
scienceJan 26, 20262:03:50pending
Subir Sarkar: Why Dark Energy Is a Local Illusion
About this episode
Hot off the press, Professor Subir Sarkar makes the case that dark energy doesn’t exist (and he’s not being provocative for its own sake). He’s the former head of Oxford’s particle theory group, serves on the Particle Data Group. Sarkar's group has found that the cosmic acceleration supposedly driving the universe's expansion is directional—not uniform as required by a cosmological constant—appearing only in the direction we're moving through space. He claims the 2011 Nobel Prize-winning discovery rests on a century-old assumption of cosmic isotropy that his data now falsifies at over 5 sigma. "We need to go back to square one."
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