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Re: Dark energy/matter



A little hype goes a long way.
"Dark energy" is a fancy name for Einstein's cosmological constant. Our
friends the cosmoologists, like my friends the hep practitioners, are not
loath to try to popularize their concepts (the "God particle" for the
Higgs has my vote for the worst attempt of the century, but Leon has a
peculiar sense of humor). There are many people trying to find a
mechanism that generates the cosmological constant, and the received
wisdom is that it's amazingly small (thereby requiring "fine tuning",
which is to be abhored).

There are several experiments trying to detect "dark matter". I pointed
out in a note to the Soudan collaboration that some of them would require
300 years of funding to obtain acceptable precision.

Scan Spires ir you want to see who is working on what. There is a link
at: http://www.hep.anl.gov/Theory/home.html
Regards,
Jack





On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Michael N. Monce wrote:

The latest issue of Science News cites some more evidence from the
microwave background for the existence of "dark energy". It seems to me
that if the evidence continues to build for this, and also for dark
matter, then these may be the two most important discoveries in recent
physics history.

What puzzles me is the what I perceive (maybe out of ignorance) as a
lack of lot of theorists rushing to work on this. The implications for
dark matter/energy seem to me to way beyond astronomy and would impact
greatly elementary particle physics. Their existence, I would think, puts
into question our whole ideas of the fundamental structure of nature.

Can anyone give me a good synopsis of what the current ideas as to
what this stuff is? Is it too new and bizarre that people haven't really
had a chance to put something coherent together?


Mike Monce
Connecticut College


--
"Don't push the river, it flows by itself"
Frederick Perls