Saturday, December 27, 2008

A lot more All in the Is than we ever knew

This came from Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman [The Science Channel].

I had heard of Dark Matter and Dark Energy before but I hadn’t known all of this— It’s pretty astounding.

The latest episode concerning Dark Matter—the part where humans first became aware of it—begins with an ironic twist.
Back in the 1960’s there was an astronomer, Vera Rubin, who had 2 small children. This was a period when women were barely allowed to have careers at all and, if you had children, your career had better take a back seat. She could be certain that, if she undertook a study of something like Black Holes [the sexiest things astronomers were looking at at the time] for instance, her male colleagues would publish their findings before she could catch up. So she decided to study something no one else was interested in. Was she in for a shock or what?

Partly because no one else was looking and partly because she was fascinated by how galaxies work, she decided to investigate them. She looked at the closest one to us, Andromeda, first. She expected the stars orbiting the edges of the galaxy to act the way our planets do as they orbit our sun. The amount of sway gravity has over each planet determines its speed. The further away the planets are from Sol, the slower their orbits. Basic Newtonian physics.
But that’s not the way stars in a galaxy work—as she discovered when she trained her telescope on galaxy after galaxy after galaxy. The stars orbit at the same velocity no matter where, in the galaxy, they are. Surprise all round.

So, Rubin postulated, there must be more mass [and, therefore, more gravity] within galaxies than the atoms [the black holes and the star clusters] at the center of each one would suggest. Also, that gravity must be spread fairly evenly throughout the galaxy rather than being concentrated at the center.
She labeled this gravity-producing substance Dark Matter—since we can’t see it or detect it through any direct means. The only way we know it is there is by it’s influence on the matter we can detect.
Furthermore, approximately 90% of the matter in every galaxy she looked at seemed to be this Dark Matter. In other words, until that time, astronomers had been studying the tip of the iceberg that makes up our universe. Who knew?

Suddenly the field of study she had undertaken because no one else would be interested was chock full of other people either trying to prove her measurements and theories incorrect or scrambling to explain them. Out of the blue, Dark Matter was a hot topic.
She has received the Dickson Medal for Science, the National Medal of Science, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Bruce Medal and the James Craig Watson Medal. So much for tucking herself into a backwater niche in her field.

Carlos Frank, a cosmologist in England, followed up on her theory using Newtonian Law. He fed his computations into a super-computer and discovered something astonishing. When he fed all the calculations into a program that simulates the earliest universe as science understood it prior to Rubin’s work, the universe fails. A galaxy forms, the largest stars become super-novae and explode ripping the fabric of space apart. There simply isn’t enough gravity present to create the cohesive universe that we know. It certainly wouldn’t have survived long enough to allow life to evolve. It simply would not have.
So Frank began introducing Dark Matter into the infant universe he had created within the computer. First a little, then more, until he had added five times as much Dark Matter as the matter we can see. Finally, his universe created galaxies like the ones we find all around us. According to his calculations it would have taken about 10 billion years for the first stable galaxies to form and the basic spiral shape we’re all so familiar with would be the norm.
The universe includes 5 times as much Dark Matter as it does atoms.

Richard Massey in Edinburgh, Scotland, looked for Dark Matter using Gravitational Lensing. It builds on Einstein’s theory that gravity bends light. Massey postulated that Dark Matter, since it exhibits gravity, should bend light just as stars and galaxies do. So he set out to map dark matter using the bending of light waves to demonstrate its presence.
Lo and behold—wherever he found evidence of dark matter through the verification of bent light he found galaxies. Overlay a map of Light Matter [the kind we can see] and his map of Dark Matter clumps and you find galaxies on a one-to-one correlation.
Dark Matter is the skeleton of the universe.

Now, cosmologists and astronomers are grappling with a new problem:
The Big Bang is still rushing onward. Science had expected it to be slowing down but, instead, it is accelerating.
They’ve named this phenomenon Dark Energy and they’re using something they, so far, understand very little about—Dark Matter—to study Dark Energy, something they know virtually nothing about.
While the amount of Dark Matter in the universe seems to encompass about five times more matter than the matter we can directly detect, Dark Energy seems to be far greater in scope than either one. The latest calculations indicate that about 5% of the universe is visible to us, about 25% is Dark Matter and fully 70% is made up of Dark Energy.

Remember the post on the Genesis Story? Were these phenomena what the All that Is needed to include in order to create a universe that was not, by its nature, chaos? Or, just like the rest of its creation, are these forces conscious of themselves at some level? Are they, too, part of the dream the All that Is dreamed?

7 comments:

Matthew said...

I love reading about theoretical physics, even if I only have some 2nd year university physics courses.

Good to see you post again!

two crows said...

hey, Matthew--
I love learning about it too -- though I took no physics at all in school.

Stephen Hawking left me in the dust in the first few chapters. and I'm still wading through Laszlo's 'Science and the Akashic Field'. slowly.

the bite sized chunks on The Science Channel are better suited to me than any book out there.

and I do love the fact that Seth and Michael have anticipated almost everything I've learned about how the universe[s] work -- as far back as the 1960's Seth was alluding to things astronomers, astrophysicists and quantum physicists are discovering today.

I get all goose-bumply when they discover something I read about in 1975.

two crows said...

as to posting again -- I've run out of the stuff I know well from the Michael teachings. so I've been reading new stuff to see if anything will inspire me.

I've found an interesting take on karma I may put in here. it's not directly channeled information, though, so I'm taking it slowly.

I've thought about having a new reading to check it out.

Mary Ellen/Nunly said...

Hi two crows! Hey, is there a way that you can stop e-mails coming to me that show there is a comment on this site? I can't seem to find a way to do it. I'd appreciate it.

I hope all is well with you.

Take care,

Mary Ellen/Nunly

two crows said...

hey, Mary Ellen --
I guess the only way is to take you off as a co-conspirator on the blog. since you haven't posted in a long time, I would guess that'd be ok with you - so I'll go ahead and do it if I can figure out how.

if you don't want to be removed you know how to get to me through email, right?

Mary Ellen/Nunly said...

Thanks. I think if you take me off as co-writer that should do the trick. I'm way too busy to be writing on multiple blogs, can't even find time for my own.

Actually, I lost your e-mail address...must have happened when I changed computers.

Take care,

Nunly

two crows said...

Nunly--
done. it was just a slot that told the blog who to notify when comments came in. I erased your email address. let me know if that doesn't do it, k?