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The darker side of walking the dog

Guess what this title refers to -

Four-legged-friend is a black labrador, equally dark on all sides, so it doesn't refer to him

Gloomy thoughts while WTD? - no, thoughts today were all about brambles - which are I have to admit dark, but don't have a dark side - and how I am to remember to take a bag with me tomorrow for the collection of many, plumptious, previously undiscovered brambles in the ditches along our walk

Distress at having to work this morning - this makes me uniformly dark, so not that either

Still unseasonally warm, sun bright and shadows cast - definite dark side therefore when out walking, but no it isn't this either

No - the darker side in question refers to dark matter ... what is it with me and matters physical at the moment? I did disasterously badly in Physics at school (always reckoned someone in the admissions department  made a mistake when I was accepted to university with an E grade in a science!) but I find it fascinating in a I'm-totally-in-awe-of-all-this-and-understand-not-a-jot-of-it sort of a way. So back to dark matter - let me explain

Dark matter is the magic bit, or the imagined bit, or the baking powder bit that makes the cake work, that is used to explain the unexplainable bits of gravity and why sometimes the maths to define gravity doesn't quite appear to work. Bear with me a moment longer and you might see where I am going with this

The Nobel prize has been awarded to three physicists, who have looked at supernovas and what happens to the light coming from these exploding stars - it apparently undergoes a red shift, which is something to do with how far back in time they are looking, and how bent by gravity the matter from the star is. Anyway, they have discovered that the universe, which is expanding after the big bang - an event that occurred so long ago, that all the exploding bits should be slowing down now, a bit like the ripples spreading out when you drop a stone in calm water - is actually expanding faster; accelerating, even. And this might in turn prove that dark matter exists - the bit they have invented to explain what can't be explained, must exist if the unexplainable is proved by observing it. Or not, perhaps.

Where does this leave the neutrinos that appear to travel faster than light? And if matter can travel faster than light, in this dimension or from another, would that not rather distort the measurements of time across the universe and maybe even make its expansion appear to accelerate? And in what dimension are these supernovas being measured anyway?

Amazing what passes through one's mind when walking Four-legged-friend.

The darker side was the shady side of the field, necessary due to the head ache I had after musing upon the existence or otherwise of dark matter, whether it matters, and reassuring myself that I am never in this rapidly expanding universe going to understand Physics.

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