THE nature of dark energy, the mysterious stuff that is relentlessly pushing the universe apart, could be revealed by a simple table-top experiment.
Physicists dreamed up dark energy in 1998, when they found that distant supernovae appeared fainter than expected, showing that they were farther away than previously thought. To explain this, they concluded that the expansion of the universe must be accelerating and that dark energy was responsible.
One possible origin for dark energy arises from a prediction made by quantum physics: that the vacuum of space is a choppy sea of “quantum fluctuations”. This quantum vacuum could be…
