Dark energy is the real deal (or not?)

A team of physicists announced last week, after a two-year study, that they’re 99.996 percent sure dark energy is real. So what is it that they’re so sure about?

At the turn of the last century, most astronomers believed the universe was neither expanding nor contracting. They thought it had always existed in its present state and size. This thinking changed when the Christian priest Georges Lemaitre proposed an expanding universe. His proposal led to the Big Bang theory and the understanding that the universe had a beginning. But in the 1990’s, when researchers tried to determine the rate of that expansion, they made a shocking discovery: it wasn’t just expanding, it was accelerating. Nobody expected that! Those physicists won the Nobel Prize in 2011, but they never explained what was causing the acceleration. Since nobody knows, everybody’s simply calling it dark energy.  I’ve tried to help with this fictional account of dark energy and the fall. It’s real; we just don’t know what it is that’s real. 

So now dark energy is definitely exists (at least 99.996 percent definite), and it makes up about three-quarters of everything that exists. Now there’s also this substance called dark matter that makes up the remaining quarter. Although they are often confused, dark matter is entirely different from dark energy. The only thing they have in common is that physicists don’t know much about dark matter either. 

If you add up dark energy and dark matter, it’s most of the universe. The other stuff, called matter, makes up only about 3 percent of everything. That’s you and me, our cars, our houses, the earth, the stars, and everything else that we can see, feel, or touch. We’re that 3 percent t portion.  If dark energy’s the real deal, then we know next to nothing about most of everything that’s real. Isn’t it comforting to know science has your back? 

I’m deeply appreciative for everything science and technology have done.  The wonders are awesomely amazing.  But if I put this in terms of today’s football society, I think team science is grossly overrated.  On the other side, team religion is incredibly underrated. When everything science has discovered is put on the grand scale, it’s still almost nothing. Put that next to God, to whom even the universe is tiny, and the comparison is striking.