The Dark Universe

1500 words, 7 minute read

As my ‘frequent readers’ know, I am a parochial school survivor: 6 years…in the 1950s…before Vatican II humanized the Church: my first purple heart. (I also survived the late ‘60s for heart #2). That said, it’s intriguing to see that things I learned 75 years ago are making a comeback.

In ‘sisters’ school’ everything was a ‘mystery’. (At least they had that right!) Creation, Incarnation, Eucharist, Resurrection, Ascension – all mysteries. Don’t think too much about them, just accept them as facts and move on.

Hardly a promising start for a budding theologian! But later in my intellectual odyssey, I discovered that Sister Mary Martha was in league with some of the 20^th centuries leading thinkers: quantum mechanics like Bohr and logical positivists like early Wittgenstein.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, perhaps inspired by another leading intellect of the time, Frank Baum, asks us to accept experimental data on face value and avoid looking behind the ‘curtain’ in search of underlying causes or a coherent model. Sister would have approved. Phenomena only please! Were 5,000 people fed from a few loaves and fishes leaving 12 baskets of leftover scraps? So noted, now move on.

As a child, how often was I told not to speak of things I did not fully understand? Sister would have been overjoyed to read, ““Whereof one cannot speak (know), thereof one must be silent.” (Wittgenstein)

The Global Cultural Revolution (from the Vatican to Paris and from China to Woodstock) taught us to eschew the transcendent and honor the immanent: “Be Here Now!” (Ram Das). Today we have bumper stickers reading, “Follow the Science.” But unbeknownst to everyone, Science has executed a U-Turn and now embraces the heuristic power of mystery. Truly, “it’s yesterday once more.” (Karen Carpenter)

***

We have a problem. Since Thales (or before) we have been developing a detailed cosmology to account for the phenomena we know as Universe. An incredible tour de force, but one with a few rough edges.

Specifically, the Universe seems to be expanding at an accelerating rate while structures within the universe (e.g. galaxies) seem not to be expanding at all. Gravity doesn’t cut it!

It’s a mystery! But we learned how to deal with such unaccountable phenomena 70 years ago. We simply declare them ‘mysteries’ and then posit new entities, like Trinity and Transubstantiation, to account for what’s otherwise unaccountable. Eazy-Peezy.

It began with Dark Matter - the name cosmologists gave to the mysterious force that seems to be holding galaxies together. Apparently, cosmologists felt a need to respond to the challenge young Woody Allen posed in Annie Hall: ‘Why should I bother to do homework if the universe is blowing up all around me?’

Then came Dark Energy: “For nearly thirty years, Dark Energy has been the cornerstone of modern cosmology. When astronomers discovered in the 1990s that the universe wasn't just expanding but accelerating…they needed an explanation. Dark Energy was it, an invisible pressure built into the fabric of space itself, pushing everything apart. Nobody has ever detected it directly, but the maths seemed to demand it, so into the equations it went.” - Mark Thompson, BBC, May 31, 2026

Dark Energy seemed to account for the fact that the universe seems to be expanding at an accelerating rate. Between the two, Dark Forces (Oooo!) are thought to account for 95% of the universe’s gravitational behavior (96% on October 31). It is so convenient when mysteries balance out like this. Perhaps it’s a mark of authenticity; perhaps not.

And so a new definition of Scientific Method is emerging: Whenever you can’t explain some phenomenon, discover a new ‘force’ to account for it and then label that force ‘dark’ so no one can expect you to locate it or explain it. Neat trick…no wonder these guys (sic) got all A’s in high school; they really are that smart!

Dark Forces are accepted by the astronomical community. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 2011 in recognition of the ‘discovery’ of Dark Matter. But now we have another problem! Well, several problems:

A new set of measurements that seem to suggest that the expansion of the universe is not accelerating after all; in fact, it’s slowing down. Oops! So we have a beautiful theory, all dressed up with nowhere to go. Anyone who’s been stood up on prom night can empathize with our cosmological angst.

But believe it or not, it gets even worse for ‘denizens of the dark’. Mark Thompson (above), science broadcaster and author, continued his remarks, turning his attention to a team of mathematicians who recently “…found that accelerating expansion falls naturally out of Einstein's original equations, without any need to bolt Dark Energy onto the side. The universe accelerates not because of some mysterious invisible force, but because of the inherent mathematics of how space and matter behave in the wake of the Big Bang.”

So not only did your prom date ghost you, it turns out that the prom had already been cancelled and nobody bothered to let you know.

***

Just a few years ago we thought we had everything figured out…well, at least one thing figured out: ‘We’re in the dark!’ (95% dark anyway). MIT Technology Review (5/19/2025):

“We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of what’s floating about in the cosmos is ordinary matter—planets and stars and galaxies and the dust and gas between them. The other 95% is dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities aptly named for our inability to shed light on their true nature... Cosmologists have cast dark matter as the hidden glue binding galaxies together. Dark energy plays an opposite role, ripping the fabric of space apart.”

Poor Isaac Newton must have been on mushrooms when he thought to explain gravity in terms of a perfectly visible, and regrettably tactile, apple (falling from a tree branch overhead). Dark ‘gravity/anti-gravity’ forces have been accepted in the academy, but the smug satisfaction that comes from intellectual certainty does not last long. Take in the 2026 view from the left coast (UC Davis):

“…A new paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society produced mathematical proof that the standard model of cosmic expansion, the one built around dark energy, is fundamentally unstable.”

So your prom date ghosted you, but the prom had been cancelled anyway, and OBTW, the brand new limo you hired to take you to the prom was just recalled - something about a tendency for the engine to explode?

And I thought I was having a bad day!

Scientists ‘invented’ the Dark to give a name to things they couldn’t explain. Based on what we know, the Universe shouldn’t work. There’s not nearly enough mass to hold galaxies together. In fact, however, galaxies do exist, 100’s of billions of them with more forming ‘every day’. So something’s wrong and the Dark hypothesis seems to solve the problem. Of course, it’s merely ‘solving’ one unknown in terms of another.

So where do we go from here? Well, the headlines are already in the can: “Dark hypotheses confirmed!” And they will be confirmed because any advance in our understanding of the universe will now be labeled dark.

And why not? ‘Dark Universe’ has no denotative meaning, nothing that might subject it to the risk of falsification. It’s a universal place holder for whatever we don’t know now but may discover later. So ‘dark’ is apt after all.

Once we learn something about the universe that we don’t already know, whatever that is, that will be what ‘dark’ is. It will define ‘dark’. Of course it will. We don’t know what Dark is so whatever turns out to solve the paradox will be quite correctly labeled Dark, and we will say, “Of course that’s what Dark Matter and Energy are, we knew it all along.” Except of course, we didn’t.

Do you doubt me? It’s already happening. An article by Evan Gough in the February 09, 2026 issue of Universe Today suggests replacing the Black Hole hypothesis with…you guessed it, Dark Matter. According to Gough, it may be dark matter, not a black hole, that resides at the center of the Milky Way and holds the galaxy together. So the Dark Forces are living up to their name. They can explain virtually everything…no matter what anything is.

Thanks for reading through to the end and now before you go, if you don’t mind, just one more favor, please: Can you remind me how rational science differs from spooky magic?