Cosmological Constant and Dark Energy has been in the news for months.

I dont think there is a controversy when one measures the speed of light.Would a hypothetical controversy related to the speed of light, be important?

From my understanding, dark energy is just the placeholder name for what is causing the expansion of space to accelerate, so the value is a direct result of the measurement just like the speed of light.

The age of the universe is affected by this probable change in the (now very disputed) number value of Dark Energy, for one thing.You seem to feel that the number value of Dark Energy is unimportant.One thing that should possibly scare you is there is now the possibility that the value could change suddenly, and the difference between a positive and negative number value could - if extreme enough possibilities are considered - in theory, possibly cause the whole universe to collapse in our lifetimes.Now there is the possibility for Dark Energy to change across time and space.Infact, most will reach just such an interpretation.So what is the cosmic trigger?

What I am saying is that this number is simply a measurement. I agree that the age of the universe could change as we make better and better measurements, and possibly find systematic errors in how those measurements are interpreted. This is true for pretty much all of physics. It scares me as much as the speed of light suddenly changing and causing the Sun to decimate the Earth.

But has the speed of light ever changed?(distant light is spatially further away from us than its very physical speed due to, ironically, Dark Energy)The spatial dimensions of our universe have probably changed to some extent (or could) depending on what Dark Energy has been doing all along the way. I hope everything is flat and stays flat, if we aren't a bunch of cut off bubble universes.Michio Kaku feels that the multiverse is made up of separate round bubbles (for universes), which keep splitting off when inflation creates a, perhaps, never ending number of universes.Kaku says the bubble universes actually bump into each other and actually can and do destroy each other. I hope not!Inflationary forces seem to very much have the possibility of changing, though Dark Energy might possibly be unchanging ( increasingly unlikely, now, it seems)EDIT; Kaku is one of the Many World Interpretation proponents who do not regard a flat universe as important to the MWI, but he is a minority, I feel.

I quoted you saying "psychic studies." I don't understand anything you are saying here. I don't understand what kind of answer you are asking for here either. OK, I am really confused now, are you asking here why the supernovae results don't agree with eachother in some way, or why the supernovae and CMB data disagree? Obviously different measurement techniques, one giving data on the temperature of different regions of the Universe when it was ~380,000 years after the Big Bang and the other measuring the distance of different supernovae at different times in the past to measure the expansion rate.I thought "inflation" referred specifically to a brief period of very rapid expansion right after the Big Bang. Are you using "inflation" and "expansion" interchangeably?

If it does it could destroy the Earth, so you better be worried.Also, gravity could suddenly become a repulsive force and blow the planet apart. Yet another reason to be worried.

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LamarkNewAge in Message 11 writes:
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I started talking about Many Worlds because many have long speculated that Hibbert Space takes the UNIVERSAL UNCOLLAPSING macro-particle (entire universe) conglomeration "ray" to the hypothetical multiverse real-estate.
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In a flat universe, with both early ​(first fraction of a second) Inflation, plus (separately) physical laws brought by an infinite local universe expansion (via Dark Energy), there is a place for these ever duplicating macro-particles (our duplicating universe!) to go.

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Tanypteryx in message 21:

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I don't understand anything you are saying here.

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I was saying the real issue of the quantum wave function NOT collapsing means the particles (such as trillions of duplicates of YOU per second) have to go somewhere, and Dark Energy AND early cosmic Inflation are an have been highly relevant for decades. Brian Greene wrote a book around 12 (?) years ago, and fairly early on, he referenced dark energy as highly relevant to Many Worlds, and he spent alot of pages on showing what objects in our life (whether television screens, pinpong tables, etc.) were shaped in a "finite" verses "infinite" dimension.The multiverse has often been seen as something completely apart and different from the alternate universes, Sean Carroll had his epiphany in 2011.

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Are Many Worlds and the Multiverse the Same Idea?
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When physicists are asked about “parallel worlds” or ideas along those lines, they have to be careful to distinguish among different interpretations of that idea. There is the “multiverse” of inflationary cosmology, the “many worlds” or “branches of the wave function” of quantum mechanics, and “parallel branes” of string theory. Increasingly, however, people are wondering whether the first two concepts might actually represent the same underlying idea. (I think the branes are still a truly distinct notion.)

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At first blush it seems crazy — or at least that was my own initial reaction. When cosmologists talk about “the multiverse,” it’s a slightly poetic term. We really just mean different regions of spacetime, far away so that we can’t observe them, but nevertheless still part of what one might reasonably want to call “the universe.” In inflationary cosmology, however, these different regions can be relatively self-contained — “pocket universes,” as Alan Guth calls them. When you combine this with string theory, the emergent local laws of physics in the different pocket universes can be very different; they can have different particles, different forces, even different numbers of dimensions. So there is a good reason to think about them as separate universes, even if they’re all part of the same underlying spacetime.

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The situation in quantum mechanics is superficially entirely different. Think of Schrödinger’s Cat. Quantum mechanics describes reality in terms of wave functions, which assign numbers (amplitudes) to all the various possibilities of what we can see when we make an observation. The cat is neither alive nor dead; it is in a superposition of alive + dead. At least, until we observe it. In the simplistic Copenhagen interpretation, at the moment of observation the wave function “collapses” onto one actual possibility. We see either an alive cat or a dead cat; the other possibility has simply ceased to exist. In the Many Worlds or Everett interpretation, both possibilities continue to exist, but “we” (the macroscopic observers) are split into two, one that observes a live cat and one that observes a dead one. There are now two of us, both equally real, never to come back into contact.

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These two ideas sound utterly different. In the cosmological multiverse, the other universes are simply far away; in quantum mechanics, they’re right here, but in different possibility spaces (i.e. different parts of Hilbert space, if you want to get technical). But some physicists have been musing for a while that they might actually be the same, and now there are a couple of new papers by brave thinkers from the Bay Area that make this idea explicit.

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Physical Theories, Eternal Inflation, and Quantum Universe, Yasunori Nomura

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The Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Raphael Bousso and Leonard Susskind

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Related ideas have been discussed recently under the rubric of “how to do quantum mechanics in an infinitely big universe”; see papers by Don Page and another by Anthony Aguirre, David Layzer, and Max Tegmark. But these two new ones go explicitly for the “multiverse = many-worlds” theme.

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After reading these papers I’ve gone from a confused skeptic to a tentative believer. This happened for a very common reason: I realized that these ideas fit very well with other ideas I’ve been thinking about myself! So I’m going to try to explain a bit about what is going on. However, for better or for worse, my interpretation of these papers is strongly colored by my own ideas. So I’m going to explain what I think has a chance of being true; I believe it’s pretty close to what is being proposed in these papers, but don’t hold the authors responsible for anything silly that I end up saying.

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There are two ideas that fit together to make this crazy-sounding proposal into something sensible. The first is quantum vacuum decay.

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Are Many Worlds and the Multiverse the Same Idea? – Sean Carroll

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(I am glad I knew what keywords to type. Carrolls article was totally unfinable when I put "sean carroll many worlds interpretation" into google. Alot is said about Carroll on the net. Awsome. I put this search term to find the article: sean carroll many worlds interpretation hibbert space multiverse 2011)Next

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LamarkNewAge in Message 11 quotes
Tanypteryx from Message 9:
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"Well, it wasn't the cosmic microwave background when it was emitted. And we are trying to compare observations made here and now on Earth of events that occurred in the distant past."
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​LamarkNewAge
I would consider the question to be the accuracy of the measuring technique and the resolution of the image. Do have any comments on how recent the CMB data brings us to a clear picture, and how clear would you call the picture
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Tanpteryx
I don't understand what kind of answer you are asking for here either.

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I suppose I wanted to see what value people placed on the CMB.
Then compared it to other pictures from other observation techniques.

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OK, I am really confused now, are you asking here why the supernovae results don't agree with eachother in some way, or why the supernovae and CMB data disagree?

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All of the above
(yes and yes)I was quote as saying:

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LamarkNewAge in Message 11 writes:
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CMB and Type IA Supernova observations are clearly different techniques.
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Both are trying to see what speed the inflation of the universe was moving at and at what time.

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You responed:
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Obviously different measurement techniques, one giving data on the temperature of different regions of the Universe when it was ~380,000 years after the Big Bang and the other measuring the distance of different supernovae at different times in the past to measure the expansion rate.
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I thought "inflation" referred specifically to a brief period of very rapid expansion right after the Big Bang. Are you using "inflation" and "expansion" interchangeably?

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I was asking about the broad sweep, but you don't need to address the first fraction of a second of the universe (light was not even visible until 379,000 years later (CMB!) so the Supernovae observations wont ever be relevant to that).I did not specifically mention Dark Energy, perhaps due to the fact that it can possibly be used in way too overgeneralized of a fashion, when describing the expansion from all time periods. But, the use of the term Dark Energy is taken to be a synonym for expansion in general. So just assume I was talking about Dark Energy.

OK, I'm going to let you carry on. I really don't understand anything you are saying, so I shouldn't comment further.

It's like looking at the world using the reflection from the shattered pieces of a mirror. Many of the pieces are familiar but somehow different, and there are also completely unrecognizable pieces, and in the end you just can't tell what it is.--Percy

Yeah, I had forgotten about that. A broken mirror describes it better than anything I have heard before.

I hope a Big Crunch is not back.But:

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Dark energy could be getting weaker, suggesting the universe will end in a 'Big Crunch'

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News

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By Robert Lea published 2 days ago

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"The discovery of evolving dark energy would be as revolutionary as the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe itself, if confirmed."

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The current "standard model" of the cosmos, its history, and its evolution is called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model — but the supremacy of this model, in which lambda represents the cosmological constant and dark energy, may now be under serious threat.

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In short, that is because new observations of the cosmos have suggested that dark energy, the force causing our universe to expand faster and faster, seems to be weakening. That may not sound like much in and of itself, but this finding actually has the potential to cause the first major paradigm shift in cosmology since the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe just over 25 years ago. It could even suggest out universe won't end in a "Big Rip," or a "Big Chill," but rather a "Big Crunch." More on that shortly, first, let's dive into these fascinating results.

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Related: Largest 3D map of our universe could hint that dark energy evolves with time

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"The release of these results was a great day for cosmology, pointing to a 'decreasing' effect of the dark energy over time, meaning it is evolving and, therefore, not constant after all," Luz Ángela García Peñaloza, former DESI team member and a cosmologist at the Universidad ECCI in Columbia, told Space.com. "The discovery of evolving dark energy would be as revolutionary as the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe itself, if confirmed with future data."

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Please provide link.

The concept of a Big Crunch, where the universe collapses in on itself, is certainly a dramatic and intriguing possibility. However, it is important to note that this is still a theoretical concept and not a confirmed reality. The idea that dark energy, the force driving the universe's expansion, may be weakening and potentially leading to a Big Crunch is a fascinating hypothesis that could shake up our current understanding of the cosmos. It will be interesting to see how further research and observations contribute to this theory and whether it will be confirmed or debunked in the future.

The link first:Dark energy could be getting weaker, suggesting the universe will end in a 'Big Crunch' | Space(This "bad news" came just before I started my thread, 2 weeks ago)(This is not the other "bad" news, which I have been discussing - Supernova results)The Supernova results came in early JanuaryI immediately thought of the implications for the (hypothetical) multiverse, and the (very controversial) Quantum Many Worlds.Sean Carroll, every month, has a three hour question and answer program. Usually, it is mostly about the Many Worlds Theory. He did not get any questions about whether the collapse of the Cosmological Constant could also sink the Many Worlds Theory. I fear it could bring down my favorite theories.