Let’s leave the tawdry ambitions and vain-glorious antics of our politicians, and look at the bigger picture. In fact, let us look at the biggest possible picture – why is the Universe expanding at the rate we measure?
We are all taught that Universe started from a point, and that 13.799 ± 0.021 billion years ago this point exploded, or began to expand. This was the Big Bang – so named by British astronomer Fred Hoyle, who thought that an explosion was an undignified way for the Cosmos to begin, and during a BBC Radio broadcast in 1949 he dismissively referred to this explosive origin as a ‘Big Bang’. His dismissive term stuck in the memories of his audience. Albert Einstein always refused to believe in the Big Bang. The Church, by contrast, had at last found a scientific discovery with which they could be reconciled. Pope Pius XII, opening a scientific conference at the Vatican in 1951, declared that the Big Bang bore witness to that primordial fiat lux (Genesis 1:3) uttered by God.
Anyway… this primordial explosion accounts for the expanding Universe – it is all rushing away from a central point. The problem is that expansion should, by now be slowing. However, our measurements show that the rate of expansion is increasing. To rationalize this… difference between theory and experiment, cosmologists have postulated another form of matter – Dark Matter. This Dark Matter has never been observed (hence the name), but it is everywhere in the Universe.
And it is the ubiquity of Dark Matter, and its associated mass that is causing the Universe to continue to expand at a rate greater than we calculate from our present knowledge of the constituents of the Universe. The key, therefore to explaining the expanding Universe is to find some Dark Matter and to determine its mass. Two physicists from the University of Sussex, near Brighton, have just calculated limits for the mass of Dark Matter. They haven’t found any, but they have calculated what Dark Matter may be like, and where it could most likely be found.
“In this letter, we show that quantum gravity leads to lower and upper bounds on the masses of dark matter candidates. These bounds depend on the spins of the dark matter candidates and the nature of interactions in the dark matter sector. For example, for singlet scalar dark matter, we find a mass range, 0.001 eV < mass < 10,000 000 eV.”
The range of possible values is enormous, but that is how science advances. And the problem they are investigating is one of the really ‘big questions’ facing humanity.
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