dark energy
It was my dad’s birthday yesterday and during dinner last night at Bardelli’s (if you haven’t been and you are into pizza, GO!) the inevitable discussion about time and how it seems to be passing at a more rapid rate each year, came up.
I’m one of those lucky people who has a dad that knows everything – and if he doesn’t know, he’ll find out. He reads everything from National Geographic to Scientific American, knows about supernovas and why, even though the earth is spinning at almost 100kmp/h through space, there is no resultant wind on the earth’s surface. Ask Joe, he now knows why too 
According to my dad, one of the theories on why time seems to be moving faster (apart from the one that says time is like a toilet roll: the closer you get to the end the faster it goes), is because of dark energy.
Wikipedia describes dark energy as:
“In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to increase the rate of expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the most popular way to explain recent observations that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for 74% of the total mass-energy of the universe.”
Imagine that, 74% of the universe is potentially made of a hypothetical (i.e. as yet unproven) form of energy that we can neither see nor feel yet we experience it daily when we realise that 9am turned into 4pm and Monday merged into Friday before you could say: “What’s the time?”.
I’m getting that planet feeling again…
Tags: dark energy, joe, space, wikipedia
