“Thanks to this data you can open a door and classify all these theories and say which ones work and which ones don’t,” she said.īy scouring the early universe and the extreme environments of black holes, Escamilla-Rivera thinks we can find cracks in general relativity, which will make way for something else. Precision cosmology combines large and diverse data sets with new statistical methods, machine learning and supercomputers. With cosmologists unable to create experiments that can distinguish these theories from general relativity, the ideas have gathered dust.Īccording to Escamilla-Rivera, that’s beginning to change in this new era of precision cosmology, a field she is pioneering in her home country of Mexico. A bewildering array of alternatives to general relativity have been put forward over time, from “teleparallel gravity” to “complex quintessence” and “negative-mass cosmology,” but they long seemed like theoretical fancies. “We’re invoking these mysterious things,” said the cosmologist Celia Escamilla-Rivera.“I am strongly convinced that alternative theories of gravity are needed.”Įscamilla-Rivera is searching for another, more complete theory. But it’s also possible that they are illusions that appear because gravity works differently from how Einstein thought about it.
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The working assumption is that dark matter consists of nonluminous elementary particles, and that dark energy is the energy of space itself. Invisible substances known as dark matter and dark energy seem to make up some 95% of the content of the universe. A year rarely goes by without a new experiment or observation confirming Einstein’s theory.
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Since then, general relativity, which says that massive objects like stars warp the fabric of space-time around them, has passed increasingly precise tests. During a solar eclipse in 1919, Arthur Eddington observed light bending around the sun just as predicted by general relativity, Albert Einstein’s new theory of gravity.