If you're an avid Scientific American reader like me, you may have stumbled across the recent article (reprinted from Nature) about an experiment that actually had scientists bringing a bit of gas below absolute zero. At first glance, one might think this absolute rubbish--or as the article itself says--"It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery." The "cosmological mystery" this technique may or may not help solve is the question of "dark energy" and the exciting new idea (though nowhere near ready to be a real hypothesis yet) of the scientists in question is something like this, "Matter acts quite a bit differently than you would ever expect in negative-Kelvin temperatures, if matter somehow is under the same conditions, maybe it just acts differently than we expected and dark energy really just is normal energy under some incredibly unexpected conditions . . . ."
I liked that idea, and not just because it satisfies the part of me that wants to slash the imagination of science down to size with Occam's Razor, though it does do that. And not also because it puts a "face" on dark energy for me--makes it look like something more than a place-holding name for a phenomenon for which scientists have observed, but in reality haven't come remotely close to cracking. Granted the connection between negative-Kelvin gas and dark energy is probably just a clever connection in spe but not in re, but I like clever connections, so why don't we run with this clever connection for a moment or two?
When I read about Supersymmtery "failing" a few months ago, I was strangely pleased about it. It was a nice vindication of the fact that at its best science seeks the truth, and sometimes that means finding out that the thing you've been searching for probably doesn't exist. It's still possible that it's too soon to tell about Supersymmetry. But the evidence is mounting that's she's a goner or Supersymmetry is going to look quite different than most expected.
I have some affection for the unexpected, and perhaps the connection between both of these articles is the reality of science stumbling while breaking ground on new frontiers. I don't mean that at all pejoratively--if you don't stumble while breaking new ground . . . well, I don't have a metaphor for it--you're either God or you're stumbling. It's the most human enterprise, and stumbling (or "meandering" as one SciAm writer put it) toward truth is also the best human enterprise.
In this case, the "stumbling" is made all the more interesting because the stumbling seems to end in resting against the firm foundation of some firmly established ideas. In the case of the apparent failure of Supersymmetry, it comes on the heels of a most profound victory for the Standard Model. Supersymmetry may have failed, but the Standard Model has, simply, worked. It is not a grand unifying theory, but we're clearly getting quite a bit right here. No dark matter yet, no singular theory of the fundamental forces, but we can account for the minute in a very detailed fashion.
On the other hand, this new article on negative-Kelvin gas sparks some ideas--maybe (and it's such a maybe) dark energy really can be accounted for by the matter/energy in the universe that exists already. Maybe there's no such thing as dark energy--or that it is the far side of the moon, the Janus-face of matter we're just not used to seeing--and there isn't anything else out there to be looking for. Which doesn't mean there isn't anything left to discover, on the contrary, it means that we don't know what we do know quite so well as we thought. If--and it's a huge hypothetical if--dark energy is just normal energy in an extreme state . . . it would mean that the answer to the question has been here the whole time, we just have yet to be able to even imagine the right questions. It would be akin to another Einsteinian revolution: Newton (and co.) had a really great explanation for what we commonly observe in nature, but Einstein's crazy-complicated ideas that completely revolutionized our entire thinking about time, space, and light, was the right one. What Newton did was remarkable, but what Einstein did was absolutely revolutionary on the cultural and psychological level--he rewrote the book on everything we thought we knew and could experience with the most common of senses. For the scientific community, what we knew about the universe had already been problematized, and he found the solution in the place only genius thought to look. But for everyone, he revolutionized the way we think about space and time and even "relativity". For our purposes now, the reference is analogical: if dark energy is just energy, and not another "kind" of energy filled with exotic particles in far-flung corners of time and space, then we have no idea of what energy is capable. We already know the energy contained in just an atom is remarkable--perhaps we have only glimpsed the beginning of the potential of matter/energy to do incredible things and simply to be incredible.
In any case, I imagine we'll find out someday, and I imagine we'll do better than the current Wikipedia page on dark energy which makes me scowl a little because it sounds like science doing a "god-of-the-gaps" hypothesis as bad as the luminferous ether ever was. Perhaps I'm supposed to be hearing, "We have no idea how to account for the disparity needed for the expanding universe model (when the universe is flat), and we're calling the potential solution for this problem "dark energy"?" Being a Thomist and generally supportive of coherent metaphysical systems, I really don't like god-of-the-gaps hypotheses . . . but more on that in another article.
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