one using her last name. Where’s the fun in that? If i’m lucky, it’ll turn out to be a contact binary.

By: Nereid

Nereid — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:36:06 +0000

I am looking forward to your comments on the ‘dark flow’ paper, particularly on the extent to which you think Kashlinsky et al. have not only unambiguously detected the kinetic SZE but also extracted a clean signal from the relevant data using it …

By: Nick Cross

Nick Cross — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:59:43 +0000

I don’t like the term dark energy, but nor do I like the other terms people use for it either: cosmological constant – not sure yet if it is a constant term yet or vacuum energy, which it might be, but the theoretical values and the observed values differ by so much that I don’t think it is useful to describe it as that at the present time.

By: Aristarchus

Aristarchus — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:57:55 +0000

I went outside last night and there was a lot of dark dark about.

By: Alice

Alice — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:42:44 +0000

We could start comparing it to Harry Potter. “This force must be in league with Voldemort. He probably wants to turn that energy into a Horcrux”. “Oh dear, there are Dementors in that galaxy!” “Who’s the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor this year? Is that job still jinxed?” Press releases at least might at least try to avoid it in order to sound more serious.

No slur on Harry Potter intended; I love those books!

By: Aleks

Aleks — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 02:03:19 +0000

I can live with a dark world, as long as all the dark things are really in the dark, metaphorically speaking, meaning that we don’t know how they are. But what happens when we shine light (again metaphorically) on dark matter and dark energy? Do we still call them dark? I would expect that we switch to more useful names, as soon as we find out what dark matter and dark energy actually are. Until then, I’m fine with any name, although question marks instead of words would probably be the honest solution. Just doesn’t give good headlines: New evidence for the existence of ??? in the Universe! Seriously, who wants to read that?