For those of you not keeping track, dark energy has been postulated in order to keep our old “Big Banged” universe in conformance with observation. The problem: all of the stuff which is receding from us—which is everything—is speeding up, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Dark energy is the stuff which is proposed to be doing this. Unfortunately, a) no one’s seen it, b) no one’s quite sure how to see it, and c) in order to fit with observation, around three-fourths of the entire universe has to be made up the stuff.
Add that to dark matter, which is unseen but proven (we can see light bending through its gravitational lensing), then all of the stuff we can see in the universe—the stuff the normally we think about when we think about “the universe”—is around 7% of its actual content. In SAT terms, Actual Universe : Our Universe :: Cheese : Easy Cheese in an aerosol can.
But hey—this is the 21st century! Why go with the invisible stuff that no one can observe or explain, when we can jump right into realities that are batshit insane. Possibly real, but still batshit.
Reality option #2: time is running out. Literally. In this theory, the universe isn’t speeding up. Time is slowing down. Since time is the denominator, that makes it look like things are speeding up. So in this theory, the pressure exerted by the reservoir of time makes time come out more slowly when it starts to run low, much in the same way that violence in Iraq slows down after you’ve killed or moved all of the people who don’t pray like you do.
Reality option #3: turns out, that Big Bang thing? Optical illusion. The universe is actually infinite, but mass and space are actually interchangeable with length and time.
Let me say that again. In the future, I’ll be 84 kilograms tall and around 80-odd years wide.
Do the math on this one—or more accurately, read someone else’s math, because no one who isn’t Rain Man can understand it—and inconvenient features like the red shift of galaxies sort of pop out as automatic features. You get it for free. But this makes other observations, like 3 degree Kelvin background radiation, into inconvenient features.
My observation: in the history of science, there are two kinds of kludges which make theories work. There’s Einstein’s cosmological constant, which he believed to be completely wrong, but which turned out to be accurate. (So far.) And then there are things like “ether” and “God”, which turn out to be scientifically useless. Dark energy is in one of these categories—and historically speaking, it’s more likely to be the latter.
On the other hand, certain entirely human and very important concepts are wrapped up in the idea that Time is an arrow with only one direction. Like, say, mortality. If we discover that time has a certain sumpthin’ sumpthin’ which makes it completely unlike what we perceive it to be, then that sorta knocks a big hole into both the religious concept of “eternal afterlife” as well as the atheistic “you only make this scene once”.
These are ideas that I’ve been playing with in a novel, but I gotta say—the stuff I’m reading about on science blogs is a hell of a lot weirder than anything I can come up with.