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The discovery of dark energy was one of the biggest surprises in astronomy. Instead of a nice, predictable expanding Universe, acted on only by gravity, astronomers turned up a mysterious repulsive force accelerating the expansion of the Universe. Fraser and Pamela explain
the evidence for a dark energy, and a few possible theories for what could be providing this repulsive force.
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If dark matter is spontaneously being created in an expanding universe, doesn’t this violate the law of the conservation of mass?
Just reading the transcript from the show, Dr. Pam Gay stated that the universe IS expanding. The more it expands, the more space there is for vacuum energy to “bubble”. The more vacuum energy bubbles “out”, the more repulsive force it puts out, the more the universe it pushing itself apart.
She didn’t mention dark energy doing this.
Nonetheless, this does seem contrary to our Newtonian understanding of the world, which still governs our general scientific approach to the Earth. Newton thought in terms of “Absolute Space” and “Absolute Time”, both concepts we have since found to be untrue or wrong – Newton based them on religious beliefs.
So, is space violating our comfortable ideas of “conservation of energy” and “conservation of matter”, or does the matter such as the Earth and the Stars, which comprise only 4% of EVERYTHING, violate the physics of Dark Energy (a.k.a. vacuum energy? Dr. Gay never says?) and Dark Matter??????
I had to listen to this segment of the show several times, and I’m still not sure what to think of energy bubbling out, up, through or away from any point in space as the universe expands. Is there a repository of “Energy” from which vacuum energy comes to “bubble” from? Suggests another parallel universe, doesn’t it? Or is there a cosmic “tank” of energy to bubble from, put there by….who? what? which? why? how?