The Importance of Birefringence in Dark Energy

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

There is a claim out there that you can maybe see this birefringence in the known data that we have right now on the cosmic microwave background polarization. It's not yet to the level of statistical significance, so I'm being very, very cautious about it. The simplest explanation for the dark energy is just that it's a cosmological constant. So be very, very careful when people say we know nothing about what the darkEnergy is.

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

Support Mindscape on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.