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Comment by MrMcCall | Hacker News Reader

Dark energy is the force that counteracts the combined gravity of our enormous universe. It also keeps the electrons flowing around the nucleus, but not into it.

The universe started with a single Big Bang, but is maintained by an interrelated force continually applied that keeps allowing it to resist collapse, the resulting system allowing local minima such as Earth's sweet spot of smallish sun + gentle orbit.

It's almost like it was designed to be perfect, with nicely balancing counterforces, all set in a sea of brutal extrema, and all set to mathematically clockwork precision that is discoverable by intelligent inhabitants, whose bodies, themselves, operate under those same physical laws. Almost ;-)

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> It also keeps the electrons flowing around the nucleus, but not into it.

Asa cautionary note to other readers, this statement is not consistent with any theory of which I am aware, and it’s certainly not a concept accepted by mainstream physics

Eugene Parker and Ludwig Boltzmann are familiar with your argument, and I doubt you even have Lord Kelvin's credentials.

As Prof. Parker said, "We'll see who falls flat." (That's a paraphrase from memory; I doubt it's an exact quote.)

Boltzmann had a whole lot of math backing up his assertions. Among the many issues with what you posited, I highly doubt you have bothered to actually check to see if the force necessary to keep electrons from colliding with the nucleus would also be commensurate with what’s needed to counteract gravity at cosmological scales. Your theory is analogous to saying that we don’t need to invoke gravity to explain why the earth doesn’t spiral into the sun, because it could just be explained with solar photon pressure.

Sorry to have confused you, but the force that keeps atoms from imploding is (IIUC) of a different nature than that which keeps the universe expanding. They are both "dark energy", but I do not think they are the same "force".

I apologize for not making that clear, but I only know of their very basic nature, not their mathematical-physics relationships and differences. That's not my area of expertise. I'm a general systems person, so I have some very basic knowledge of how such systems behave. This is due to my curiosity about the universe and my own self, which has given me access to persons much more deeply connected than myself.

Note that Eugene Parker, too, had a lot of maths to back his claims up, but that didn't help him convince his peers. Only when we sent a probe up that could measure the solar wind did his detractors begin to stand down. That is always the way new levels of understanding are treated by the status quo.

> [Dark energy] also keeps the electrons flowing around the nucleus, but not into it.

That's totaly wrong. The movenent of electrons arround rhe nucleus is explained by the Schoedinger equation that does not use dark energy at all.

Movement, yes, but does it explain why they just keep moving about in that cloud?

I don't think so, but I'm open to learning.

The Schoedinger equation is a partial diferential equation. When you solve it, you get the eigenvalues and eigenvectors.

The eigenvalues are the energies. The differences if energies are easy to measure experimentaly looking at the light of discharge lamps. Most of the science of early 20th century is triying to find a theory that explains the colors in that light.

The eigenvectors of the Schoedinger equations are the clouds distributions of the electrons. I'm not sure how difficult is to measure them directly, but they are important to get the size and shape of molecules and the positions of atoms inside crystals and a lot of other stuff.

The same theory that explains the the light of discharge lamps and the electronic clouds also explains the leds in the screen and the transistors in the procesor of yoyr phone.

And dark energy is not used in any of these calcuñations.

No, our current models (the basis for the calculations) do not incorporate dark energy.

Sure, the Schoedinger Equation describes the electron cloud, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't account for why it is moving, and not spiraling into the nucleus. It can't. Put a different way, describing something's movement does not explain why it's moving. Still the SE is as amazing achievement, but it is descriptive of effects, not causes.

> It's almost like it was designed to be perfect…

It’s almost like the ones that aren’t ideal for life don’t tend to have much life to notice that fact.

Well, yeah, that's how it works. On Earth here, we're an oasis of warm thermodynamic blessedness in a sea of frigid brutality.

Be thankful there's no humans on Uranus.

Any life in the universe that evolved on Uranus-style systems will similarly be grateful not to be here on Earth. Their religions might go on about the perfect conditions compared to those scorchingly hot ones closer to the Sun.

Hell, penguins don’t even like the tropics on the same planet.

I don't think there is enough heat energy on Uranus to facilitate the kind of brain that facilitates human-level thinking and behaving. Earth has vigorous blooms of life around our deepsea volcanic vents, but those life forms are not going to reach any where near our level of evolution. Its environment is too limited.

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