what does it mean for a particle to travel through space in/as a wave? why is it so prevalent that "things" travel as waves? what is the real difference between a particle and wave? and how can one infinitesimal piece of quanta be a wave ( something that assumedly takes up the space of an area larger then a single point of infinitesimal quanta)? does wave signify an attached tail trailing behind an oscillating particle? or does the imagination of a trail just help depict a particles guaranteed travel pattern ( frequency) through space-time?

Where specifically is the part where NASA is "confusing" things?

Originally posted by swan001

Originally posted by buddhasystem
Where do you see dark energy mentioned in the paper?

Er... Right here, mate:

The discovery cements dark matter's status as the biggest building block in the universe, while also putting to rest the nagging worries of many astronomers that they gambled wrong.

Dark matter's murky nature has always sat a bit uneasily with astronomers.

A leading explanation for this is that the gas and stars are held together by the gravity of dark matter. Belief in dark matter is widespread across the scientific community, but astronomers don't know what it's made of.

I'll post the paper link once again:
www.nasa.gov...

Where specifically is the part where NASA is "confusing" things?

You really don't know the difference between dark matter/dark nebulas and dark energy/quantum jitter?

Originally posted by buddhasystem
reply to post by swan001

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Dude, see Arb's post above. And work on your reading comprehension skills.

Originally posted by buddhasystem
No, you are actually making a mistake as far as the logic goes. You see, if I'm writing a paper which focuses on the properties of the proton, and the proton only, it does not mean in any shape or form that I'm unaware of the existence of the electron.

One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood. The first property that Einstein discovered is that it is possible for more space to come into existence. Then one version of Einstein's gravity theory, the version that contains a cosmological constant, makes a second prediction: "empty space" can possess its own energy. Because this energy is a property of space itself, it would not be diluted as space expands. As more space comes into existence, more of this energy-of-space would appear. As a result, this form of energy would cause the Universe to expand faster and faster. Unfortunately, no one understands why the cosmological constant should even be there, much less why it would have exactly the right value to cause the observed acceleration of the Universe.

Another explanation for how space acquires energy comes from the quantum theory of matter. In this theory, "empty space" is actually full of temporary ("virtual") particles that continually form and then disappear. But when physicists tried to calculate how much energy this would give empty space, the answer came out wrong - wrong by a lot. The number came out 10^120 times too big. That's a 1 with 120 zeros after it. It's hard to get an answer that bad. So the mystery continues.

Another explanation for dark energy is that it is a new kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the Universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy. Some theorists have named this "quintessence," after the fifth element of the Greek philosophers. But, if quintessence is the answer, we still don't know what it is like, what it interacts with, or why it exists. So the mystery continues.

A last possibility is that Einstein's theory of gravity is not correct. That would not only affect the expansion of the Universe, but it would also affect the way that normal matter in galaxies and clusters of galaxies behaved. This fact would provide a way to decide if the solution to the dark energy problem is a new gravity theory or not: we could observe how galaxies come together in clusters. But if it does turn out that a new theory of gravity is needed, what kind of theory would it be?...

The thing that is needed to decide between dark energy possibilities - a property of space, a new dynamic fluid, or a new theory of gravity - is more data, better data.

`quantum jitter': the value of quantities characterizing the system fluctuate

quantum foam can be used as a qualitative description of subatomic spacetime turbulence at extremely small distances (on the order of the Planck length). At such small scales of time and space, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into particles and antiparticles and then annihilate without violating physical conservation laws. As the scale of time and space being discussed shrinks, the energy of the virtual particles increases. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, energy curves spacetime. This suggests that—at sufficiently small scales—the energy of these fluctuations would be large enough to cause significant departures from the smooth spacetime seen at larger scales, giving spacetime a "foamy" character.

With an incomplete theory of quantum gravity, it is impossible to be certain what spacetime would look like at these small scales, because existing theories of gravity do not give accurate predictions in that regime.