Everything in the universe is slowly moving farther away from everything else. We are pinned down to the surface of the earth as a mechanical function of this acceleration. We must either unmask this coincidence – or radically rethink how physics can progress from here.Galileo Galilei was among the first who experimentally realized that all falling bodies accelerate at the same rate. There are two ways of thinking about mass. The only possible conclusion he could draw was that the entire universe was expanding.Hubble believed that the expansion of the universe was constant, meaning galaxies twice as far away should be moving about twice as fast. Some examples are Another type of model, the backreaction conjecture,A final possibility is that dark energy is an illusion caused by some bias in measurements.

Using the telescope to peer at some of the furthest galaxies in the universe, astronomers discovered that not only is the universe expanding, it's accelerating.We still don't know why or how the universe is accelerating, but the leading theory is that there's some kind of energy—scientists call it 'dark energy'—pushing everything apart. In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is an unknown form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales.

The author encourages repeats of the experiments. Why does gravity behave exactly, on all physical levels, as if the earth were accelerating upwards? This is an apparent production error, reusing a closeup of the first version of the experiment with air resistance. Any body that is being pulled or pushed through space should be subject to the laws of inertia. A universe closed by ordinary matter (i.e., Omega_M = 1) is formally ruled out at the 7 sigma to 8 sigma confidence level for the two different fitting methods.

This commenting section is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page. With only a few exceptions, like nearby Andromeda, every other spot in the universe was drifting away.Hubble made this observation by studying the Doppler effect. Some have criticized this concept on philosophical grounds as "spooky action at a distance," in which an object can be moved, changed, or otherwise affected without being physically touched (as in mechanical contact) by another object.

Under the space-bending schema of General Relativity the arc of a basketball makes a "straight line path" to its destination. At 4:15, when replaying the short final release closeup in the vacuum, the barbs are seen to move wildly when released. An upwardly accelerating earth is the most natural conclusion, the best explanation, and is dutifully supported by experimental evidence of the highest caliber. Galileo and Newton grappled with it, and ended up just accepting it, rather than understanding it.

Sometimes this experiment is called a "proof of General Relativity," but it is a test of the Equivalence Principle which exists within General Relativity.


Therefore the proposal of dark energy.Even the most obstinately ignorant cannot avoid learning when in an environment that educates.Are you a naked scientist or a romantic scientist; if not a troll?I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception - Groucho Marx - Well I read some text and understood the origin of evidence. The Equivalence Principle, with the same experimental results, would need to exist in any alternative theory of gravity, such as the theory of the Graviton messenger particles as proposed by Quantum Mechanics. Measurement of the expansion rate is a critical part of the study, and it has been found that the expansion rate is very nearly "flat". See: Aside from bizarre experiments and massive coincidence, one may reason that the earth is accelerating upwards simply because that is what we observe it to be doing. Einstein went one better: he declared it a principle of nature. There are numerous pieces of evidence that the earth is accelerating upwards. The cornerstone of the Equivalence Principle maintains that gravity and all physical effects operate exactly as if the earth were accelerating upwards. Gravity is often described as an attraction between masses.

In The 1959 Pound-Rebka experiment at Harvard was one of the first high-precision, relativistic tests of the equivalence principle to be carried out under controlled conditionsThe Pound-Rebka-Snyder experiments are the same 1959 experiment, conducted with an additional researcher, which has been Summarily, light will be redshifted or blueshifted when traveling upwards or downwards because "gravity" operates exactly as if the earth were accelerating upwards.

For example, if we are located in an emptier-than-average region of space, the observed cosmic expansion rate could be mistaken for a variation in time, or acceleration.As the universe expands, the density of radiation and ordinary In models where dark energy is the cosmological constant, the universe will expand exponentially with time in the far future, coming closer and closer to a A constantly expanding universe with a non-zero cosmological constant has mass density decreasing over time.