Regular readers are aware of my disdain for Dark Energy and Dark Matter. These are hypothetical entities that apparently can’t be detected but which allow astrophysicists to pretend they understand why physical measurements of the universe don’t correlate with the estimates they make about things like the mass of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe.
Well I’m happy to report they’ve come up with another theory that at least allows them to get rid of dark energy. It’s called non-metric gravity. Of course I’m glad they’re getting rid of dark energy. Getting rid of something that doesn’t exist is a helpful idea. But I can’t say that the exercise they’ve gone through to “measure” the parameters in their new model is all that inspiring. They take the gravitational constant and make it a function of the form:
F(Q) = α + βQn
And all three parameters are determined by curve fitting, using the available data from astrophysical observations like the red shift and microwave radiation densities. And unsurprisingly they are able to make the hypothesis fit the data.
Now does this prove anything? Certainly not. But at least it doesn’t require inventing ubiquitous non-existent particles that are indetectable and inexplicable. And to my way of looking at things it’s the beginning of an approach that may start to unravel the baffling problems that astrophysicists are confronted with when they look at the universe on the grand scale.
Now if only they can man up and admit there’s no such thing as dark matter they might start to gain my respect back again. Sir Isaac forgive them. They’re not very bright.