What is dark energy?

The so-called mystery of Dark Energy

Currently fashionable presentations of Dark Energy routinely begin with questions such as "how can we solve the mystery of Dark Energy?" One is seldom told why or how is Dark Energy a mystery, and is never really told what Dark Energy is.

There are very good reasons for this. The long and short of it is that Dark Energy - as conceived by our modern physicists - is a fanciful notion that would bring a Mona Lisa smile even to Einstein's lips. There is no proof that it exists, but it must exist, solely because it is universally agreed that: 1) the universe had a beginning; 2) the universe is expanding; 3) the known mass-energy of the universe cannot account for the supposed rate of expansion. Add to this that, somehow, by more recent so-called computations, this rate of expansion is accelerating, and one obtains all the ingredients for a modern scientific religion - a metaphysics of physics. Note that all of these requirements were Einstein's legacy (for all that he would have smiled!); but please remark further that, despite thousands of papers published on the subject, there is literally no experimental evidence for any of them. Hence, it is all a matter of credo quia absurdum est.

Indeed, the idea that the universe had a beginning is nothing more than an interpretation, and at that, one that is not legitimized by the First Law of Conservation of Energy. That the universe is expanding is not the result of any direct observation, but of yet another interpretation - of Redshifts and Blueshifts. And that the total measurement of mass-energy would have to account for the constraints of an interpretive model, is simply a self-validating requirement for which there can be no independent experimental proof. As for the acceleration of that expansion - well, it's all in the eyes of the beholders. All of this should have put Einstein's legacy into question. But it didn't. Instead, it produced yet another false problem: if there is not enough Matter in the universe, not enough Dark Matter, then there must be some Dark Energy.

The twists and turns of the argument are remarkable. And they indicate just how obstinate, desperate orthodoxies are - in their refusal to alter the parameters of a field of inquiry or investigation - and the extent to which they're willing to go on co-opting, patching, mending with sheer spit, models that have obviously outlived their usefulness.

Ask yourself - what would it mean to Albert Einstein to hear Dark Energy spoken of as distinct from Dark Matter or Dark Mass?? And why make the distinction when, by Dark Energy, physicists mean the most massive particle that supposedly exists? Albert undoubtedly would have exclaimed: "it's nothing more than a marketing gimmick!" And he wouldn't have been far from the truth, even if for the wrong reasons. For, indeed, according to Einstein, all energy is mass, carries mass, affects mass - and energy and mass interconvert. Mass, says Albert, is an intrinsic property of all energy. These authors happen to think he was wrong, but that is what Albert said. The mass-property of all energy was even supposed to apply to kinetic energy! - which is how DeBroglie got his Matter Waves going with a relativistic solution. There could never be Dark Energy without mass. And there could never be mass less energy. Not, at least, according to Albert. Anyway, this is a minor detail, since the Dark Energy that our particle physicists talk about is only 'massless' for laughs - it was 'massless' in a distant past, but is super massive today.

In truth, the import of uncertainty has been so abused in physics, by physicists, that they literally do not know what Dark Energy is. That is to say, they are not just uncertain about it, they are totally uncertain, ie completely confused. It's hardly surprising, then, that when they speak, they are inclined to say precisely nothing. Here, for example, is Rocky Kolb, of Fermilab, U. of Chicago:

We do not know, but it is known that exists because it HAS a property, at least but not last.

An example of how tenure precedes essence. And it does not really matter for the fate of the universe what is. The irrelevance of "to be". Just want to know what has, of its own, qualities that are essential, but not if essence itself, that is sufficient to note their properties and to answer this very human question that is lost in the mists of time to predict the future holds for us our Universe.

Even if dark energy does not exist (in essence) as some theories postulate, the observed effects would continue demanding (in possession). Whereby gravity must have some properties that we have not identified to date, as also theorized to explain the observed phenomena of universal accelerated expansion.

In short, to have or not have, that is the question for existence.