• Question: What does "Fixing the broken universe mean"?

    Asked by MichaelM15 to Maggie on 16 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 16 Nov 2017:


      The biggest problem in the Universe at the moment is that there are 4 forces of nature, weak, strong, electro-magnetic and gravity. The first 3 of those all work well together on small scales like on particles and are well explained by the Grand Unified Theory, but gravity doesn’t fit very well into those calculations. That’s why people like Stephen Hawking are working on trying to make all the 4 forces work together on all scales. This is the Theory of Everything but no one has solved it yet!

      But we know that gravity works best on the largest scales. On stars and galaxies. Our current theory of gravity is called General Relativity, but to explain some of the things that astronomers see with this theory we need dark matter and dark energy! We dont know what they are or if they are even real but if they do exist then they make up 95% of our Universe! If not then we know that General Relativity is wrong.

      To fix the Universe we need to know if dark matter and dark energy are real and that is what I am looking for

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