[dark energy] and the complexity of space

In 2001, Ray Villard, of spacedotcom, wrote of:

A strange repulsive force of "dark energy" pervad[ing] every nook and cranny of the universe, push[ing] against the master force of gravity.While gravity gently binds planets, stars and galaxies together, dark energy tugs on the fabric of time and space, pushing galaxies apart ever faster and faster into the farthest reaches of the universe.

The Hubble Deep Field image containing the farthest supernova suggested that that a decelerating universe holds galaxies relatively close together and objects in them would have appeared brighter because they would be closer.

The comment I liked the most about this was:

"This starts to look incredibly ugly and complicated," says Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "I even wonder if we are we asking right questions."

Or this one:

"Dark energy is something we have no clue as to what is causing it, and it doesn't fit into current physics theories, and they have to develop new approaches to explain it," said Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "That's exciting. It's rare that we get to do this."

Yep, when you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, you can wax lyrical, like Morris Aizenman, a senior science associate with the National Science Foundation, who was so moved by the finding that he likened it to a Keats poem about Cortez' first sighting of the Pacific Ocean.

So is the universe accelerating or decelerating? Who knows? Supernovae observations published in 1998 suggested space is expanding faster today than long ago. And is the universe three-dimensional or is it flat? The simple answer is that scientists don’t know.

It’s not scientists who appear to be the arrogant ones. It is mankind who places science on a pedestal and wilfully misunderstands what it is about. Science is seeking answers, it is not G-d.

So in the knowledge that we don’t really know anything, except on the plane we currently perceive from, who would be so arrogantly blinkered as to suggest that there might just be a great cosmic force we can refer to under the moniker “G-d”?

Who knows, there might be such a power after all.