Nobel Prize of Dark Energy

By a funny coincidence my previous post Hubble Law Without Dark Energy appears to have triggered the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for

• the discovery that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate

with the following motivation:

• The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves.
• If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.
• The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma - perhaps the greatest in physics today.
• What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe.
• Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science.
• And everything is possible again.

But to introduce a completely new phenomenon of dark energy as explanation of the seemingly accelerating expansion of the Universe, does not seem to help understanding much, if understanding is what science is about.

In the previous post I reflected over a simple idea to explain the observations, based on expansion by inertia from an initial inflated state resulting from a Big Bang expansion driven by a pressure increasing with distance caused by a heat source creating a velocity also increasing with distance. Observations made today would then represent space-time cuts with again velocities increasing with distance. The velocity distribution would then be set by the pressure distribution in the Big Bang expansion determined by the specifics of the heat source, without any need to introduce new forces (beyond inertia) of unknown nature.

Note that the observations of more distant (dimmer) far away galaxies than expected behind the Nobel Prize, would correspond to a sublinear increase of velocity with distance at the start of the inertial expansion after Big Bang expansion, which would not as such appear to be surprising. The surprising observations may thus in fact not be so surprising, which is surprising.

Remember what Einstein adviced:

• Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.