Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Paranormal Activity?
You may or may not know this, but that there is literally more to the universe than we can physically see or detect using current scientific equipment. It is estimated that all the ‘visible’ matter in the universe, the stuff that stars, planets and humans are made of, is only around 4% of everything that exists in the universe. Most of what’s out there, about 73% is energy of some sort. The remaining 27% is matter. And only 4% of all of this is currently detectable by human kind. Kind of a scary thought really; our knowledge of the physical universe, the world we live in and the ever increasing level of technology is based on a statistically insignificant proportion of the universe. Using our own statistical measures, our 4% of the universe is an outlier. It almost feels as if we’ve been peeking through a keyhole thinking we have a 360 degree field-of-view.
The matter we see and the matter we’re made of constitutes only 4 % of universe, (http://edelweiss2.in2p3.fr/Presentation/index.php)
How have we come to learn of our diminutive place in the vast expanse of the universe? It stems from the work of the cosmologists looking out into the heavens and making observations about the movement of galaxies. What they found was that the speed with which the galaxies have been moving and spinning around each other is really great, much greater than the strength of gravity based on the amount of substance visible. So great is this rate of spin and movement that by all rights they should have torn themselves apart. The fact that the galaxies remain intact under such great forces suggests that there is much more matter. This matter, labelled ‘dark matter’ because we cannot detect it, must be contributing to the gravitational pull that holds things in balance. The dark matter is not simply regular matter we can’t see due to lack of light illuminating it. It is believed to be a form of matter that we cannot currently detect. And there are a number of experiments going on to try and detect the existence of this matter, when, on very rare occasions it interacts with ‘our’ matter.
Scientists believe that they are now getting closer to understanding what dark matter is, as is suggested by this article ‘hot-on-the-trail-of-universes-darkest-secret’.
Like the discovery of dark matter, the idea of dark energy came about from observations about the expansion of the universe. Prior to 1998, scientists believed that the universe was slowing down gradually due to gravity. But, new observations revealed that the opposite was the case; the universe was expanding at an increasingly greater rate. For this to occur, there had to be more energy in the universe overcoming the forces of gravity and pushing the expansion of everything. More detail of dark matter and dark energy can be found here (dark-matter-dark-energy).
The science of cosmology, filled with dark matter and dark energy is a fascinating field. What does it have to do with parapsychology? Well, technically… nothing. But the events occurring in cosmology do seem to be somewhat analogous to parapsychological research. If we consider ghost research as an example, it’s tantilizing to think that the (genuine) observations of ghost activity are just the tip of the iceberg making its presence known in the 4% of the universe we can see. It seems that there is something truly anomalous occurring, but we just don’t know which factors influence its ability to interact with physical matter and our senses.