Materialism and the Darks

This month's Scientific American magazine reminds us that this is the 10th anniversary of Saul Permutter's discovery that the universe expansion is accellerating, not slowing. Perlmutter used the radiation of supernovae to measure the rate of expansion. Apparently supernovae all have something in common: a single stable frequency of radiation. So when a very distant supernova is found, the Doppler change in its frequency of radiation tells how fast it is moving away. Using this technique, Perlmutter determined that the universal expansion is becoming more rapid, rather than slowing.

The increasing expansion has led to some interesting twists on reality as we know it, and as we don't know it. For example, what would cause the rate of expansion to increase? Gravity between bodies would cause it to slow down. So there must be an "anti-gravity dark energy" which is currently unknown to us.

It is currently estimated that the universe is composed of 72% anti-gravity dark energy, 23% dark matter (unseen, uncharacterized, but susceptible to gravity), and 5% normal matter (protons, neutrons, electrons). In other words, we have a physical reality of only 5% of the universe.

Christopher Stubbs of Harvard University says, "It could well be that there's some big piece of reality that we don't understand".

It is easy to show that logically, the belief that material reality is all that exists, is self-refuting. As science marches on, it shows similar conclusions. In the case of the "darks", science will be able to measure them by their effects, if not their actualities. This is the same with gravity, for example, which is known to exist only by its effect. But with the "darks", the effects contradict our normal experience of reality, at least the "material" reality that we all experience every day.

Scientifically, the belief in philosophical materialism began to unravel with the realization that in the quantum world existence of material things change merely by the interference of being observed. In fact, the wave/particles seem to have advance "knowledge" of the presence of an observer. The connection between a mind and a particle goes against material-only reality.

Now with "unseeable mass" and "anti-gravity energy", we again see the disconnect within the materialist philosophy. In fact the ability of two competing energies to exist within the same realm suggests a differential nonlinearity, where one energy declines less rapidly with distance than the other. For example, why would galaxies be formed by gravitational attraction, yet be pushed away from other galaxies? Such a finding would explode our current understanding of geometric distribution of energy, at least for 72% of the real universe. And can dark matter exist on top of, or within the same space as our regular matter?

It might be easier at this juncture to assume that our "material reality" is just a small backwash eddy in the overall reality of our universe.

And the final questions: Can life exist (in any form) in the dark regions? And if so, can they see us? If they can, could they interfere with our reality? After all, the "darks" are 95% of the universe - we are outnumbered.

Or maybe it works like this: our universe is like a single droplet of water placed into the geometric center of a pressure cooker, where it explodes into steam. The steam expands rapidly, at first away from the other vaporized atoms, but then accelerating toward the walls of the cooker due to gravitational attraction. After a while, and a lot of cooling, the water droplet condenses evenly on the entire interior of the cooker.

So I'm thinking that, just maybe, there's another reality still, just outside our dueling realities in our little universe. Or maybe it is just everywhere, barely on the other side of the quantum field that is called the fabric of our reality. But who can say for certain? Not philosophical materialists.