The Perseid Meteor Shower, Dark Energy and Pearls

When I first learned what a pearl was and how it was made I thought it was a grand mystery.  I imagined myself growing very, very small and diving through the layers of nacre to the center of the pearl.  In my mind, when I sat on the center grain of sand that was my pearly home, my world always seemed very large, even though I was a spec and my universe only a pearl. 

When I study astronomy, I feel like I am back inside that pearl.  Physicists understand what it is like to be very small and very large all at the same time.  Tonight is the big finale for this year’s Perseid Meteor Shower, as the earth passes through the debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle.  [This shower, full of fire and beauty, is really a tribute to the birth of my second daughter, but that is another story.]

But the real excitement in astrophysics isn’t the highly visible and deeply understood excitement of meteor showers.  No, the real buzz concerns the concept of Dark Energy.  It also affirms what I have always felt about Albert Einstein—he had the ability to be right without even knowing he was, or why such rightness had to be.  On the matter of Dark Energy, Einstein was right in two ways, first his cosmological constant (which he later repudiated, like any good scientist, for lack of confirming empirical data) does work to explain the presence of Dark Energy.  Second, and most important, he was right in his belief that the unifying aspect of all theories would be in gravity. 

Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) has provided both answers and questions to cosmologists.  Microwave energy, measured through an alphabet soup of new devices, is a remnant of the Big Bang.  The fluctuation of the CMB shows the kind of hot and cold spots scientists expect from the results of the Big Bang.  An explosion in the relative vacuum of space will expand in a sphere, but debris—even primordial atomic debris—will scatter in clumps, braids and strands.  Cosmic Microwave Background reflects this dispersal as we believe it may have looked from about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. 

            There is also ample evidence to confirm that what you and I would call, “mass,” makes up only about 5% of the universe.  Another 30 % has been identified as dark matter—physically there, but unseen.  That leaves a whooping 65% currently supposed to be Dark Energy which (oh, would Einstein love this!) apparently is antigravity.  

Dark Energy is pushing the mass of the universe away from itself at a rate that creates a flat, not a pulsating universe.  If that is so, would it not then behave as gravity does, only in reverse?  Would dark energy not have spewed from the Big Bang in the same haphazard and pervasive way as did nascent matter?  Would central cores of dark energy not exert a force equally in all directions away from itself?  Would dark energy not form bubbles of antigravity, with the world of matter occupying the skin of those bubbles where dark energy has stretched itself too thin to counteract the positive gravitation of the world of physical mass?   The logic as well as the mathematics fit together neatly.  

The awesome combination of matter, dark matter and dark energy form a delicate equation that turns scientists into philosophers.  It is a pearl of perfection.

Ponder the music of the sphere and keep the faith.