[RascalPuff]

Originally Posted by neutralino

Your flagrant lack of knowledge of basic cosmology, and physics, is somewhat baffling, especially since you seem to constantly question the foundations of these subjects. I'm sure I've told you this before, but I shall say it once again. 'Dark Energy' and 'quintessence' are NOT different things. Dark energy is the blanket term used for the thing that is causing the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Dark energy can be one of two major things:

• The cosmological constant. Mathematically, the cosmological constant is a constant of integration obtained on integrating the acceleration equation to get the Friedmann equation.* Thus, if you take this viewpoint you necessarily have to add the cosmological constant to the other fundamental constants.
• There could be some density attributed to the vacuum (this is, essentially, quintessence). This means that, even when there is no conventional matter in the spacetime, the right hand side of the acceleration equation is non-zero

Now, to your other points. Dark energy and dark matter will always be scrutinised: such is the nature of science! Black holes are not being scrutinised by any reputable physicist that I know of at this time since the physics community are convinced that they exist. Gravitons are particles that have been made up in order to mediate the gravitational force. However, since we do not have a quantum theory of gravity, then it makes no sense to conjecture whether they exist or not! String theory is not taken as a standard theory and so, of course, is being scrutinised. The big bang theory is taken as standard cosmology, and is not being questioned by any large number of cosmologists.

*I would like to urge you to read up on some basic cosmology: I have provided many links in my thread in this subforum, precisely so that we can avoid having to explain the standard view again and again. I also think you should clarify what is in the standard model, and what is not.

In my opinion, and I think I speak for the majority of scientists here, one cannot critisize a theory if one does not understand the basics of it!!

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Speak of large and small numbers of 'Standard Theorists' if you will.
Whereas, fortunately, science is not a democracy - there is no refuge in professional attendance ratings.

"Dark Energy' and 'quintessence' are NOT different things."

Neither do I say otherwise. They are in fact used interchangeably, while 'Dark Matter' occupys a schizoid netherealm adjacent to the double-talk of Dark Energy and 'quintessence'.

In your own words:
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Dark energy is the blanket term used for the thing that is causing the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Dark energy can be one of two major things:

• The cosmological constant. Mathematically, the cosmological constant is a constant of integration obtained on integrating the acceleration equation to get the Friedmann equation.* Thus, if you take this viewpoint you necessarily have to add the cosmological constant to the other fundamental constants.
• __________________________________________________ ____

Dark energy is a blanket to cover up the fact that the Cosmological Constant has been unabashedly (necessarily) retrieved from politically induced retirement and is now back on the slate as 'LambdaColdDarkMatter' (and its improvised 'quintessential' cousins).

The 'Friedmann equation' allows for an expanding (or contracting) universe, and since it was formerly used to counterstate the presently purloined ('abandoned') Cosmological Constant - Lambda - it is now being used to (in your words) explain 'the thing that causes the acceleration of the expansion of the universe'.



The 'big bang' has no common center from which the recession originates. 'The center is everywhere'. This is not the signature of an explosive beginning. Whereas, it is the signature of a repelling force comparable to the Newtonian impelling force, only acting in an opposite vector. Namely, the necessary - pilfered and re-named - Cosmological Constant... (couldn't agree with you more on that note. Albeit, the big bangologists are desperately shoring up what used to be a common center based theory...)

Background radiation is characteristic of any model of an expanding universe. The expansion of matter itself requires no 'spontaneous creation of hydrogen' (a contradiction of the law of conservation of mass-energy) and reinstates the 'Steady State'.

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Sourced from "The Australian" July 2004

AFTER nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole gobbles everything within it - including traces of its own existence - physicist Stephen Hawking has done an intellectual backflip.

Next week at a conference in Dublin, the wheelchair-bound Oxford University academic will recant his controversial "black-hole paradox".

It's an idea he first proposed in 1976 and involves the complicated physics of black holes, or dense objects such as what remains when some stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own weight.

Leading cosmologist Paul Davies, of Macquarie University's Australian Centre for Astrobiology, heard rumours earlier this year about Dr Hawking's intellectual conversion. "Evidently, something has caused him to change his mind, but he's being very coy about what it is," Professor Davies said yesterday.


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The Editors, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,
415 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017

14 May 1976
(20 yrs. before '96, when the acceleration finally overran 'Standard Theorists')



"An Accelerating Universe?" "...that most reasonable observational data.... fit closely all models to which the expansion is accelerating. "The prediction of accelerating expansion is contrary to expectation... "something must be terribly wrong."..."The net forces between (receding) glaxies really are repulsive (Re: 'Hubble's Law - the more distant a given stellar or galactic light source the faster it's rate of recession from the point of observation". Re: Einstein's Cosmological Constant <repelling force acting parallel to and in the opposite direction as the popular concept of 'Newtonian impelling force>, a force different from others in that its velocity increases - rather than decreases, with distance.) - SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 'Science and the Citizen', December 1975, James E. Gunn and Beatrice M. Tinsley.


'I point out this apparent conflict with the understanding that Gunn and Tinsley concluded "...the prediction of accelerating expansion is contrary to expectation... and that something must be terribly wrong." Especially so if "...the net forces between (receding) galaxies... really are repelling... and if gravitational values really are "equivalent to and synchronous with inertial acceleration values beyond a billionth of a second and the technical ability to measure any difference" (THE NEW GRAVITY <Is The 4th Dimension>, April 1976, Kent B. Robertson).

'Is it possible we are overlooking a rather obvious consideration, concerning the real nature of 'gravity?'

Very Truly Yours,


David F. Sicks, Anchorage, Alaska cc - Mr. Kent Robertson

( Mr. David F. Sicks received no response.)
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Speaking at the 2005 Solvay conference David Gross (Nobel laureate) said:
"We are in a period of utter confusion...These equations tell us nothing about where space and time come from and describe nothing we would recognise. At best, string theory depicts the way particles might interact in a collection of hypothetical universes...we are missing something fundamental."

Excerpts from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn, from paragraph 1: "Research is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education".