Space

As is my guilty pleasure for a nerd like me, I watched another episode of Nova last night. This time it dealt with advances in the physics of space. New and fun things called dark matter and dark energy. 

Like many of you who took Astronomy 143, we were just understanding relativity theory, space/time and gravity. The misconception of fifty, or in my case forty years ago was that space was basically a static unmoving entity; no more.  

According to the episode that theory went by the wayside some thirty years ago when physicists realized that galaxies that they observed were moving as fast at the outer rim of their rotations as the same stuff within the galaxy. The reason? Space is expanding and has expanded for billions of years, and most likely will continue well into the future, billions of years to come. 

Now the new and fun stuff is called dark matter and dark energy. The jury is still out as to what dark matter actually is, but in a quick and easy explanation it is that it is not visible to light, it is about 27 percent of the universe, while dark energy that represents 60 percent of the universe is the cement that binds the universe together or the whole show would fly apart. All the stars and planets and other stuff that makes up the universe is but five percent that we can actually see in the night sky. 

Back in the 90s I found a book called The Physics of Star Trek, which is a fascinating book by Lawrence M. Krauss, first published in 1995. It explores the scientific concepts behind the Star Trek universe, analyzing whether technologies like warp drive, teleportation, and time travel could exist within the laws of physics. 

Obviously, what wasn’t included was the concept of expanding universe, galaxies and dark matter because that concept hadn’t been broached at that time. I’m sure had Roddenberry known, there would have definitely been episodes of those topics included to allow Spock to consider the logic behind these new and fun ideas.