Dark energy is just a placeholder for “we don’t know how this stuff works”. There is afaik no generally accepted theory about what it actually is. Whatever turns out to be the actual explanation is dark energy.
Yes, I think that’s why “doesn’t exist” is in quotation marks in the title.
I get what you are saying, and it seems reasonable if dark energy turns out to be something. If, however, dark energy turns out to be a placeholder for simply our misinterpretation of what is happening, it’s a little harder to say that dark energy exists.
The reason we say that is because we still see the effect of it, we just don’t see the cause. We see the universe expanding, but we cannot say why it happens. It’s not gravity because that obviously has the opposite effect and holds things closer together, so there must be some sort of force actively working against it. There’s a bunch of various hypothesis about it that could be the answer, but none of them can be proven, at least not yet. But the simple fact that we still see an effect by an unknown cause means that there still must be an unknown cause behind it, because things do not just happen without a reason.
What is this, the cosmological argument, dark energy edition?
The difference between God and dark energy is that for the former we have an expectation of what it can do, without an actual observation that it does those things, while the latter we can actually observe what it does, with some expectations to what the cause may be (whether any of them being true or not being a different matter). But it isn’t a case of “we don’t know what it is, thus it must be God” kind of deal. And without going too far into religious history, but there’s just 0 evidence to back anything up. All of the observed wonders and creations were written by humans that lived long after those things allegedly happened, and are often in direct contradiction to actually established scientific facts, which makes it even harder to believe - and that’s just for one of the many religious beliefs out there. Religious texts are just a twisted and fantastical view on human’s short history.
Hey, I was just trying to say that David Hume and likely a few others would have reservations about accepting your argument.
Perhaps an allegory would be useful.
Suppose I go about town telling everyone that there is a thief about. “A thief?”, everyone exclaims, “where, who?” And I tell them that I have not actually seen the thief, but I have taken to calling him Drake Emory, and I have evidence. Some of my money is missing, and that can’t happen without a cause. I call that cause Drake Emory. Seeing the wisdom of my words, the townsfolk agree that while Drake Emory is a strange name to call a thief, still he must exist because the money is gone. So, convinced of his existence, everyone searches high and low for Drake Emory. Some posit that Drake is a man who sneaks into houses at night. Others are certain that he is just a rat who chews bank notes to make his nest. There are many, many discussions about him. Only one thing is certain: Drake Emory must exist. How could he not? Something made that money disappear. Unfortunately, what the towns people don’t know, and I never even realize myself, is that no money ever went missing. In truth, I only came to that conclusion because I really don’t fully understand the accounting software that I’ve been using.
But Dark Energy isn’t a thief, it’s just a name for something we don’t know the concept of yet. You’re immediately attaching some sort of concept around it, you say it’s a thief without any evidence that the money was actually stolen, when there’s other possible explanations for the missing money, and we know the money is missing because that’s an actually observable fact, which rules out whatever analogy your accounting software is supposed to be. I hope it’s not our models of physics because just because they currently cannot explain it, does not mean that we cannot see it happening. So we aren’t doing the same to Dark Energy, we see the money is missing and theorize possibilities as to where it went, or rather how in this case. As the other guy said, the name is just a placeholder for the possible concept behind it, nothing more. Dark because we can’t see it, and energy because it’s some sort of force.
Let me explain the allegory and how it relates to the problem.
We can directly observe some things, like the shift in frequency of light or the output of accounting software. We can make inferences from these observations, like our models of the universe or our belief that the software indicates that money has been stolen. We can also step into discussions about what our inferences imply, like the existence of something that would explain what our models tell us or the existence of a thief.
In the allegory, the necessity of a thief is contingent upon our inferences about missing money. In physics, the necessity of dark energy is contingent upon the validity of our models and the assumptions drawn from them.
The claim that dark energy has to exist is just too strong of a claim, as it rests only upon inference. Even when you make, as you do, the weakest possible version of the claim, which is to say that dark energy is whatever makes sense of our inferences, it is still too strong a claim, unless you include “our inferences have been incorrect” as a possible outcome to the question of “what is dark energy?”
If researchers wish to question some of our inferences and doubt some of our assumptions, it’s a good thing. Claiming that dark energy must exist whenever researchers question it is not helpful.
EDIT changed matter -> energy
