Dark energy may part of the thermodynamics of spacetime
The recent DESI results, which are quite preliminary, suggest that dark energy, the substance that makes up the majority of mass in our universe, might not be constant. No one is retiring the cosmological constant yet but we still have no idea what dark energy is.
There may be a clue, however, in a field of study that was originally developed to understand how to make more efficient steam engines. It has since become a set of laws that apply to everything in our universe.
Back in 1995, in a rather astonishing result, Ted Jacobson derived Einstein’s equations of general relativity, which explain the warping of space and time that give us gravity, from basic rules of thermodynamics.
There had already been hints of this before from studies of black hole thermodynamics. Black holes were shown to have a temperature and like all bodies with a temperature, they release radiation.
In his bestselling book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking explained that this radiation was caused by particle anti-particle pairs appearing in the vacuum of space. Normally, these come back together and annihilate one another but near an event horizon, one might fall in and the other escape so they can’t annihilate anymore. There was a nice illustration of it in the book showing the little particles. Some escape and some don’t.
This explanantion is complete and utter nonsense of course. Nothing like this occurs near black hole event horizons and Hawking’s academic papers on the subject had nothing to do with pair particles falling into black holes.
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