World Science Scholars

4.5 Dark Energy

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    • In this course you’ve learned a staggering concept: roughly 95% of our entire universe is in a form that is essentially unknown to us. Given that science has certainly taken profound strides in understanding the universe over the past few centuries, how does this realization affect your view of our state of knowledge?

    • We are doomed.

    • It is really both interesting and perplexing and the same time. You begin thinking you understand the physics of something and all of a sudden you get the sense that all you know is just a point in a sea of information, which is normally overwhelming for the human mind to grasp.

    • its staggering but at the same time its exciting. because we can now surely say that there is scope for discoveries in astrophysics. we wont be jobless.

    • The fact that we only understand 5% of what the Universe is made of, doesn’t mean that all our accumulated knowledge of astrophysics/cosmology only amounts to 5% of what there is to know, as in quantitive terms, for example, dark matter and dark energy are only two concepts, albeit very important concepts, which if discovered, would allow us to understand approx 100% of what the Universe is made of. So in quantitive terms, it may be that we already understand 98% of what there is to know, if dark matter and energy were the only outstanding issues in cosmology, which they are not.

    • I already knew some of this but it was great to enhance my knowledge from a professional astrophysicist. Everyday we try to look out in the space and find things that we can not explain. Although we can achieve a giant leap forward if we can connect macro universe with the micro universe. Understanding of Quantum Mechanics will be a next break through in modern physics, which most definitely will open doors to new age of physics and technology all together.

    • Knowledge and the universe are expanding together.

    • It’s very much interesting.

    • The knowledge base we have now will be the foundation on which new discoveries will be made, either disproving what we know to be wrong or proving indeed it is right. Either will point us eventually in the right direction, maybe even in my life time (I am 73 now).

    • It’s very exciting!

    • Chuck Lund’s comment “Knowledge and the universe are expanding together” makes me think knowledge is dark energy!

    • According to Einstein light is bent by gravity. If that is the case then how is it that the light from from distant stars travels straight to Earth without being influenced by the gravity of other stars that the light passes close to. Light from mercury was bent by the gravity of our relatively “tiny” sun. Other stars are much much bigger than our Sun.

    • Our knowledge is roughly following a logistic curve. Most certainly there is a resource based limit for our knowledge. So far every new innovation has generated two or three more (more or less successful) innovations. So, I’m confident that finding 95 % of Universe unknown generates more innovations in many fields of our knowledge.

    • Knowledge is “White Matter”.- light
      Not knowing is “Dark Matter” – Dark or no light.
      Seeing is believing.

    • It certainly affects our understanding of the universe to learn that we ignore so much.
      However, we trust that scientific efforts and resources are spent in the correct directions as to find the explanations.

    • I believe the biggest discoveries are yet to come. I believe we will discover that there is a collective consciousness that exists and that we all play a role of observers in this baryonic world. We shape this world through our thoughts and emotions, and collectively we are outraged. A great awakening is upon us, spiritual and intellectual, and this paradigm realignment will lead humanity to great discoveries. As above, so below. I believe that once we realize that when the great population accepts a theory, that theory becomes reality. Perspective and open mindedness will be key in getting there. Closing the doors to outside beliefs and ideas will hinder our progress, more so than it has already. As more awaken to the reality that we are shaping this world, more answers will unfold. This is an exciting time to be alive.

    • Last century with Einstein and Quantum theory done, all the was left was to unite them. Then with these tools learn about the Universe.
      Well now there’s string theory which is still unproven, and we don’t know what 95% of the Universe is made of. We know more of we don’t know, that’s are big success. This is a vary different feeling. Quit humbling and kind of hard to have big ego, that’s are big win.

    • Expands our thinking

    • More likely it expands our ignorance of the Universe. We don’t know what 95% of it is. It’s all Maya or illusion. We just see more mathematical discoveries that there is Dark energy that cannot be seen or sensed or harnessed in any way. Now they want another bigger LHC costing hundreds of billion$ to verify that there is nothing out there.

    • Excellent!

    • Dark energy, Dark matter and black holes cannot be seen because they interact with light in a way that you can only infer with your mind and certain experiments and very indirectly. God is a similar concept. He exists and does not exist at the same time. You cannot see God. You can only experience God through personal experiments. The lab is your own body and mind. The sixth sense the (mind) is the only way to indirectly experience God. Exactly the same concept as black holes in the Universe. Except we don’t need large expensive space telescopes. If we can build a inverted telescope (microscope possibly) to see inside the mind then may be we can discover this invisible God.

    • good

    • I feel a bit better about the performance of economists now I know that physicists have just discovered a previously-missing extra c.95% of the universe 🙂

    • The more we learn, the more we realize how much we donot know! Knowledge is the realization of our ignorance.

    • In this course you’ve learned a staggering concept: roughly 95% of our entire universe is in a form that is essentially unknown to us. Given that science has certainly taken profound strides in understanding the universe over the past few centuries, how does this realization affect your view of our state of knowledge?

      I would say that this realization tells us that we’re going in the right direction. If you think about it, as we tackle so many questions in science, upon finding out the answers, we also realize that we’ve found even more questions, the questions that we weren’t even aware of. So, I think, the fact that we realize how ignorant we really are, tells a lot about how good our understanding of science is.

    • it was soo interesting and useful. please upload a course of dark energy, General relativity and quantum physics

    • it was soo interesting and useful. please upload a course of dark energy, General relativity and quantum physics

    • Feels good to know what we don’t know. For the next step in the ladder, that statistic of what we don’t know about the multiverse constituents versus what we know varies in way broader bounds: 0% – 100% 🤭

    • I guess it reminds us on the one hand of how ´small´ we are, and how little we know. On the other hand, it is a challenge to find out more about the universe.

    • Fantastic

    • I think there’s competing equity behind the curtain on levels with more competing/collaborating disclosure. I thought the number was smaller which is both humbling for science and opening of optimism for what is yet to be concluded by us in exploration as we begin to realize the continuity between waves and particles, although might be best to start with probing poorer looking dark matter just in case someone gets pissed. I wouldn’t start the Trump wall of dark energy or a different God’s.

    • This reminds me of buying a newer, but older car.

      With Dark Energy and Dark Matter, we have stepped outside the Earthy plane into a pond of previously unthought of substance.

      The border this time, the new vehicle, however is vastly alien in its` design.

      Concepts of decelerating, proven wrong, lead to universal expansion that at first seems beyond the comprehension, but it is only a new terrain, made clearer by your thoughtful course content.

      Thanks for the clarity!

    • It means that no matter how much we seem to understand; there is more to know, that infinity, the dividing one a 1 into many parts can indeed go on forever. There will always be something to abstract upon. It doesn’t matter how much we think we know about a field of knowledge, there is always an infinite amount more to know about it. It is awe-inspiring at the same time it is disheartening. But that is the beauty of it, it’s the yin and yang of it all.

      It makes us realize that perhaps some questions that we don’t have solutions for just yet, such as NP-Complete problems may still be yet answerable. New possibilities will open up after these solutions become apparent that we didn’t know were possible until we discovered something else. The tech tree is unfathomable long it seems. I guess we just have to keep tossing the fishing pole of time and computation at it and seeing what we pull out of the depth of knowledge that we currently have available, every catch increasing the pool that much more. Fascinating.

    • It comes back to the fact that we as a species have a drop of knowledge in the ocean of the universal knowledge out there. Bigger drop increases our understanding, which should give all of us hope.

    • I’m always impressed with how clever scientist are and what they have already discovered. The fact that we now know that baryons only make up <;5% of everything makes for very interesting research and discoveries ahead.

    • I believe with the advancement of deep space spectrography and advent of quantum computing the application of its services to deep space exploration we will succeed in understanding dark energy and dark matter and with the discovery of gravitational waves recently our hopes have only went up.

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