Monday, October 20, 2008

Quantifying Diverse Universe


I watched The Universe on History channel recently. Pretty interesting program. But what beat me is the statement "73% of the universe is Dark Energy". Statements like this throw me off balance. First of all, to talk about how big the pieces of a pie are, shouldn't we know how big the whole pie is? Also, what is the guarantee that what we see is representative of the universe? When a decent level of uncertainty is involved, I would say something like "about two thirds of the "observed" universe is estimated to be dark energy" or something generic like that. I would refrain from exuding confidence with statements like "72.98% of the universe is Dark Energy".

Reminds me of the quote "38% of the of the statistics are made up on the spot"!

I am sure astronomers had a good reason for saying what they said - I just didn't get it.

1 comment:

ShastriX said...

Ha, ha, Gopa. Lies, damn lies, and stats.

Reading an interesting post the other day that God doesn't create the Universe; He projects it. So that adds a further spin to the whole "she-bang" :-)