Hot off the press, Prof. Subir Sarkar makes the case that dark energy doesn’t exist (and he’s not being provocative for its own sake). He’s the former head of Oxford’s particle theory group, serves on the Particle Data Group.
The 2011 Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of cosmic acceleration. Sarkar’s team reanalyzed the supernova data when the full‑sky catalog became available and found the claimed five‑sigma result was actually three sigma (evidence for, not discovery of). Worse, when they allowed the acceleration to vary by direction, it turned out to be a dipole: acceleration toward the CMB hotspot, deceleration in the opposite direction. Average over the whole sky, and you get expansion at a constant rate. No cosmological constant required.
We also discuss the unbecoming episode where a journal explicitly rejected Sarkar’s paper because “it questions a Nob…
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