Dark Energy

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Randy helps Jim get a handle on dark energy. Why do we need it? Why do we want to believe in it now, but didn't earlier? How many different things could it be? What does it have to do with you? How close are we to knowing anything about it?

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Notes:

1. The papers we read for this program:

• Carroll, S., "Dark Energy and the Preposterous Universe." [arXiv]
• Turner, M., "Dark Energy and the New Cosmology." [arXiv]
• Zwicky, F., "On the Masses of Nebulae and Clusters of Nebulae." Astrophys. J.  86, 217 (1937) [web]
• Holsclaw, T., Alam, U., Sanso, B, Lee, H., Heitmann, K., Habib, S. and Higdon, D., "New Constraints on the Time-Variation of the Dark Energy Equation of State from Current Supernova Data." [web]

2.I'll review Oyvind Gron's book, Lecture Notes on the General Theory of Relativity soon. I've been meaning to for a couple of months now.

3. Previous Episodes Referenced:

• Virtual Gravitational Dipoles
• f(R) Theories of Gravity
• Requirements for Alternative Theories of Gravity

4. Read my review of Cosmic Update, a book about cosmology in the accelerating universe.

5.If you or Dragan Hejdukovic wants to supply us with the background energy that would be predicted from virtual gravitational dipoles, please leave us a nice comment with smilies.

6. Our subreddit.

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