Dark Energy

The Quest for Dark Energy

Within any physical system we know, energy changes its nature in a way that an irreversible part of it is steadily increasing. Scientists call this proven effect the increase of entropy and it became one of the basic principles and natural laws of thermodynamics. Any state of order is slowly developing toward increasing disorder. However, this principle suddenly becomes completely lost if we introduce super symmetrical aspects into the universal picture.

A super symmetry construction of space-time segments shows further on an entropy increase in each enclosed segment, but the relative decrease of entropy of an opposing segment. This effect has a phenomenally strange influence on the entire space-time construction: The usual reduction of energy density, caused by an inflation of space, turns exactly into the opposite for the opposing segment. This space-time construction gets more exciting facets in case we allow four different space-time quadrants to interact this way in a rotational symmetry.

Just consider a very thin but long glass tube and look at it with one eye and the other eye closed, turning the tube around. Once the full length of this tube is visible you can turn it in a way that only one or the other end remains detectable. The length of the entire tube disappeared because it turned into the focus axis of your eye, seemingly hiding in one dimension of space.

Remembering now that time got during Einstein’s era equal rights as a length of three-dimensional space, we should be able to turn the length of the tube somehow into the direction of the time axis instead of rotating it just into another direction in space. Picking up relative speed has exactly such an effect. The acceleration of a vehicle turns its length more and more into its original axis of time progress. The remaining observers read shrinking dimensions of the vehicle, and sequential events on the clocks and time line of this vehicle are synchronously turned into a third glass tube dimension, describing relative time stagnation with relative energy storage. Specialists talk about a relativistic time dilation; all passengers of the vehicle age slower in comparison with inspectors in the starting point.

The basics of Einstein’s special theory of relativity are as simple as that, as soon as we accept time as an equal dimension of the four-dimensional space-time construction against our logical feelings. The validity has been proven in many experiments, using very precise atomic clocks. Einstein’s purely theoretical imaginations became an undisputed matter of fact. We could round off the new rotary construction of Einstein’s space-time with only one additional dimension of glass tube direction to capture the relative acceleration of events in comparison with our clocks. The results of this completion are as spectacular as revolutionary because they may not only open completely new insights into quantum physics, but plant a new tree of knowledge of who is the master and who the slave. All of a sudden, endless alternatives appear at any single moment of our time, with certain probabilities and in form of permanently superimposed flash pictures of nature; quantum physics reveals its origin just by the introduction of at least one additional dimension - the fifth dimension of extreme acceleration and perceiveable phenomena of quantum mechanics.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity describes energy densities as influences of masses and upon the straight four-dimensional grid of the three space dimensions (length, width, height) and time. Young Einstein consulted his fellow student Marcel Grossmann to elaborate the mathematics that could cope with his imaginations of forced curvatures of space and time caused by the presence of masses. This way, gravity lost its classical picture of being an attractive force and is today interpreted as the result of space-time distortions: Mass caused hollows in space-time force other masses to fall into this hollow. These hollows deflect light rays and they slow down the pace of time. It has been reliably confirmed that time on Earth’s surface runs slightly slower than time in deep space.

With the help of his colleague, Einstein succeeded in the mathematical formulation of his general theory of relativity. This joint work took place around 1912, using the tensor calculus of Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro. Being convinced of a stable universe, Einstein had to introduce an additional term in order to maintain its dimensions, because his initial formulas led to the theoretical expansion of space. He named the mathematical constant for the conservation of the entire space “cosmological constant”.

The expansion of our universe was noticed by astronomer Hubble long time ago in 1929, forcing Einstein to revise his equations about space, time and masses, i.e. to withdraw from the original idea of a conservative cosmological constant, joking that is was probably the biggest stupidity of his life to introduce it. Hubble’s discoveries raise the question, what actually made the renewed observations of an expanding universe so special for the Scandinavian Award Committee as to grant the 2011 Nobel Prize? But this time it was actually not just the discovery that something inflates the universe, but that it expands with an increasing speed. The scientists’ approach to evaluate this expansion was smart; the science teams observed special types of supernovae -explosions of aged stars that are as heavy as our sun, but with a size of Earth. They did a great job to discover more than 50 distant supernovae and then to register that their light intensity was surprisingly lower than expected (so called redshift), drawing thereof the conclusion that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. As a consequence, Einstein’s formulas have been revised the second time to cope with this new situation, re-introducing Einstein’s cosmological constant, but now with a matched value that corresponds to the progressing inflation and without any idea about the nature of this expansion force that dominates all other forces in the universe.

Two exciting, yet unsolved questions came up: What type of super force or super energy could be capable of pushing entire galaxies away from each other, revolting against the strong and far reaching gravitational forces of huge galactic mass clusters? What stabilizes these galaxies on top in a way that the outer stars move much faster in their stable orbits than Newton’s and Einstein’s formulas of classical physics stipulate?

About one hundred years ago, the assumption of a constant speed of light caused serious disputes about the nature of pure vacuum, because recognized scientists like physics Nobel Prize winner Hendrik Lorentz saw vacuum as a kind of medium. The ancient Greeks called this strange and all embedding substance “ether”. But if vacuum consists of ether, then speed of light cannot stay constant, because ether represents the roads with fixed dimensions in our example of city traffic. Therefore, several contemporary scientists dismissed Lorentz’s ideas of a vacuum as a strange type of energetic fluid and treated it only with differential geometry, purely as a mathematical grid that has an impact on the energy densities.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity starts to fail, in case we observe microcosmic processes - quantum physics takes over with probabilities that events actually happen and where they will happen. Time, location and energy cannot be precisely related to each other anymore. This odd phenomenon is called the uncertainty principle and became the most important starting base of quantum mechanics.

For many decades, many scientists around the world tried to solve this fundamental problem of physics that macrocosm and microcosm need two different approaches for satisfactory scientific descriptions. Might another revision of Einstein’s imaginations navigate science finally towards a feasible solution to combine quantum physics with Einstein’s space-time continuum? The answer seems to be yes because there is an apparent insufficiency in Einstein’s formulations that has not yet been used in the reflections about an accelerating expansion of the Universe, extensively: Einstein’s equating of length and time. If we assume two or more universes, but overlapping in the simple way that one spatial dimension coincides with Einstein’s time dimension of all others respectively, the result is astonishing. Flat and therefore completely invisible, overlapping 2-D-spaces appear around us, difficult to detect, since they show up with two spatial dimensions only.

We could assign some flat spaces around us to electromagnetism in case electromagnetic waves turn out to be flat – and they are flat as everybody can prove it simply with horizontally and vertically polarized 3-D-glasses for 3-D-movies or looking at the H- and V- polarizations for the LNBs of satellite dishes. The 3D-glasses use the flat 2-D-nature of these waves to filter light and to differentiate between information for the right eye and for the left eye. The LNB-receivers, installed above the satellite dishes, filter horizontally or vertically polarized electromagnetic TV-signals, separating this way TV channels on the same carrier frequency. These examples prove that flat spaces around us in fact exist, and that they become visible by electromagnetism, i.e. turbulences on coinciding space-time dimensions.

What would happen if the coincidence of Einstein’s time axis with one spatial dimension of these flat 2-D-spaces around us would get slowly lost because of rotational processes? The answer is simple: Space of an observer expands at the expense of remaining time reserves for the future. From this new point of view such flat spaces around us turn out to be one possible source of dark energy for the accelerating expansion of the universe: Serial space points on the time axis leap into simultaneous points in space. This is sort of a leakage from a potential future time span to space expansion towards a lower energy state, as the storage of events in time needs additional energy, just like battery charging.

Finally, we could rotate two overlapping flat space dimensions one step further against each other until they oppose each other’s time progress and space dimensions and another step further until they change the sides of touching each other. We can do this without conflict to any of Einstein’s descriptions only if we introduce a quantization scheme with length and time minima for the axis of rotation in order to avoid negative length and negative time development.

The reversal of energy hosting dimensions would produce a superimposed space-time-grid effect that contributes to the galactic and intergalactic gravity, with unnoticeable space-time distortions across very long distances, being a possible supplement to so-called Wimps (weakly interacting massive particles) that hold the number one candidate position for dark matter: Dark matter is currently assumed to mainly consist of electromagnetically neutral and super heavy particles, scattered across the universe, with an enormous impact on the gravity of galaxies and between those. The astonishing feature of these Wimps is that they are supposed to cause the dominating part of gravity in the universe, but they do not go lumpy despite this gravity.

During the last decades, astronomers and astrophysicists surprised us with the discovery of the huge coverage gap of more than 70 percent of the overall energy density balance in the universe. Physicists tend towards the opinion of the existence of a special energy field or vacuum energy with a constant value. This constant field energy is supposed to accelerate the cosmic expansion and to counteract the gravity of masses. This postulated dark energy increases with an expanding volume of the universe, in other words, the density of dark energy stays constant. Any known type of gas consists of atoms or molecules and behaves another way: Its energy density drops proportionally to the increasing volume. This important difference means that dark energy is expected to dominate our universe more and more. Astrophysicists and quantum physicists tried to elaborate a feasible model for this strange and inexplicable feature of dark energy. From the quantum physicist’s view, an empty space may be filled up with interwoven energy fields. These energy fields cannot be registered yet, or at all, but contribute to a basic energy of a vacuum.

Experimental values of a cosmological constant lie more than a hundred places (120 places, some quote 108 places) right of the decimal point of today’s interpretations of quantum physics, if unifying fundamental forces on an infinitesimal scale. Vacuum energies became an important part of theoretical physics, but their energy densities seem not to be subject to gravitation. The existence of dark energy is as mysterious as striking, because it dominates all other energies. The most peculiar feature of dark energy, if in fact describable by a peculiar type of vacuum energy density, is its antigravity that is in contradiction to any other known form of energy density.