Pondering Space

Pondering Space

As some of us will draw up hankies, or noise horns, or anything that will draw attention to the final end of the longest primary in American history, may I remind you that space may not be what you thought it was, at least from your college science perspective. I know, some of you are still reeling from the pain of losing Pluto to sub-planetary status, but try to get over it, as we have much much more work to do in understanding all the new space around Pluto, and beyond Pluto, space that we forgot to include back in our science class. Now scientists are telling us we should be watchful, not of who’s going to be on the Platform as the presumptive candidate of either Party, but of a new dark force, aka “dark energy,” as described by a science news writer, Dennis Oberbye, in the June 3, 2008 edition of the New York Times.

From one simple perspective, we may have to invent a new metaphor of Newton’s falling apple to be able to appreciate what has always been going on in deep space, but we’ve never been able to talk about it before, as we did not have the technology to measure what was “out there.” Now with the aid of a supercollider (see “Chasing God on the French/Swiss Border Mar 27,2008 blog) scientists will be able to hypothesize that perhaps all of our theories about the universe may be too SMALL.

According to the science article, “Dark, Perhaps Forever,” we could be tapping more than $600 million to search for this “dark energy.” And more than a few scientists think this may not be enough. But even more problematic is the idea of our concept of the universe, that we are actually in the one and only universe. We may not be in the one and only, in fact, it’s looking more like one in a zillion, as reported in the Times. And that takes us to the “meaning” question, doesn’t it, as we all want to know that we actually have some relevance in this big old neighborhood.

But according to one interviewed scientist, Dr. Edward Witten, in light of this new dark force, we may have to reconstruct what’s in our heads about what’s out there: “Before the discovery of the dark energy, quantum physicists tended to assume that the ‘vacuum’ we live in has some deep meaning that reflects nature’s deepest secrets….But if ours is only one of a zillion in a haystack, there is nothing special about it, no secret to be found.” Those remarks reflect for many of us, as long as there is a universe “out there,” or “in us,” surely we must have some meaning, but if the universe is only one of so many that we can’t count, does our “meaning factor” still hold up as defined by our religious texts, keeping in mind some of the religious texts don’t even bother to bring it up!

If everything works out, and the deep space budget can keep expanding exponentially, then sometime mid next decade, scientists will launch “J-dem,” (aka Joint Dark Energy Mission, as reported in the Times article). Perhaps then we’ll have a better fix on just how deep is deep space, but then, scientists are not completely sure they’ll have all the definitive answers. Some of you may be deeply disappointed to have invested so much in something so big, but like we’ve been doing ever since we put together the first machine, we keep trying to define ourselves by objects made by ourselves.

I don’t know about you, but I’m staying up for this one, as it’s almost too exciting to fall asleep over. In the meantime, if you are still looking for meaning, you can watch tonight’s finale of the Democratic Primary contest, or at least the possible end of the finale, or maybe the idea of the possible end, depending on political “dark energy.” Everything keeps changing, right?