ON THE MATTER OF THE DARK SCIENCES

Okay, this is Wednesday, when I return to the purpose of this blog site, which is to share with you the life work of an engineering professor.  Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to confusing you more than not.  Today I enlighten you on some esoteric physics, a subject that made less and less sense to me the more and more I delved.  

As for example, that famous Einstein equation--energy equals mass squared.  How can mass and energy possibly be related?  One has mass and other has none.  And what, exactly, is gravity, anyway?

Around 40 years ago, astronomers noted that for the first half of those years after the Big Bang, the Universe expanded.  However, most astrophysicists believe that our Universe is flat.  What?

To further confound anyone, during the second 7 billion years, this expansion accelerated.  With friction or entropy or gravity, how can this make any sense?

One explanation was that there were invisible matter and energy out there causing this phenomenon.  Mysterious, okay, but invisible?  Thus, out of pure space, scientists said why don't we call what we don't know dark matter and dark energy.

About the latter, there are four fundamental forces:  gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.  Dark energy is considered to possibly be a fifth force.  How can energy be a type of force?  Some of you surely must remember that force times distance equals energy.

Since those early days I felt that gravity, one of those forces, was the answer,  More so, that Einstein's theory has a flaw, and physicists have not yet been able to figure this out.  Thus, it is not impossible that someday, dark energy and dark matter will become obsolete terms.

Most of my life I was perfectly satisfied with the sensibility of science, and wondered how anyone could accept the religious explanations for the beginning of time and how life came to be.  Then science came up with dark energy and dark matter:

One of the most puzzling mysteries about the Universe is simply, “where is everything?” All that we can see, find, or interact with is made up of particles from the Standard Model, including photons, neutrinos, electrons, and the quarks and gluons which comprise the building blocks of our atoms. Yet when we look out at the cosmic ocean, we find that all of this makes up just under 5% of the total energy in the Universe; the rest is unseen. We call the missing components dark energy (68%) and dark matter (27%), but we don’t know what they are. Do we even know when they came into existence?

So to this new reality, where almost everything we see out there in space and around us, this "ordinary matter," is only around 5% of what really exists.  The deeper you get into science, the less and less you know.

So, anyway, what does humanity gain by solving this dark energy and dark matter enigma?  And we are spending major bucks on this question:

• Particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider.
• Cosmology instruments such as WMAP and Planck.
• Direct detection experiments including CDMS, XENON, Zeplin, WARP, ArDM and others.
• Indirect detection experiments including: Gamma ray detectors (Fermi from space and Cherenkov Telescopes from the ground); neutrino telescopes (IceCube, Antares); antimatter detectors (Pamela, AMS-02) and X-ray and radio facilities.

When the Higgs boson was found at CERN's Large Hadron Collider seven years ago, the cost was said to be $13.9 billion.  But you say, what has that God Particle to do with the dark sciences?  Aha, the Higgs boson will trap dark matter!!!

What is the justification?  Well, this total expenditure is almost nothing compared to what the world annually spends on war, which is $1800 billion, or $1.3 trillion/year:

But wouldn't it make more sense to re-focus our scientific efforts towards remediating global climate warming or improving our airports?  Sure, try convincing the Military-Industrial Complex or Big Science.

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Super Typhoon Hagibis is churning on towards a Saturday encounter with Tokyo.  Rugby World Cup matches in Japan are at high risk.  Some teams are hoping for cancellation, for if this happens, the game is as good as played with a 0-0 score.  However, World Rugby insists it has a robust contingency plan, meaning, move the games to another site.

For the record, the USA has thus far played and lost 3 games, having been outscored by 92 points.  Tonga has the same terrible record, but is only minus 50.  We play Tonga on Saturday.  You think, maybe, that a cancellation would be desirable?  Population of Tonga is 108,000.  USA?  327 million.

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