Originally published at: NASA says "something weird is going on" with the cosmos | Boing Boing
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They notice that now?
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We really should have never built that Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland…
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So we’re still not facing a Gnab Gib anytime soon, right?
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NASA says “something weird is going on” with the cosmos
Papasan says “something weird is going on” with the Earth.
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The alien overlords are probably wrapping up the current simulation. Hope they keep craft beer, Sherlock, Holmes, comic books, and vintage motorcycles for the next simulation.
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a discrepancy between the expansion rate as measured in the local universe compared to independent observations from right after the big bang
(clearly) gravity decays with-respect-to time; i calls it [drippy font mode] The Dark Coefficient!
(woulda called it the dark force, but that’s copywritten) (“You old @#$! you, it’s clearly the changing intersection between multiverse branes which was more …intersectional a mere 13.772 billion years ago”)
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Something weird and it don’t look good. Who ya gonna call—cosmologists?
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Didn’t read it. It’s the GOP, isn’t it.
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You mean the hair-and-makeup people?
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Small bit of pedantry:
Dark matter is a placeholder to account for the “missing” mass of the universe, since gravitational observations show there is 96% (give or take) of matter missing based on what we can see.
Dark energy is a placeholder to account for the fact that observations show the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Acceleration requires energy, but no source of it is apparent.
These new observations are super interesting because it’s the first chink in the dark energy armour. One of the grandest mysteries in cosmology has been the accelerating expansion of the universe. That’s extremely unintuitive, but it is corroborated by buckets and buckets of data. This data may show otherwise for the first time, so it’s very very interesting. However the bar to refute dark energy is high, since there is a lot of existing data behind it.
It would be a lot more intuitively satisfying to be in a universe that is either static or decelerating in size (likely to end in a Big Crunch or Big Bounce). Infinite acceleration is upsetting to human metaphors and cognitive models.
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Some people just never want to stop.
Thank you for your “pedantry”. It cleared up some stuff for me about this whole Dark Cosmology stuff.
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Have they tried unplugging the universe, and plugging it back in again?
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Well, no. But now they know “You break it, you buy it” is not official policy.
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No, they don’t do hair (well, Berenice’s that one time).
Don’t worry, they get that a lot.
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Who took those readings and can they be trusted?
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Back a thousand years or so, when I was doing physics at school, I came across the constants. (Planck’s, I think it was, at least at first.) I was told, as every other student, and I believe, every other physicist, was told, that these were “universal constants”. And at the time I though - “how do they know?” It’s a pretty big assumption. The universe is big. Something might be constant for the entire planet Earth, or even the entire solar system, or even the entire Milky Way Galaxy, but not be quite the same somewhere else. And no-one (yet) has any way of finding out. It’s my suspicion that this is at the heart of the problem. The further we look, the stranger things are going to be. The biologist J.B.S. Haldane said: ’ The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine. We haven’t even come close yet.
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vrplumber says “something weird is going on” with Papasan’s font. 
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Think cosmically.
Act globally.
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