DARK ENERGY

When I began this project, I set out to find a more specific definition of dark energy. I knew how it was discovered and its effect, but not its cause or its specific behavior. I had gained an interest in this area through a cosmology class I took over the summer, and I knew I wanted to write my capstone on something cosmology-related, so I read Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps. This book taught me a lot about Einstein’s theory of relativity, but I realized at the beginning of the year that I wanted to explore dark energy in more depth. I think that I’m drawn to dark energy because it’s quite literally the biggest thing in the universe, and will only get bigger in the future. It’s the impetus for the change in large-scale structure of the universe, and understanding it allows one to predict the future of our universe.

As I began my research, I found that Thorne’s book wasn’t a great source for learning about dark energy, so I turned to the internet to find deeper explanations of the theories I was familiar with along with some new ones. The theory of quintessence was pretty new to me, and a major sticking point for this project. I made some progress by repeatedly throwing myself at a paper by Adrian Vollmer of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Heidelberg. With a concerted effort I finally managed to gain a better understanding of quintessence, and with it a much more solid hold on the possibilities of dark energy. That being said, I can state my thesis with much more confidence now. All things taken into consideration, dark energy is probably a cosmological constant--an intrinsic property of space in our universe. The biggest question I still have is how researchers can experimentally verify existing theories; in the field of theoretical physics in general, not just cosmology, verification seems like a difficult process.

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Cosmology, to me, is an underappreciated field of study because it’s difficult to see how it directly impacts us in our day-to-day lives. In fact, it might not at all. The way I see it, however, understanding our universe better should be an ultimate goal for humanity. Many unforeseen benefits have come from scientific research, like nuclear power, LEDs, firefighting equipment--the list goes on. In this case, finding a way to harvest dark energy could provide us with infinite renewable energy. In an even more nuanced way, this particular research and its utterly vast and complex implications could have any number of benefits that we simply aren’t yet able to understand. Moving forward, I’m interested in looking into the research process in this field. As for the casual reader, there’s something to be said for gaining an understanding of the universe. Take from this what you will, but you should now have a better idea of where the entire universe is headed and why.