Some of you may remember in November 2015 I attended an event at London's Tate Modern for a series of walks, talks and workshops staged as part of the International Year of Light. I blogged about this in 2 parts covering the whole day in summary. If that kind of thing ever turns up again, I will tweet the living daylights out of it because the whole day was very engaging and enlightening and unmissable.
Last night's programme gave a little more glimpse into the weird world of dark matter and dark energy, but as ever it was not enough for me. To begin with let's take a look at the model and how our universe is perceived both seen and (arguably) unseen.
Watch this before reading any further, its a bit quirky but this is the Universe for 'dum dums' like me and you in 4 minutes
Now what this video doesn't do is give an insight into how light actually works, so I'm going to refer you back to my Light and Dark Matters blog part 2 here to get the ball rolling.
And then...have a little read of this, it's a few pages long but worth reacquainting yourself with the subject of light...don't forget to come back here 😜
The actual scale of our Universe is hard for us to get our heads around because well, some of us have trouble with getting around our own county let alone something billions of light years across. Were we ever mean't to travel at the speed of light if we could because, actually, we are made of light too. We are made of the very stuff of stars. Our bodies reflect and absorb light. How many times have you sat in the sunshine feeling it's warmth for a few minutes after a cold, long winter and thinking "Yeah, I can accomplish anything now!". That's because physically your body is absorbing Vitamin D which you can't get from eating certain foods alone. Just 10 minutes in the sun is enough to boost energy levels for healthy bone structure, boost brain activity and reduce inflammation. Ever felt run down, tired or constantly battling a cold? Not enough sunshine my friends!
The Universe scale is so large that we may never actually know how far the whole thing goes, at the end of this video below is a depiction of other possible universes, but does it end there? Is that the 'brick wall' of Universes and nothing else?
In the Sky at Night programme they talked about dark matter and energy pushing and pulling at the fabric of the universe. I imagine a network of substance rather like a carbon nanotube. We're informed that gravity has a great part to play with dark matter and in fact I asked the question on Twitter following the programme, given Maggie's analogy with the turntable and marble spinning off it, if matter can escape the gravity and in turn our Milky Way and yes, given enough energy it could but what part does dark matter or energy have in holding all the threads (galaxies, hot spots, stars) together and therefore stopping matter spinning out? Also, galaxies are known to collide, what is going on with dark matter then, does it 'throw a sickie' and crawl away when this process happens?!
Further we were informed that the Universe's expansion is speeding up, this has been mooted for some time, now we are being told that dark energy has something to do with it until we end up coming to what the Sky at Night so wonderfully termed "The Big Crunch" as opposed to "The Big Bang". Supposedly 70% of the Universe's energy is this stuff and we can't actually see it? Maybe that's why we're unlikely to ever travel to the Proxima Centauri, unless we can project ourselves to it somehow without encountering the speed of light or any of this dark stuff we can't see.
Given that we are ourselves made of light, every fibre of our being comes from light, even our thoughts are made of light matter charged particles giving off energy. By increasing our knowledge of the cosmos, improving our brains, advancing our technologies are WE actually accelerating the expansion process? Is this actually a battle between dark matter and light matter this pulling and pushing process? Rather than dark energy and dark matter winning this battle, is light matter winning it? Which is the strongest substance? Further, if we end up not alone in this Universe and there are others also increasing their knowledge, evolution etc, then could this be the reason behind the acceleration too? Like a critical mass of light energy hammering away at all the dark energy screaming
I said I had more questions than answers!
I also said I'd push a few buttons...feel free to discuss and bounce theories and ideas around, but don't go overboard with the technical terms, because as Albert Einstein once said "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it enough"
"Set me free, allow me to soar
Stretch out my wings like I have never done before..."
credit: Francisco Guzman
I said I had more questions than answers!
I also said I'd push a few buttons...feel free to discuss and bounce theories and ideas around, but don't go overboard with the technical terms, because as Albert Einstein once said "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it enough"
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