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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (5197)	6/22/2001 7:00:04 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Besides methane whatnot, the long term investors have another worry ... however, the dark matter and antigravity may explain what has been happening on WS and why the indices are holding tight: time.com Chugs, Jay QUOTE [partial] But a series of remarkable discoveries announced in quick succession starting this spring has gone a long way toward settling the question once and for all. Scientists who were betting on a Big Crunch liked to quote the poet Robert Frost: "Some say the world will end in fire,/ some say in ice./ From what I've tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favor fire." Those in the other camp preferred T.S. Eliot: "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper." Now, using observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico, the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, the mammoth Keck Telescope in Hawaii and sensitive radio detectors in Antarctica, the verdict is in: T.S. Eliot wins. For that reason alone, the latest news from space would be profoundly significant; understanding where we came from and where we are headed have been obsessions of thinking humans, probably for as long as we've walked the earth. But the particulars of these discoveries shed light on even deeper mysteries of the cosmos, lending powerful support to radical ideas once considered speculative at best. For one thing, the new observations bolster the theory of inflation: the notion that the universe went through a period of turbocharged expansion before it was a trillionth of a second old, flying apart (in apparent, but not actual, contradiction of Albert Einstein's theories of relativity) faster than the speed of light. An equally bizarre implication is that the universe is pervaded with a strange sort of "antigravity," a concept originally proposed by and later abandoned by Einstein as the greatest blunder of his life. This force, which has lately been dubbed "dark energy," isn't just keeping the expansion from slowing down, it's making the universe fly apart faster and faster all the time, like a rocket ship with the throttle wide open. It gets stranger still. Not only does dark energy swamp ordinary gravity but an invisible substance known to scientists as "dark matter" also seems to outweigh the ordinary stuff of stars, planets and people by a factor of 10 to 1. "Not only are we not at the center of the universe," University of California, Santa Cruz, astrophysical theorist Joel Primack has commented, "we aren't even made of the same stuff the universe is." These mind-bending discoveries raise more questions than they answer. For example, just because scientists know dark matter is there doesn't mean they understand what it really is. Same goes for dark energy. "If you thought the universe was hard to comprehend before," says University of Chicago astrophysicist Michael Turner, "then you'd better take some smart pills, because it's only going to get worse." UNQUOTE