Hubble Findings: What Does It Mean for Theories of Everything?

[alexsok]

http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/11/16/1
Latest data from Hubble indicates that:

The observations reveal that dark energy was around nine billion years ago and has been acting in a consistent way ever since. The data suggest that the effect of dark energy was rather weak until about five to six billion years ago when it defeated gravity in a “cosmic tug of war” and the rate of expansion began to increase.

What are the ramifications of this finding for the various TOEs we have?

 

[Mike2]

http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/11/16/1
Latest data from Hubble indicates that:

What are the ramifications of this finding for the various TOEs we have?

I think it might confirm the existence of a Zero Point Energy which has been controversial in the past. This energy is the minumum possible energy state of the quantum fields that are associated with every point in space no matter where. And it would confirm those theories that predict a QFT of spacetime/matter that give rise to added space with time as part of that QFT.

 

[rtharbaugh1]

I saw this in the press lately too. Seems to me space always has to preceed matter, so there is always space "outside" a universe. If there were a cloud of particles in a universe, they would naturally have to expand just because of brownian motion. Say the motion of anyone particle in the cloud is essentially random. There necessarily have to be lots more directions away from the center than there are directions towards the center. I should like to know if there is anything in the cosmological constant, or in dark energy, which makes it exceed the limits of this simple model. But before you throw in the inevitable thinning of the density of matter, please take into account that the "Particals" here may be the size of strings, making our usual bosons and leptons almost unimaginably huge by comparison. And on that scale, self-creation may be operating, as virtual particles become real as more space becomes available to accommodate them.

Eh?

R

 

[Chronos]

I was reading the Riess paper on Arxiv over the weekend:

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0611572
New Hubble Space Telescope Discoveries of Type Ia Supernovae at z > 1: Narrowing Constraints on the Early Behavior of Dark Energy

I think it is more a confirmation of earlier work by Perlmutter et al that put accelerated expansion and dark energy on the cosmological map. This will probably draw more interest on the A-C forum. I was about to start a thread there on this paper, but noticed alexsok got the jump on me here. I will credit accordingly.

 

[EL]

I was reading the Riess paper on Arxiv over the weekend

Havn't had time to read myself yet, but I've heard it was quite hard to extract what they really conclude. Appearantly there's a lot of assumed priors in many of the calculations which makes the situation somewhat unclear. What did you get out of it?

 

[Thomas Larsson]

The new result might be an indication that dark energy is fundamental rather than environmental. Conversely, had dark energy been significantly different 9 billion years ago, it would have been strong evidence that it were environmental.

 

[EL]

The new result might be an indication that dark energy is fundamental rather than environmental. Conversely, had dark energy been significantly different 9 billion years ago, it would have been strong evidence that it were environmental.

Yes, that much I'd got. But for example, what limits are they putting on dw/dz?