I Might Have Discovered the Mechanism of Dark Energy— and It’s Actually a Bit of an Anticlimax

I’ve been attempting to convert the sneaky Quantum Gravity manuscript into an actual (non-sneaky) manuscript on Quantum Gravity for a few days now. It has been a long slog. Partly because I’m feeling lazy in the evenings after long days doing actual lab work, but partly because I’m not an expert in the current theory of gravity. One might (perhaps rightfully) ask how could I have anything to contribute to gravity, if I don’t understand the current relativistic model of gravity, besides a very superficial understanding? Well, the answer is that to some extent nobody knows where gravity comes from. Well not fundamentally, that is. Physicist are very good at converting a bunch of “I don’t know, but I have experimental data” into marvelous equations, without really bothering to ask about fundamental questions, such as “what is the curvature of space-time in the most concrete sense?”.

Well, my paper is precisely trying to answer the above question. And to do this, I’ve been reading Wikipedia pages of the current understanding of gravity and then asking ChatGPT to explain some of the hard bits with easier language and asking it links to recent publications on the topic.  At first, I realized I’d need to learn about stress-energy tensors. This in turn got me a bit frustrated, because the Wikipedia page didn’t really explain to what sort of objects these could be applied to. Because of this, I asked ChatGPT:

“Can a single molecule have a stress-energy tensor?”

The answer I got just led me nowhere, because the answers were somehow “off” at this scale. That is, the language which is probably fine and reasonable for solid objects surrounded by nothing (or at least nothing much) just didn’t seemed to work when thinking about gravity in a sea of quantum particles in direct contact with each other.

This led me to ask:

“What are the smallest length scales where gravity has been quantitatively been observed? I.e. Are there lab studies of two objects imparting gravitational pull where the objects are too small to be seen by naked eye?”

Wikipedia did seem to find papers studying gravitational effects on objects down to a scale of 10 μm. But these would still need to be solid for the experiments to be doable, just for practical reasons, because gases and liquids aren’t objects. At least not in any conventional sense.

Then, thinking of the idea of attractive interaction of solid 10 μm object, a question popped into my head, which I asked ChatGPT:

“Is gravity always considered an attractive interaction?”

The first bit of the answer was very boring. In short, the answer was “Yes, for conventional matter”. But after the first bit, there was a bombshell:

“When it’s not attractive

General relativity allows situations where gravity is effectively repulsive:

• Dark energy / cosmological constant

  
  

  A positive Cosmological constant causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate. This acts like a repulsive gravitational effect on large scales.”

Dark energy acts as a repulsive gravitational effect on the large scale! The phenomenon that I had been observing with my aqueous dispersions of lignin spheres was a repulsive gravitational effect. I was observing something very similar to dark energy (or possibly exactly the same) in my experiments. And the theory that I had come up with was the first explanation for such a phenomenon. I had found the first logical mechanism for the repulsive curvature of space-time!

The funny thing is that I had not found anything new to me during my discussion with ChatGPT, but realized that what I had found was exactly what has been boggling the minds of top physicists at least since 1998 when the term dark energy was coined.

Looking back at my posts, I only now realize that I had made the connection already six months ago, but back then I hadn’t fully realized that dark energy is just something needed to explain repulsive gravity found in experimental data. There isn’t any need for the energy to do anything else than to repel. And this is exactly what my theory provides: repulsion.

Now I know, I need to rewrite my manuscript around dark energy interactions. Or at least somehow acknowledging the connection of the found repulsive gravity and the repulsive gravity observed on the astronomical scale. It won’t be easy, because I don’t speak the same language as astrophysicists.

Now you might ask: “why do you call dark energy an anticlimax?” Well, because I somehow thought it would be something more exotic. But it’s just the phenomenon that I found a rough solution years ago and a mathematically sensible solution about half a year ago.  You might also ask: “didn’t you find the solution to dark energy already six months ago, already?” The answer is, almost but not exactly. You see, six months ago I didn’t really understand what dark energy was supposed to be doing. Or, I should have, but I somehow didn’t. I did vaguely know about the expansion of the universe and that dark energy was somehow related to it, but it was all fluff to me.

So, does dark energy really curve space-time in a repulsive manner? Perhaps the answer is that dark energy is a misleading term for a much broader concept. It seems feasible that even if microwaves indeed entangle into toruses that repulse any objects moving through them, the same repulsive interaction in liquids is the entangled curving of moving molecules into their own toruses.

Inspired by this, I’ll give you an illustration of a sea of donuts:

Because you can’t have a post with no illustration. Granted, the picture isn’t very related to the post, but at least you’ll remember this post better with it.