Heretics Deny The Dark Matter of Faith

In the post "Rebel Science: The Dark Matter of Faith" the issue of faith was discussed in the context of the "dark matter" debate.

Evidently the rebellion is now growing, and the dark matter of faith may be losing out to the more tangible universe:

Dark energy is itself a hasty fix to an inconvenient truth discovered by astronomers in the late 1990s: that the universe is expanding, and the rate of this expansion seems to be constantly picking up speed.

To explain this startling finding, cosmologists invoked dark energy, a hypothetical form of energy that is pulling the universe apart in all directions (note that dark energy is wholly separate from the equally mysterious concept of dark matter - a hypothetical form of matter that populates the universe, interacting gravitationally with normal matter, but which cannot be seen with light). In this interpretation, the whole universe is blowing up like a balloon, and from any given point within it, all distant objects appear to be speeding away from you.

But not everyone is happy with the dark energy explanation.

"It just seems like an unnatural correction to the equations - it's like a fudge factor," Temple told SPACE.com. "The equations don't make quite as much physical sense when you put it in. You just put it in to fit the data."

Temple thinks the idea of an expanding wave makes more sense.

(Space). Rebel science sometimes becomes main stream science. Perhaps our little discussion about faith helped? To the extent that article indicates a scientific difference between dark matter and dark energy it is a canard. Gravity, the expander in the expansion hypothesis, is a function of mass.

Energy and mass are equivalent in the sense of e=mc², showing that if energy increases or decreases mass also increases or decreases, and vice versa. Which came first, mass or energy, is unanswerable in the dynamic of this equation because they co-exist.

A simple expansion of the universe formula is H² = 8/3 π G p.

Italian scientists claim to have discovered dark matter but other scientists in the United States are not buying it.

Note that "dark matter" is not the only area in science where faith may be an issue.

Both the article 13 Things That Don't Make Sense and the book written after the article explain 13 similar scenarios where scientists figuratively scratch their heads faithfully.

The controversy is still raging: WIMP Wars.