Dark Energy is Antigravity (and other cosmological heresies)

Academic physicists and astrophysicists are still reluctant to use the word “antigravity” because the academic science community has been ridiculing ufo witnesses who described AAVs as “antigravity craft” for so long that the stigma is nearly impossible to overcome at this point. So they couldn’t describe the antigravitational acceleration between the galaxy clusters as antigravity without jeopardizing their careers, and therefore they chose the term “dark energy” instead – that focuses the attention on the (unknown) source of the effect, rather than the effect itself (antigravity). You’ll also see a lot of talk in the literature about “repulsive gravity” and “negative gravitation,” which are just politically correct synonyms for “antigravity.” The stigma is slowly beginning to dissolve now, 20 years after the discovery of antigravity acting between the galaxy clusters.

Antigravity is simply the negative pole of the gravitational field; whereas positive gravity accelerates bodies of matter together, antigravity accelerates bodies of matter apart. That’s what’s happening to the galaxy clusters – they’re accelerating away from each other driven by a negative gravitational field, aka antigravity.

The negative pole of gravity has always been a feature of the equations of general relativity, but it was ignored, and usually ridiculed, apparently for no other reason than the obvious association between UFOs and antigravity. I'll explain. The principles of gravitoelectromagnetism (GEM) are codified within the Einstein field equation – simply put, this means that all of the dynamical laws that operate on electrical charge have an analogy in the form of the gravitational charge. So for example, if we spin a ring of electrical charges around in a circular manner, we create a magnetic field. A perfectly analogous effect happens when you spin a ring of matter around in a circle; you create a gravitomagnetic field (this is also known as “frame dragging” and “the Lense-Thirring effect”). Now, if you accelerate electrical charges around the small axis of a toroidal inductor (a donut-shaped inductor), you produce a positive electrical field on one side of the inductor, and a negative electrical field on the other side of the inductor. In an analogous manner, if you accelerate matter (gravitational charges) in that same fashion, you produce a positive gravitational field on one side of the toroid, and a negative gravitational field on the other side. So the negative pole of the gravitational field is a fundamental and inescapable feature of gravitational physics, and it always has been. Robert L. Forward elucidated this fact back in 1963 when he wrote this paper, which the academic physics community ignored more or less completely because he used the taboo word “antigravity” in the title:

“Guidelines to Antigravity,” Robert L. Forward, American Journal of Physics, 1963
https://mlpol.net/vx/src/1510434945245-0.pdf

The now-proven dark energy effect, regardless of its source, is an antigravitational effect – that’s not in question. The galaxy clusters are being gravitationally accelerated away from each other. This means that as an observer recedes from any given galaxy cluster, the attractive acceleration of gravity diminishes slightly faster than the inverse square law, and reaches zero at a specific distance from the galaxy cluster (in other words, the dark energy effect nullifies the gravitational field of the galaxy cluster at that distance). And beyond that distance, an observer would be accelerated away from the galaxy cluster – in other words, an antigravitational field now exists between the observer and the galaxy cluster. And the farther the observer moves away from the galaxy cluster, the greater the gravitational acceleration away from it becomes. Here’s a small sample of the myriad citations about it:

“Such cosmological observations have indicated that the universe undergoes accelerated expansion during recent redshift times. This accelerating expansion has been attributed to a dark energy component with negative pressure which can induce repulsive gravity and thus cause accelerated expansion.”


“Now a group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that billions of years before this mysterious antigravity overcame cosmic gravity and sent the galaxies scooting apart like muscle cars departing a tollbooth, it was already present in space, affecting the evolution of the cosmos.

‘We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,’ said Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute about the antigravity force, known as dark energy. He is the leader of a team of ‘dark energy prospectors,’ as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity. The group reported their observations at a news conference today and in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.”


The astrophysicist quoted above, Adam Riess, won the Nobel Prize in 2011 for his co-discovery of dark energy, aka antigravity.

“The expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating, and the mysterious anti-gravity agent of this acceleration has been called “dark energy”. To measure the dynamics of dark energy, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) can be used.”


“We have proposed that the dark energy and the recent cosmic acceleration can be the result of the existence of local antigravity sources associated with astrophysical matter configurations distributed throughout the universe.”


It’s probably worth mentioning that the Big Bang also appears to be a manifestation of antigravity. You’ll hear astrophysicists talk about “the exponential expansion of spacetime” during the cosmic inflation era, which is now the cornerstone of the Big Bang model. Nobody has been able to explain this dramatic rate of acceleration in the early universe, and cosmologists weakly suggest the existence of a new particle coined the “inflaton” to explain it. But cosmic inflation has all of the earmarks of antigravity. The Big Bang is poorly named because it wasn’t an actual explosion – it was the rapid expansion of spacetime itself, and that’s what antigravity is: it’s the metric expansion of spacetime. Just like the Hubble expansion.

So in retrospect it seems obvious that antigravity has been an essential feature of cosmic evolution from the very beginning, and astrophysicists are only slowly growing to accept that fact. Once the mainstream astrophysics community accepts that cosmic inflation, the Hubble expansion, and dark energy are all various manifestations of a single antigravitational field phenomenon, then I think we’ll finally be in a position to understand its operational principles and exploit them technologically, as so many of our unearthly visitors have clearly already done.

I will have things to comment on this post, Today is somewhat of a bad day for me, I have this headache and can't look at the screen. But I found this to be amazing, And I will have things to ask about it when I return in a couple of days.

So it also goes back to Newton, yes?

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and each body in motion tends to stay a body in motion motion...

These feed on each other and coexist at the same time?

But it appears dark energy is more powerful, since the universe continues to expand, so will antigravity eventually win, or does the power of antigravity reach a point of stable neutrality with gravity at some point in the future?

*sips coffee*

So is oil on water a good analogy?

A teaspoon of Olive Oil will continue to spread across the surface of a lake until it is one atom thick... and if the surface were to remain undisturbed the surface tension of the oil will keep it as a single floating mass, but disturb it a little and it will break up and disperse itself in a wider and wider surface area by breaking up into smaller islands of oil...

*sips more coffee*

Kchoo said:

So it also goes back to Newton, yes?

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and each body in motion tends to stay a body in motion motion...

These feed on each other and coexist at the same time?

But it appears dark energy is more powerful, since the universe continues to expand, so will antigravity eventually win, or does the power of antigravity reach a point of stable neutrality with gravity at some point in the future?

*sips coffee*

Click to expand...

We can't be certain about the distant future because we don't yet know the causal mechanism behind this antigravitational force field that spans the observable universe, but at this point is appears to be proportional to distance, which is increasing between the galaxy clusters, and it's been behaving this way for at least 6 billion years. So it appears that the effect will continue in this fashion indefinitely until every galaxy cluster is isolated, with all the others having accelerated beyond the horizon of observability. Some even speculate that the effect could continue to increase until matter itself is torn apart, and they call that "the Big Rip," but I think that's taking things too far - at this point is seems to behave like the cosmological constant that Einstein had originally postulated and its field strength doesn't appear to be increasing in that way.

Kchoo said:

So is oil on water a good analogy?

A teaspoon of Olive Oil will continue to spread across the surface of a lake until it is one atom thick... and if the surface were to remain undisturbed the surface tension of the oil will keep it as a single floating mass, but disturb it a little and it will break up and disperse itself in a wider and wider surface area by breaking up into smaller islands of oil...

*sips more coffee*

Click to expand...

There are some things that I like about that analogy, and some things that don't seem to fit too.

This antigravitational "dark energy" effect isn't quite like anything that we've ever seen before. It acts like a repulsion, similar to a pair of electrically charged particles repelling each another, but the repulsion doesn't decrease as the distance increases - the repulsion actually increases as the distance increases, and it seems to do so linearly. So you get twice as much acceleration apart, as you double the distance - it's as if spacetime itself has a uniform antigravitational charge. There's a study going on right now called the Dark Energy Survey which is examining this effect more closely, to see if there's any variation in the distribution of this effect. So far they haven't found any, but the study will have some new results later this year, and will get even more precise after the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope goes into operation next year (if all proceeds on schedule), and then spends the next few years collecting data for closer analysis.

Ok... a Ball, Bubble or Balloon analogy then?

As the balloon grows at a constant rate the dots drawn on surface stretch away from each other, increasing in distance with an aparent acceleration relative to each other while the surface is always expanding at the same rate.

*Sips Tea*

Kchoo said:

Ok... a Ball, Bubble or Balloon analogy then?

As the balloon grows at a constant rate the dots drawn on surface stretch away from each other, increasing in distance with an aparent acceleration relative to each other while the surface is always expanding at the same rate.

*Sips Tea*

Click to expand...

That's a decent analogy. But it's somewhat flawed, because a balloon has a finite radius, so there's a maximum rate at which two points can accelerate apart, which you find between any two points on exact opposite sides of the expanding balloon. The geometry of the universe is flat, so that doesn't happen with dark energy: the further two galaxy clusters are apart, the faster they accelerate away from each other.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

..
.the further two galaxy clusters are apart, the faster they accelerate away from each other.

Click to expand...

That's freaky... hard to understand... we have Andromeda to worry about coliding with us... yet galaxies seem to be forced away from each other in the dark current also? It seems our two galaxies must be caught in an eddie...

We don't fully understand how gravity works, I've heard from some sources that Gravity doesn't really pull, It's like a force that actually pushes... So, With Dark Energy being an almost completely ununderstood force that seems to pull upon the universe. This all makes very logical sense to me.

I only have one question. At this juncture, With us not fully understanding gravity and possibly even less about dark energy, is this a correlation or is there some sort of working theory with math intact for this? Basically, If there is an equation explaining how dark energy is antigravity. I'd love to study it. Provided there is one, But I suspect there is, I'm not a mathematical genius, But I've seen enough calculus, That if I could see the Math on this, and have about twenty minutes, I could figure out the equation. "Maybe".

Shadowprophet said:

We don't fully understand how gravity works, I've heard from some sources that Gravity doesn't really pull, It's like a force that actually pushes... So, With Dark Energy being an almost completely ununderstood force that seems to pull upon the universe. This all makes very logical sense to me.

Click to expand...

This concept of "push gravity is known as the Le Sage theory of gravitation (even though Fatio came up with it 58 years earlier, in 1690). I thought it was interesting until I realized that it can't explain gravitational time dilation. It also can't explain several other empirical observations, including gravitational waves, which are quadrupolar. The theory is now considered to be fully discredited.

Nevertheless, we know that general relativity (GR) isn't the complete answer, because it breaks down at the quantum level, and all attempts at a quantum theory of gravity have failed so far. But all of its predictions have been verified to extremely high precision, so we know that it's correct at the macro scale. It's even been verified with tabletop experiments involving small masses interacting at separations down to 25 micrometers (note: GR's predictions reduce to the predictions of Newtonian gravity in the weak field limit, which applies to these kinds of experiments).

Theoretical physicists are still trying to find an alternative theory of gravity that could potentially explain the dark matter effect and/or the dark energy effect, but all non-metric theories have been ruled out. Here's an excellent review paper detailing the experimental and theoretical status of GR - this paper is a "must read" for anyone who wants to understand the status of GR and the requisite parameters of an alternative gravity theory:

"The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment," Clifford M. Will, Living Rev. Relativ., 2014

We did an episode of Physics Frontiers about it, which summaries the findings:

"The Parameterized Post-Newtonian Framework," Physics Frontiers, episode #30
Post-Newtonian Gravitation | Free Podcasts | Podomatic"

Shadowprophet said:

I only have one question. At this juncture, With us not fully understanding gravity and possibly even less about dark energy, is this a correlation or is there some sort of working theory with math intact for this? Basically, If there is an equation explaining how dark energy is antigravity. I'd love to study it. Provided there is one, But I suspect there is, I'm not a mathematical genius, But I've seen enough calculus, That if I could see the Math on this, and have about twenty minutes, I could figure out the equation. "Maybe".

Click to expand...

That's where the prevailing model of dark energy comes from - the Einstein field equation. The Einstein tensor shows us that if spacetime has a small and constant nonzero energy density, the universe will accelerate as we observe. There are two different equations of state for dark energy, derived from GR, and both are equivalent and yield the same results. General relativity has never prohibited antigravity solutions - in fact Einstein had originally inserted an antigravity term into his equation which he called the cosmological constant (but he changed his mind and took it out when the Big Bang model arose); it simply took the discovery of the dark energy effect to convince physicists that they were physically real and applicable solutions. You can find the very simple and pertinent equations here on Sean Carroll's page:

Why Does Dark Energy Make the Universe Accelerate?

So you can see why physicists favor a vacuum energy explanation of dark energy aka antigravity; it's the simplest formulation, and it's easy to make that equation fit with our observations. The problem though, is that quantum field theory predicts a vastly higher vacuum energy density - as much as 120 orders of magnitude higher than the effect that we observe. This problem is known as the vacuum catastrophe, and it's probably the most embarrassing problem in the history of physics. So, either there's a way to mathematically cancel out nearly all - but not quite all - of the vacuum energy predicted by quantum field theory, or, the vacuum energy cancels itself out perfectly after all, and there's an entirely different explanation for the antigravitational field effect that's accelerating the galaxy clusters apart from each other.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

This concept of "push gravity is known as the Le Sage theory of gravitation (even though Fatio came up with it 58 years earlier, in 1690). I thought it was interesting until I realized that it can't explain gravitational time dilation. It also can't explain several other empirical observations, including gravitational waves, which are quadrupolar. The theory is now considered to be fully discredited.

Nevertheless, we know that general relativity (GR) isn't the complete answer, because it breaks down at the quantum level, and all attempts at a quantum theory of gravity have failed so far. But all of its predictions have been verified to extremely high precision, so we know that it's correct at the macro scale. It's even been verified with tabletop experiments involving small masses interacting at separations down to 25 micrometers (note: GR's predictions reduce to the predictions of Newtonian gravity in the weak field limit, which applies to these kinds of experiments).

Theoretical physicists are still trying to find an alternative theory of gravity that could potentially explain the dark matter effect and/or the dark energy effect, but all nn-metric theories have been ruled out. Here's an excellent review paper detailing the experimental and theoretical status of GR - this paper is a "must read" for anyone who wants to understand the status of GR and the requisite parameters of an alternative gravity theory:

"The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment," Clifford M. Will, Living Rev. Relativ., 2014

We did an episode of Physics Frontiers about it, which summaries the findings:

"The Parameterized Post-Newtonian Framework," Physics Frontiers, episode #30
Post-Newtonian Gravitation | Free Podcasts | Podomatic"


That's where the prevailing model of dark energy comes from - the Einstein field equation. The Einstein tensor shows us that if spacetime has a small and constant nonzero energy density, the universe will accelerate as we've observed. There are two different equations of state for dark energy, derived from GR, and both are equivalent and yield the same results. General relativity has never prohibited antigravity solutions; it simply took the discovery of the dark energy effect to convince physicists that they were physically real and applicable solutions. You can find the very simple and pertinent equations here on Sean Carroll's page:

Why Does Dark Energy Make the Universe Accelerate?

So you can see why physicists favor a vacuum energy explanation of dark energy aka antigravity; it's the simplest formulation, and it's easy to make that equation fit with our observations. The problem though, is that quantum field theory predicts a vastly higher vacuum energy density - as much as 120 orders of magnitude higher than the effect that we observe. This problem is known as the vacuum catastrophe, and it's probably the most embarrassing problem in the history of physics. So, either there's a way to mathematically cancel out nearly all - but not quite all - of the vacuum energy predicted by quantum field theory, or, the vacuum energy cancels itself out perfectly after all, and there's an entirely different explanation for the antigravitational field effect that's accelerating the galaxy clusters apart from each other.

Click to expand...

This leaves me thinking, Gravity is directly linked to electromagnetism, I believe you said something to that sort had been basically proven. " Don't quote me on this because, My memory isn't perfect" But, if Dark Energy and gravity are the exact same force, Should we not be able to polarize gravity with enough magnetic force at least locally? Basically turning gravity into antigravity at the whim of enough electromagnetic force?

Thomas R. Morrison said:

“We have proposed that the dark energy and the recent cosmic acceleration can be the result of the existence of local antigravity sources associated with astrophysical matter configurations distributed throughout the universe.”

“A solution of the dark energy and its coincidence problem based on local antigravity sources without fine-tuning or new scales,” G. Kofinas and V. Zarikas, Physical Review D, 2018
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.08779.pdf​

Click to expand...

When mentioning the existence of local antigravity sources, what are they considering to be these sources or is this still unknown and we are only seeing the effects right now, but not the cause?...

...

nivek said:

When mentioning the existence of local antigravity sources, what are they considering to be these sources or is this still unknown and we are only seeing the effects right now, but not the cause?...

...

Click to expand...

Good question the Gravitational force would be relative wouldn't it.

Shadowprophet said:

equation explaining how dark energy is antigravity.

Click to expand...

Would this be an example? or maybe not.Dark Energy Antigravity - L. Perivolaropoulos

coubob said:

Would this be an example? or maybe not.Dark Energy Antigravity - L. Perivolaropoulos

Click to expand...

Thank you, It indeed is,

Okay, I'm going to do it, I'm going to jump off the deep end for a moment, Please if this is absurd please, Let me know, Because this is just a thought, I'm not ready to make it a theory or defend it or anything,

What can both push and pull at the same time. First I thought of a sphere, imagine a gravitational sphere cosmic in scale. As the sphere expands it has its own density it's own gravitational attractions within, But outside the bubble or at some sort of cosmic scale event horizon, There could be a dense gravitational-like wave or ripple that is pulling or pushing as the case may be at an inverse or opposite force because it's affecting the inside of the sphere , But, Not because it's an opposite force at all, It's the exact same kind of gravity we experience here, It's just an intense event horizon or the shell of the bubble has a lot of gravitational force of its own and counteracts?

If this sounds insane, I need to hear that said. Because People don't learn unless learning is hard and has lessons in it.

Or, what if the whole universe is one big wave form... everything moves apart and widens, then everything moves back together and condenses before expanding again...

The whole thing is Pulsing... like a giant heart beat...

Kchoo said:

Or, what if the whole universe is one big wave form... everything moves apart and widens, then everything moves back together and condenses before expanding again...

The whole thing is Pulsing... like a giant heart beat...

Click to expand...

It seems like there where some theories about how the universe at some point could begin compressing back instead of expanding, I can't remember if that's been disproven or not. I think the jury is still out on that.

Shadowprophet said:

This leaves me thinking, Gravity is directly linked to electromagnetism, I believe you said something to that sort had been basically proven. " Don't quote me on this because, My memory isn't perfect"

Click to expand...

The electromagnetic stress-energy tensor is a component of the Einstein field equations, so yes we already have a metric tensor equation for the magnitude of the gravitational field associated with electromagnetic energy. An interesting feature of the stress-energy-momentum tensor is that positive pressure generates ordinary gravity, whereas negative pressure (aka tension) contributes negatively to the tensor - tension is in effect an antigravity term (regardless of the nature of that tension).

Shadowprophet said:

But, if Dark Energy and gravity are the exact same force, Should we not be able to polarize gravity with enough magnetic force at least locally

Click to expand...

They're not really forces (they're accelerations, which is a bit different because they're not dependent on mass, as force is). A magnetic field has positive energy so it creates a gravitational field (a very small field effect anyway). Interestingly, binding energy is a negative term - so for example, the sum of the gravitational fields for a magnet and an iron bar which are widely separated in spacetime, is actually higher than the gravitational field of the same magnet and iron bar when they're stuck together via the magnetic field. However, it appears that it's impossible to get an antigravitational field this way, because the magnetic field has positive energy, and even if you coupled the magnetic field in a bound state, you could only at best cancel out that field energy, leaving the positive rest mass of the material, which of course creates a positive gravitational field.

The prevailing theory of dark energy (as vacuum energy) gets around this because the energy of the vacuum doesn't have any rest mass, and it's uniform throughout spacetime, and with both of those characteristics an antigravitational field results.

Shadowprophet said:

Basically turning gravity into antigravity at the whim of enough electromagnetic force?

Click to expand...

It appears that no body of matter with a positive rest mass can undergo any combination of interactions that could reverse the polarity of its overall stress-energy tensor. I've heard this from experts in general relativity, but I haven't seen the proof myself yet. Next time I talk to one I'll ask them for the proof behind this. In the meantime I trust that they're correct, but I'd like to see the basis for that conclusion.

nivek said:

When mentioning the existence of local antigravity sources, what are they considering to be these sources or is this still unknown and we are only seeing the effects right now, but not the cause?

Click to expand...

That's a very complicated question, it turns out. I've been making my way through that paper, and at this point it looks like they're talking about a model of quantum gravity that has a cut-off in the IR range that somehow results in a long-range antigravity field that isn't very noticeable within the galaxy clusters, but which overtakes the positive gravitational field in the long-range regime, resulting in a repulsion between the galaxy clusters (I really like this idea, because it assigns the field to material bodies, instead of the current model which assigns the field to empty space, which seems absurd to me). Their work is based on the concept of asymptotically safe gravity, which is a new concept to me, so I'll have to study that in more detail before I can figure out wtf they're talking about.

Shadowprophet said:

Good question the Gravitational force would be relative wouldn't it.

Click to expand...

Oddly, no, the gravitational field isn't relative even though it's based on the special theory of relativity (SR). In SR, all motion is relative - when two observers in relative inertial motion pass by one another, they both see the clock of the other body ticking more slowly, while their own clock seems to tick at the usual constant rate. They disagree about whose clock is ticking more slowly.

The gravitational field is different. An astronaut far from the Earth in a low-gravity region of space would see your clock here on the Earth ticking more slowly. And an observer on the Earth would see the astronaut's clock tricking more quickly. They both agree that the clock on the Earth is ticking more slowly, so the effect isn't relative.

Like a stone being dropped in a pool of water.