Scientists have found that the expanding universe is speeding up at its outer edges, rather than slowing down as would be expected from a cosmos moving outward and away foom the source of the Big Bang. At first, astronomers and physicists attributed this strange phenomenon to the influence of Dark Matter. But since Dark Matter is an unknown quantity, cosmologists find themselves turning to quantum physicists, whose research with particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider are trying to find evidence for Dark Matter at the sub-atomic level. When publicity over the LHC was heating up in 2007, some scientists announced alternate explanations for the accelerating edge of reality. According to this report from the Telegraph and this article at the New Scientist, one team suggested that time is slowing down and will eventually run out, stopping the entire universe in a single, freeze-frame final moment (Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain). Another scientist (Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles) has suggested that there are two or more dimensions of time. For an explanation of Two-Time Physics, a theory which has been developing since 1995, go here. Bars's work is another attempt to explain the Theory of Everything.
Science is, amongst other things, constantly revising itself. There are a number of reasons for this, of course, but the most important thing is this: scientists cannot answer the questions of the universe. No matter how hard they try.
ReplyDeleteThat's a really good point; though I think they look at their vocation as a calling related to eternal refinement, rather than one of eternal futility!
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