Janna Levin: belief

Transcript context

…So figuring out what dark energy is might land some clues. Yeah, actually it might. It’s positive energy and a negative pressure, which is kind of like a rubber band sort of quality because we think of pressure is pushing things outward and dark energy has a very strange sort of quality that as things move outward, you feel more energy as opposed to less energy. The energy doesn’t get lower, it gets more, so it doesn’t have. Energy doesn’t get lower, it gets more. So it doesn’t have the right features for the wormhole. But those are some pretty surprising features. And we again, can conjecture like, “Oh hey, the quantum energy of the vacuum kind of behaves that way. That would be a great resolution to the dark energy problem. It’s just the energy of empty space, and it’s the quantum energy of empty space.” That’s an excellent answer. The problem is, is by all our methods and all the understanding we have, that energy’s either really, really huge, huge, way bigger than what we see today, or it’s like zero. So that’s a numbers problem. We can’t naturally fine-tune the energy of empty space to give us this really weird value so that we just happen to be seeing it today. But again, we can think of a kind of dark energy that exists. So the question becomes, why is it such a weird value? Not how is this conceivable because we can conceive of it. But if it’s a weird value, that means there is a phenomenon we don’t understand.…

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