This Mysterious Energy Is Everywhere. Scientists Still Don't Know What It Is

Short Wave

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🗓️ 16 July 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

The universe — everything in existence — is expanding every second! It's only been about a hundred years that humanity has known this, too — that most galaxies are traveling away from us and the universe is expanding. Just a few decades ago, in the late 1990s, scientists started to notice another peculiar thing: The expansion of the universe is speeding up over time. It's like an explosion where the debris gets faster instead of slowing down. The mysterious force pushing the universe outward faster and faster was named dark energy. Cosmologist Brian Nord joins host Regina G. Barber in a conversation that talks about what dark energy could be and what it implies about the end of our universe.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions.
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0:17.0	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:21.0	Hey Shortwaivers, it's Regina Barber.
0:24.0	Today it's widely accepted that our universe is expanding.
0:27.0	This is what I taught in Astronomy 101 for many, many years.
0:31.0	But a hundred years ago, when Albert Einstein was figuring out general and
0:34.5	special activity, that wasn't the case. The prevailing theory was actually
0:39.5	that the universe was not expanding. However, Einstein's equations in the original form in which he
0:45.0	derived them predicted that the universe was expanding. Some versions of this
0:49.3	history say that once Einstein wrote these equations, he freaked out at their implications.
0:54.4	And so he added a fudge factor.
0:56.4	It was meant to counteract the expansion
0:59.6	so that you would get this static universe.
1:06.7	And then later he took it out because he was like no I guess the universe is expanding. And he called this fudge factor his
1:10.7	greatest blunder. And then in 1999, we found out that that term should be in there.
1:17.0	You know, it's a shame.
1:18.0	If he had gotten this right in the first place, he might have been famous.
1:21.0	That's Brian Nord.
1:25.0	He's a computational cosmologist.
1:27.0	And okay, that seems like a lot,
1:29.0	which is probably why he says sometimes people get confused.
	...

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