Question for the scientists out there. . .What the heck is dark energy? And dark matter?
And can we use it to fuel warp travel?
By theory there is a calculated amount of matter in the universe. This is based basically on how fast the universe is expanding. The amount of matter visible to astronomers doesn’t match the amount calculated by the expansion. The unseen matter has been labeled dark matter for obvious reasons. Astomomers aren’t sure what makes up this unseen matter, there are theories that it is simply energy. Since Einstein showed matter and energy are interchangable E = mc^2, the missing matter may be a form of energy according to some astromomers.
fuel warp travel??? (science fiction)
Not a scientist, and not sure of “dark energy” but dark matter is matter that is not detectable by light or touch, they really hypothesis it exists. It makes up, “they” say, 90% of the matter in the universe. It was discovered by discrenencies in calculating the mass of the universe. It may be sub atomic or maybe huge like massive black holes. That is about as far as I can take it.
<warp travel??? (science fiction)>
YOU LIE!!!
Question for the scientists out there. . .What the heck is dark energy? And dark matter?
My wife claims that they are the product of my drinking Endurox, or beans
Thank you for asking. I don;t know the answer but I do have another question.
Last night I saw a documentary on ballooning. They mentioned balloons putting satelites into orbit.
That;s impossible right? I mean, escape velocity is 17,000 mph+ and there is no “air” or atmosp[here in space for a balloon to be “lighter than”.
What the heck did they mean??? It’s really bugging me.
Are you sure they weren’t just talking about some advanced observation balloon? I seem to recall reading something not long ago about either us or the Israelis having a new plan to use high altitude balloons for something. . .
Tom, check this out for starters. . .
good explination… I just took a intro astronamy course this year… physics 214… great course… and thats pretty much what our prof said.
David
I think this is what you are talking about
http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/1/2004/01/05/story113.html
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Bumped for ZipChip’s attention.
Hey, Zip! You know anything about this stuff?
I was a bit surprised that last week’s news regarding the X-prize did not make bigger headlines. The X-prize is a $10 million prize for any private firm that can launch a person into space (62.5 miles) bring them back and do it again with the same vehicle within two weeks. One of the leading competitors got a guy up to about 40 miles last Thursday. Seems like they’re quite close to being ready to go for it. I would think that a private company’s efforts to getting a man or woman into space would be bigger news, but I guess there is a lot else going on that people would rather read about (prison photos, gas prices, etc.). Too bad.
I don’t think the vehicle is propelled by dark matter, by the way.
It was big news on slashdot at least 
Scaled Composites definitely seems to be the front-runner for the x-prize. They’re being very secretive about their schedule. Any guesses as to when they’re going to go for it?
these photos are great (sorry just url, no hyperlink):
http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/New_Index/photos/photos_text.htm
A less charitable way of putting it is dark matter and dark energy are fudge plugged into the formulas derived from current theory to make them come out with the “right” answer. Though people have made various claims about proving the existence of dark matter I think tossing the current theories instead of resorting to cooking with fudge deserves more consideration (like whether the gravitational constant is really constant).
As for warp travel, if you’re talking about faster-than-light travel, I believe Hawking suggested that it might be possible through black holes. That is, a black hole is a mass of infinite density and enormous gravitational pull, with a significant mass compressed to near infinite smallness. His theory is that all this mass might in fact go somewhere, and may in fact exit through quasars (or was it pulsars?) somewhere else in the universe. Of course, nobody has ever or could probably ever test it, at least not without significant personal trauma; i.e., getting instantaneously crushed and stretched out to a molecule thin string of matter while being absorbed into a singularity. It may be possible, but it’s one of those things that maybe best left to somebody else, like being the first black President.
I think that eerie movie “Event Horizon” explored this notion, with some dire consequences.
OK, I was kidding about warp travel. I don’t expect to be beamed up by the Enterprise anytime soon. It’s not like I’ve ever sat out in the back yard all night looking for UFOs. Really. I swear. I know Star Trek is fictional. For now. I mean, it *could *happen, right? 
Anyway, I have to say that this dark matter thing is pretty disappointing- I had hoped that there was some cool mind-bending theory behind it, and it turns out that it’s just fantasy matter used to manipulate equations so some scientist doesn’t have to face up to the possibilty that his (or her, Zip!) theory might be wrong. It doesn’t seem that dark matter is much of a boon to science’s credibility.
If TripleThreat finds out about this, it’s all over.
Predictions are by the end of the summer.
Dark matter and dark energy are “required” to explain the current state of the universe (expanding vs contracting, Hubble constant and whatnot). The interesting thing is, as I recall, that dark matter accounts for only a small percentage of the missing material (5% I think) and the dark energy accounts for the majority.
One other thing about black holes, space travel and Steven Hawking, I got to see him give a lecture in Salt Lake a few years back. During the talk he reviewed some of his quantum mechanics work with the general theory of relativity. One very interesting aspect was the application of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which basically says for any paired observations, the more you know about one thing of the pair, the less you know about the other thing. So, in the case of a black hole, which is so powerful that even light cannot escape, one can determine to a very small area the location of a light particle within the volume of a black hole (i.e. the black hole itself). The paired observation, the speed of the light particle which is generally given as a constant per Einstein of 186,000 miles per second and is otherwise considered immutable, therefore cannot be determined and must be given a range of less than and more than 186,000 miles/s. In which case, it is possible for light to travel faster than the so called limit of speed of light. This was and is the only time I have heard of any possibility of going faster than the speed of light. Maybe Star Trek may be possible some day after all.
Anyway, I have to say that this dark matter thing is pretty disappointing- I had hoped that there was some cool mind-bending theory behind it, and it turns out that it’s just fantasy matter used to manipulate equations so some scientist doesn’t have to face up to the possibilty that his (or her, Zip!) theory might be wrong. It doesn’t seem that dark matter is much of a boon to science’s credibility.
Not at all - I equate this to semicoductor physics where “holes” have mass. This is simply because they behave like they have mass and this makes the number crunching much easier. But the equations and theories are most certainly not wrong.
- Dennis
Please expound on this. From the explanations given earlier in the thread, it definitely seemed that dark matter was not much more than a fudge factor. In other words, from the earlier explanations, I got the impression that scientists had a set of mathematic equations that they thought would predict how the universe behaves, except that their observations didn’t match the equations. They therefor postulated dark matter as a way to make the equations fit anyway. (Interestingly, the sites I’ve checked out so far vary wildly in their estimation of how much of the total matter in the universe is dark- one site says no more than 5%, while another site says it may be as much as 90-99%.)
So why are the equations and theories not wrong? And what exactly are the theories?