A New Hypothesis Unifies Dark Matter and Dark Energy

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Scientists at the University of Oxford may have solved one of the biggest questions in modern physics, with a new paper unifying dark matter and dark energy into a single phenomenon: a fluid which possesses 'negative mass." If you were to push a negative mass, it would accelerate towards you. This astonishing new theory may also prove right a prediction that Einstein made 100 years ago.

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The existence of negative matter had previously been ruled out as it was thought this material would become less dense as the Universe expands, which runs contrary to our observations that show dark energy does not thin out over time. However, Dr. Farnes' research applies a 'creation tensor," which allows for negative masses to be continuously created. It demonstrates that when more and more negative masses are continually bursting into existence, this negative mass fluid does not dilute during the expansion of the cosmos. In fact, the fluid appears to be identical to dark energy.

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Dr. Farnes says: "Previous approaches to combining dark energy and dark matter have attempted to modify Einstein's theory of general relativity, which has turned out to be incredibly challenging. This new approach takes two old ideas that are known to be compatible with Einstein's theory—negative masses and matter creation—and combines them together.

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Dr. Farnes adds: "There are still many theoretical issues and computational simulations to work through, and LambdaCDM has a nearly 30 year head start, but I'm looking forward to seeing whether this new extended version of LambdaCDM can accurately match other observational evidence of our cosmology. If real, it would suggest that the missing 95% of the cosmos had an aesthetic solution: we had forgotten to include a simple minus sign."

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Links and Information please.

I was thinking along those lines when I saw the headline and started reading the first paragraph.

It reminded me of several posters we've had here at Evc. I seem to remember a guy claiming that all the features of our Universe are the results of "Electrical Fields". And there was another one who insisted that the "Earth is the Center of the Universe."

In this case, the author does not seem fanatical about his idea and "the Dark Matter/Dark Energy Question" really is one or two of the biggest questions in big physics today.

Farnes suggests we should figure out what the evidence would look like if dark matter and dark energy have a similar relationship to each other as matter and energy, E=MC^2.

Have we asked all the necessary questions in big physics or are there a bunch of questions about features of the Universe we have not even noticed yet that must be answered first?

(this could be pain meds talking)

I thought it seems fairly scientific.
I thought Tangle's comment was more of a joke.

But, who knows, I certainly don't know enough to verify that this isn't a crank.
The "we just forgot a minus sign" seems a bit misleading, though.

Science doesn't forget a minus sign for 15 years.

Oh sure, I know.

Yep, and at first I kind of mind skipped past that minus sign part and got swept off by the thought of merging dark matter and energy into the same field.

This happened (the in my mind part) because I am just reading a book, and the chapter I am on is talking about how and why matter and energy, electrical and magnetic fields, and space and time were merged by a few brilliant hypothesis that have since been tested repeatedly.

Of course you are right. I will be interested to see if we hear more from Farnes.

I am really hoping to live long enough to see some interesting observations and evidence reports and new sets of questions about the big physics questions.

The James Webb Space Telescope is due for launch March 30, 2021. I want to see at least 10 years worth of images from it.

Based on his explanation of his idea here, I think what he means is just that he thinks dark matter and energy can be explained by matter with negative mass - not that scientists accidentally dropped a negative sign in some equation and no one noticed.