In an article called Cosmic Reality Check Wired poses some really interesting questions about the paradigm change caused by the discovery that the universe is full of dark energy and dark matter, and all the space-time we thought we were so proud of is largely not the case in fact. I recommend it. Some of the salient questions:


"This mysterious stuff pushes the universe apart. It forces the cosmos to expand. This is not the steady state model of Einstein's heyday, when the universe was static and conservative. It's not even the jazzy big bang model, where everything blew up way back in the beginning. We denizens of the 21st century live in a steady bang. The bang never went away - in fact, our natural habitat is bang. Three-quarters of the universe is dedicated to pushing itself open. It's a gigantic heaving that has worked from the first primal instants and always will. It's the very nature of space to expand.



Human societies are always reshaped by their concepts of the basic nature of the universe. Copernicus damaged the infallibility of the church; Newton laid the foundation for the Enlightenment; Einstein spurred moral relativism. What will we make of our new knowledge? Are there political implications to the idea that most of the universe is untouchable, endlessly expanding, scarcely knowable? Will we finally get over our obsession with static utopias, sudden armageddons, limits, and closure? Is there philosophical comfort to be found in a silent, never-ending steady bang?"


Regards,


A