Scientists may have discovered a flaw in their understanding of dark energy

Put a pair of parallel conducting plates between a given bounded volume though, and interesting thing happens: while shorter, higher energy standing waves can still fit between them, the longer, lower energy ones cannot.

As a result, there is now no longer an unbounded number of virtual photons between the inside plates and the outside ones, and this manifests as a very slight force on the plates because you now have a higher energy on the outside then on the inside. But it's a lossy process: the plates can only exclude longer, lower energy wavelengths, so there's a very finite upper bound on how much energy any given arrangement of this system can produce since as you move the plates closer together the remaining energy inside grows much faster then the energy outside (shorter virtual wavelengths).

If you're wondering how this affects you: it's all around you. Vacuum energy - the Casimir force - is believed to account for most of the force known to be due to van der Waal's forces in chemistry - i.e. the basic force which sticks non-ionic, non-covalent things together. The difficulty of removing dust for example, is being driven by that.

EDIT: "Dark Energy" - which is what's being discussed here, is very different.

Wave functions can be seen as the sum of polynomial terms.

So a wave function of: x^3+3x^2+4x could be expressed as its coefficients [1,3,4].

Now if any of those coefficients are allowed to be zero, then you’d have, say, [0,3,4] for your polynomial which simplifies to an identical polynomial [3,4].

This just reduced the dimension of the problem by 1, but a wave function in n dimensions is fundamentally different than one with n-1 or n+1.

If you could reduce the dimension of a problem by zeroing a coefficient and still get accurate calculations then then “curse of dimensionality” would be moot because you could just keep reducing the dimension until the problem was tractable and then reverse the process to build back up to the original problem.

Unfortunately, the pigeon hole problem creeps up when the additional states of the higher dimension lack a direct analogue to its lower dimension.

Think of a binary tree. At each element draw two new elements branching from it on a line below. Allowing any leaf to be 0 effectively removes it and all of its parents and children from the model. So in order to retain the full tree all values at each leaf must be greater than 0.

I disagree that it's really that simple an explanation, though. Our best theoretical prediction for dark energy is that it should be denser by dozens of orders of magnitude. It's not remotely clear why the actual value seems to be so small, especially since it's not exactly zero.

Everything from atoms to galaxies are safe in regards to expansion. Galaxy clusters (maybe) and up would be disrupted by expansion.

This changes if you allow Dark Energy to vary with time, but the paragraph in the article assumes it's constant.

> If the work of dark energy were constant over time, it would eventually push all the stars and galaxies so far apart that even atoms could be torn asunder...

"If dark matter gives rise to the gravity that holds the universe together, then dark energy is the counter-force pushing the universe apart. Very early in the universe’s existence, dark matter dominated. Everything was closer together, so its density was higher than that of the dark energy, and its gravitational pull was stronger so the early galaxies could form. But as the universe continued to expand, the dark matter density, and hence the gravitational pull, decreased until it was less than that of the dark energy. So instead of the expected slowdown in the expansion rate, the now-dominant dark energy began pushing the universe apart at ever-faster rates."

That aside, clouds of plasma don't really work as an explanation for dark matter either. Plasma interacts with light in ways we understand quite well, which means we would see it in astronomical observations.

I just went to https://archive.ph/, entered the URL of the article and it produced that

NYT's headline is sensationalistic in the sense that astronomers didn't get anything wrong. Ten years ago, when I was in grad school, all my group did was study models with a dynamic dark energy component because it was a very common opinion among cosmologists that LCDM won't be the final answer, even though it fit the data best, because there are theoretical problems with it. If there are no observations that rule out a cosmological constant, you cannot justify introducing new parameters, so what we did is trying to figure out if and by how much certain future surveys (we were focused mostly on Euclid) could see a difference between LCDM and your favorite dynamic dark energy model.

So while this is a very exciting development, it's not like astronomers world wide are now in despair that they got something wrong. I've been out of academia for a while now, but I bet it's a welcome and overdue change in our view on the universe.

You: I'm gonna just make up my own information and wing it, I guess.

Science being wrong is a good thing, it means we are learning and removing falsified information. At every point in time, science will be invalidating the previous state of the art, and at every point in time the current science will seem naive and simple in the future.

Expecting nothing to hold is great, it means we're learning and growing as a species. The alternative is ignorance.

Yes, "science" (rather, the vast army of people conducting science, and all of their own respective human inclinations, biases, and faults) has "gotten things wrong" more times than it's gotten them right.

That's how science intrinsically works. Meanwhile, sticking your head in the sand and doing nothing, solves nothing.