THE DARK SIDE KEEPS THINGS TOGETHER, AND TEARS THINGS APART
VERN BENDER
The dark side, keeping things together, tearing things apart. Space is three dimensions; adding time, you are wandering around in four sizes. As Earth rotates on its axis, it orbits the sun, which orbits the center of the Milky Way, which itself is speeding through space. We are moving at an average velocity of 828,000 km/hr. It takes us about 230 million years to make one complete orbit around the Milky Way. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.
The universe is a giant carousel. Not only do planets, stars, and galaxies rotate, but so do the vast structures that run through space. These are self-rotating galaxies.
The most significant known structures in the universe, long strands between galaxies, also rotate. Gravity is supplemented by dark matter to drive the angular momentums of these structures. Galaxies do not move but follow a rotational motion around the axis of their filaments. These thin cylinders are hundreds of millions of light-years long but only a few million light-years in diameter. There is also movement between galaxies, driven by dark matter.
Time is fixed and absolute as it flows forward. The Moon spins once every 27.322 days, the same as its orbital period.
.The Earth’s daily axis rotation and its yearly circle around the sun.
Dark matter is not baryonic, but it is made up of other, more exotic particles like axions or WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). The Standard Model of particle physics is both extraordinarily successful and glaringly incomplete. It cannot account for the existence of dark matter. Supersymmetry more than doubles the number of particles in the Standard Model. The particles we currently know to exist can be divided into two categories: fermions and bosons. In supersymmetric theories, each particle has an as yet undiscovered superpartner with many similar properties. Fermions are paired with bosons and vice-versa. Supersymmetry (SUSY) predicts that every Standard Model particle has its own heavier super-partner particle.
Many particles are short-lived. A quark lasts a picosecond. Vacuum energy resides everywhere in space. Vacuum energy comes from vacuum quantum fluctuations and the creation of virtual quantum pairs of particles and anti-particles. Outer space has a very low density and pressure and is the closest physical approximation of a perfect vacuum. But no vacuum is genuinely excellent, not even in interstellar space, where there are still a few hydrogen atoms per cubic meter. Space is an almost perfect vacuum, full of cosmic voids.
