Deu no New York Times

"“Time and time again,” Smoot shouted, “the universe has turned out to be really simple.”"

(Já começou bem. Time again?! Referências urrando por todos os lados. Justo hoje que eu deveria aniquilar todas essas minhas referências que não me servem de mais nada. Referências são amarras muito pesadas para alguém que busca tanto pela liberdade. Bem fazem os outros...)

"...But is our luck about to run out? Smoot’s and Perlmutter’s work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be — the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest — 96 percent of the universe — is ... who knows?

Dark,” cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not “dark” as in distant or invisible. This is “dark” as in unknown for now, and possibly forever."

(Dark. Ok... Eu juro que eu vou tentar digerir isso.)

"...Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as “the ultimate Copernican revolution”: not only are we not at the center of anything; we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything."

(Ah, isso sim faz sentido. Para mim. Não ser feito da mesma matéria que a grande maioria do resto de tudo. Isso me é intrínseco, familiar. Mas piora... Sempre piora... Quer ver? )

“We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago.

“If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”

(Eu realmente não precisava de uma comprovação científica disso. Não hoje. )

"...then the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the night sky, we’re seeing the universe.
Not so. Not even close."

"...back in the 1930s, decades before anyone else took the situation seriously, astronomers called this mystery mass “dark matter.” "

"Gravity, astronomers figured, would be slowing the expansion, and the more matter the greater the gravitational effect.
But was the amount of matter in the universe enough to slow the expansion until it eventually stopped, reversed course and collapsed in a backward big bang? Or was the amount of matter not quite enough to do this, in which case the universe would just go on expanding forever? Just how much was the expansion of the universe slowing down?"

(... Blá Blá Blá...)

"Early in 1998, the two teams announced that they had each independently reached the same conclusion, and it was the opposite of what either of them expected. The rate of the expansion of the universe was not slowing down. Instead, it seemed to be speeding up.

In this case the claim could have hardly been more extraordinary: a new universe was dawning."

"Maybe the universe isn’t simple enough for dummies like us humans. Maybe it’s not just our powers of perception that aren’t up to the task but also our powers of conception. Extraordinary claims like the dawn of a new universe might require extraordinary evidence, but what if that evidence has to be literally beyond the ordinary? Astronomers now realize that dark matter probably involves matter that is nonbaryonic. And whatever it is that dark energy involves, we know it’s not “normal,” either. In that case, maybe this next round of evidence will have to be not only beyond anything we know but also beyond anything we know how to know."

(E são nessas horas que eu me pergunto por que ó Céus por que eu fui me meter a ler a seção científica do The New York Times? Por que vez por outra eu teimo em ser assombrada pela "Superbrain theory"? Por que a simplicidade das coisas não me é perceptível e eu necessito quase que urgentemente ser de uma complexidade não desvendável até para mim?!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blame it on the dark matter. I do.)




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P.S. Só para incomodar... O artigo ainda continua.

""In physics, gravity is the ur-inference. Even Newton admitted that he was making it up as he went along. That a force of attraction might exist between two distant objects, he once wrote in a letter, is “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Yet fall into it we all do on a daily basis, and physicists are no exception. “I don’t think we really understand what gravity is,” Vera Rubin says. “So in some sense we’re doing an awful lot on something we don’t know much about.”
...
“We’ve never tested gravity across the whole universe before,” Riess pointed out during a news conference last year. “It may be that there’s not really dark energy, that that’s a figment of our misperception about gravity, that gravity actually changes the way it operates on long ranges.”"

(Ha. Ótimo, não? )

Para os superbrainers, em toda sua inteligência inútil e tristeza infindável:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11dark.t.html?pagewanted=1