(September 12, 2014 at 1:58 am)sswhateverlove Wrote: Um... you may want to check your facts. Dark energy has not been observed, only it's assumed effects.
http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/foc...rk-energy/
Let me illustrate by way of an analogy why this sort of hair-splitting is absurdly foolish.
Have you ever visually observed(*) wind directly? No, and nor has anyone else. We observe it only by it's interaction with other things that we can observe. Certainly today we know that wind is the movement of air, which is comprised of molecular oxygen and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and a host of trace gases. Yet, there once was a time when we did *not* know this, and yet we still knew *something* caused the effects we observed, something we could not see. Only by making observations of the effects did we learn about wind.
We are now in the early stages of learning about what thing causes the expansion of space to accelerate against the force of gravity. That we don't know the exact nature of this thing in no way invalidates it's existence. The force exists, we can observe what it does, even if we can't directly observe it or currently know what causes it. Nonetheless, we can and have learned some of the constraints on the properties this "thing" has.
A hundred years ago, we were in largely the same situation with respect to gravity - and in many ways, still are.
