Making Space

I wonder if we are living through what will be looked back on as one of the most fundamental changes in the history of our species. I mean the sort of change that alters our common understanding of who we are, where we come from and how we fit into the universe: Copernicus' realisation that the earth was not the centre of the visible universe. Darwin's insight that humanity is not a thing apart from other animals, but descended from common ancestors. Oppenheimer "becoming death" - unleashing the dreadful power of the atom

Dark Matter and Dark Energy have emerged as significant scientific ideas only in the last two or three decades. They have always made me feel uneasy, being concepts created in order to make the equations fit the universe we see, rather than being related to anything we have observed directly. This would be bad enough if these 'fudge factors' were needed to fill a one or two percent difference between the predictions and the results. But dark matter and dark energy are now calculated to make up 95% of the universe. That's not a fudge factor, that's a gaping hole

These doubts are crystallised in an excellent "long read" in today's Guardian. The people who study dark matter and dark energy are now making direct observations that provide data that conflict with the standard big bang model of the universe that has been worked out in detail over the last 50 - and particularly the last 25 - years. Much as Einstein showed that Newtonian physics could not explain everything that was observed, and provided revolutionary new models for looking at reality, a growing number of cosmologists are coming to believe that the standard model of the universe is not just in need of a bit of adjustment, but is fundamentally broken

This is not a done deal. There are forces of resistance, of course. Ways of accommodating the new data in the old model may yet be worked out. It was ever thus: it took 70 years before Copernicus' ideas were championed by Galileo - and he died under house arrest by the Inquisition for doing so. No contemporary Einstein has yet emerged to champion a new cosmological model. But I just keep thinking about that 95%: how can we proceed with a story that only addresses 5% of reality? I hope I'm around long enough to find out the answer

Putting up shelves took up most of the day - not so much the assembly, more the creation of space to put them in. No wonder I was thinking about the space-time continuum! Not exactly a picturesque image, though; I prefer the view in the opposite direction (extra). There is always more than one perspective