The Speculist

Stranger Than We Thought

Bruce Sterling offers a pithy yet mind-blowing assessment of what the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe has revealed about the nature of the universe.

Already, the probe's findings have provided a few salient new notions about the nature of cosmic reality. For starters, the universe is 13.7 billion years old. Unlike previous figures, this is not a rough estimate; the margin of error is about 1 percent. In addition, the universe is flat. Forget all that mind-boggling space-time-is-curved stuff. Euclid was right all along. And the space-time pancake will expand infinitely. There's no such thing as an end to this particular universe.

Now here's the really wacky part: Everything we're made of or can measure - from atoms to energy - is only 4 percent of the whole shebang. The rest is dark matter (about 23 percent) and, best of all, dark energy (73 percent).

So what is this dark energy, anyway?

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.

Whoah. What could be cooler than that? How about trying to tame it?

There's one more thing to consider: What will it take to get our atom-smashing mitts on some dark energy? This stuff is the fountainhead of the universe. It makes Iraqi oil look like a dust mote. The 21st century offers us a new quest. Dark energy is irresistible.

Read the whole thing. Interesting days lie ahead.