I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Everyone expects the Nobel Peace prize to be a joke. For one thing, the Norwegians who select it are elected officials,I mean what else would you expect from a professional politician? But the Nobel prize in Physics is awarded by the Swedes. It is supposed to be for lifetime achievement, which explains why the Medicine Nobel was given to a fellow who up and died two days before. (No, they aren't taking it back from his widow.) So you would think the Physics prize would go to a whitehaired professor with baggy trousers and leather elbow patches on his jacket. I mean a whole pile of previous Nobel prize winners vote on it!

Oh. I see what you mean. I suppose that is a weak point too. Positive feedback can be quite devastating. Well, maybe that is what afflicted this year's choice. But I suspect worse. Well, what was the award for?

It went to three astronomers for carefully measuring the light from distant supernovae--fifty of them to be precise.

Okay, you are asking, what makes this discovery special? If we examine the Nobel citations, we see that novel discoveries, building a better instrument, and sometimes bold theories that transform the field are the major reasons for awarding the Nobel. Since the Nobel is not supposed to be awarded to dead people, sometimes a worthy recipient is cited for "lifetime achievement" just before he dies. Hence the trio of ancient physicists that got the prize in 2009. So which category does this year's prize fall into?

Have supernovae been observed before? Oh sure, all the way back to the Chinese astronomers in 1054. Some would even say that the Christmas star was a supernova. How about 50, is that a special number? Not really, the era of robotic telescopic observations permit thousands of such objects to be observed simultaneously from both ground and space-based telescopes 24/7. So if it wasn't the observation that was so special, was it the technique? Nope, they used other peoples instruments and data sets. So if it isn't the observation and the technique, is it lifetime achievement? Absolutely not, these are rather youngish astronomers.

I carefully tabulated the last 110 years worth of Nobel prizes and this is the chart I got for the ages.

The trend has been toward older and older Nobel prize-winners, with a trend line of one decade per 50 years. Right before the last 2 years, the average age was above 60. The overall average is 54 years old. This years winners averaged 46 years old, last year 44, and the year before that 80! So we see that the Nobel committee must think either that they need to award younger men (only two have been women), or perhaps these men are above average in contribution. Or is it something else?

We've eliminated novel observations, novel techniques, lifetime achievements, which leaves only bold theories that change the paradigm. What theory did these 50 supernovae prove?

Dark energy.

What's that? Well, to be more precise we could called it negative pressure, or perhaps anti-gravity. But it acquired the name "dark energy" to make it sound like the other thing nobody can explain, which is "dark matter". Now matter that is dark is hard to see with a telescope, especially when it is far away. Sometimes we can see it when it obscures the light from behind, as in dark nebula. But many times it doesn't even do that, and we only discover it by its gravitational affect on the "bright matter" around it. So the name is self-explanatory. But what does "dark energy" mean?

The story goes back to Einstein, who was a materialist and therefore like the Greeks before him, wanted the world to have no beginning, because without a creation there need be no creator. Unfortunately, gravity pulls everything in, so if the universe was eternal, something had to balance out the gravity that was trying to pull it in. Newton accomplished this with a careful balancing act--putting as much matter outside as inside in order to pull it in both directions at once. Einstein's equations, however, had nothing on the outside, but gravity warped the space with no way to flatten it back out. After staring at his equations, Einstein decided that his metaphysics required a modification, and he added in something called "The Cosmological Constant" to balance the gravity. This is the exact same item that today has been called "dark energy". Later when Hubble observed the galaxies all rushing away from each other, Einstein realized that an explosion would neatly keep the galaxies apart, and he removed the constant, calling it "his greatest mistake."

Therefore this constant has been in disrepute since the 1961 discovery of the "Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation," which is the observation of the light emitted 13.7 billion years ago in that enormous explosion. It also generated 2 Nobel prizes for the discoverers, Penzias and Wilson. Robert Jastrow wrote about the effect this observation had on the astronomy community in his 1978 book "God and the Astronomers". The last 3 sentences of his book get quoted a lot, but it bears repeating:

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greated by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

This has been infuriating for materialists who would give their eyeteeth to be able to get rid of the creation with its implied creator, and go back to the eternality of Democritus. Sir Fred Hoyle, a self-professed atheist and follower of Democritus, denied the reality of the creation, which he attempted to ridicule as "the Big Bang". Despite his enormous intellect, he was unable to persuade very many astronomers of his position. There have been many attempts to make the Big Bang cyclic, and thereby eternal, but one of Stephen Hawking's first contributions with Roger Penrose was to show that this didn't work. \ Roger Penrose a member of the atheistic Humanist Society, however, has attempted a different kind of cyclic Big Bang which resulted in a bizarre publication last year. Hawking, another self-professed atheist, tried to get rid of the Big Bang, first by making time imaginary in his "A Brief History of Time", and now by invoking another 7 dimensions of reality in "The Grand Design".

All of these proposals have been attempts to metaphysically remove the Big Bang. I call them metaphysical, because their central premise is that reality is not the way it appears. Hoyle had protons appearing miraculously out of the vacuum and light getting tired as it got older. Hawking first had to make time an imaginary quantity, now he wants to invoke 7 more imaginary dimensions. Penrose wants so much time that spacetime loses track of its size.

These are not idiots. In fact, if you read the literature of their atheist clubs, they value Reason over all other attributes of man. It is because of their Reason that they consider themselves atheists. Yet their worship of Reason has made them adopt unreasonable positions. We are talking serious physicists here who have abandoned physics for metaphysical statements that in principle cannot be measured.

So when three rather youngish astronomers say, "Look at that, these supernova are dimmer than we expected, could this be evidence of dark energy? Could this be proof that maybe the Big Bang wasn't necessarily the beginning?" You can just imagine the electric jolt that went through the materialist community.

For the first time since Einstein's greatest blunder and since Penzias' and Wilson's discovery, there was data for Democritus and materialism. Now let's be clear, the "dark energy" cabal isn't yet ready to dismiss the Big Bang, but they are well on track for finding solutions to Einstein's equations that make it less and less necessary. First we demonstrate anti-gravity, next we start finding proof of "inflation" and "baby universes" and the "multiverse" is just around the corner.

What exactly is "dark energy"? Nobody knows. It is invisible. It has no effects on any experiment you can do in the lab. It is only quantifiable in the sense that computer simulations that attempt to distribute galaxies in the universe use it as a dial on their codes. When the dial is set at "11," as Spinal Tap would remind us, then we get a better fit. It's physical reality is right up there with the positive feedback parameter in global warming climate codes. It has only a "virtual" reality.

What about this supernovae data, isn't that a slam dunk for the existence of dark energy? (just look how far those data points are from the expected straight line!)

Actually no. Just last week a sixth theory to explain the supernova data without dark energy was announced. For reference, here are a few of the "normal science" explanations that can account for the data.
1. Perhaps the stellar codes (derived from LosAlamos bomb codes) that calculate the light output are in error, just as the were wrong about the mixing ratios in the center of our own sun, so that there is a size-dependence and light-dependence to these supernova.
2. Perhaps far away supernova are dimmed by dust, plasma, light interactions, scattering, etc. The reason they look dimmer the farther they are away, is that there is more and more dust between us. (The z-scale used for x-axis is nearly logarithmic, compressing distances.)
3. Since far away supernova went off earlier in the history of the universe. Perhaps the composition of the star that exploded back then was different from nearby supernovae--specifically, the metallicity--making the light output depend on composition.
4. Since far away supernova went off earlier in the history of the universe. Perhaps the physical constants back then were slightly different than they are today, changing the light output.
5. Perhaps they really are further away because our galaxy is in a less-dense region of the universe, and like a bubble in champagne, it is expanding locally, making it appear as if it is accelerating faster than it should.
6. Perhaps our galaxy and the some of the ones near it are flowing in a "dark flow" through the universe, making supernova in some directions dimmer, while in other directions they look brighter.

The nice thing about most of these alternative explanations, is that they don't invoke any unobservable metaphysical substances like "dark energy". Wouldn't that make them more scientific than dark energy, and not less? Wouldn't the Nobel committee wait for slightly better confirmation of "dark energy" before they award the prize? Like some other measuring stick than supernovae? Why are they so hasty?

Well, other than trying to improve their age statistics that we noted in the graph above, another reason for haste might be economic. NASA has been studying a "Joint Dark Energy Mission" for nearly a decade. This year the New York Times published an article how this mission wasn't faring too well in the constrained budgets of this administration. We're talking a $1.6 billion initiative, which if it overruns the budget like the James Webb telescope, may be multi-billions of funding to the astronomy community. The NYT even quotes the future Nobel winner, Perlmutter, saying he doesn't think this mission will go forward. Of course, if it is now considered Nobel-prize-winning science, maybe NASA will have a change of heart. Maybe this is a proactive Nobel, awarded for spurring future research rather than past. Sort of like the Nobel Peace prize in 2009.

God save us all.