Excerpt from the Wednesday, April 18, 2001 issue of Time Magazine:
"Using the Hubble Space Telescope to find and study a distant supernova--an
exploding star-- astronomers from two rival research teams have jointly gathered the
strongest evidence yet that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up, like
a rocket with its throttle wide open. And that means something is pushing it.
What that something might be is, at this point, anybody's guess … For now, the
unknown force is simply being called "dark energy," to emphasize its mysterious
nature.
To everyone's astonishment, both groups found that instead of the gradual, gravity-
driven slowdown they expected, the rate was getting faster.
If space really does seethe with dark energy, the fate of the universe, a matter of
longstanding debate, will be clear. With more dark energy today than yesterday, and
more of the stuff tomorrow than today, the cosmos should fly apart faster and faster
as time goes by. There will be no Big Crunch, as some have predicted, with billions
of galaxies falling in on one another in a fiery apocalypse. Tens of billions of years
from now, our Milky Way galaxy will find itself alone in empty space, with its
nearest neighbors too far away to see. In the end, the stars will simply wink out--and
the universe will end not with a bang but with the meekest of whimpers."
[end of excerpt]
today I was thinking about the meaning of this. You have to admit that
it tends to put into perspective everything that this life has to offer. The
car that won't start, the jerk of a boss, the money we loss on the recent
slide in the stock market, the love we lost. The issues that we argue
and fight about are meaningless if you really think about it. We are
here for such a short time.