A Dark Future

Happy Memorial Day! Last Tuesday's New York Times lamented on the sad state of Physics funding. Despite Physicists' being awarded the title of astronomer along with a Nobel Prize, there is zero interest in funding for "dark" energy. American Physics Dreams Deferred "Dark energy is, according to Dr. [Frank] Wilczek, the most mysterious fact in all of physical science, the fact with the greatest potential to rock the foundations." The 8 billion dollar James Webb Space Telescope will be consuming NASA's astrophysics budget until its launch, hopefully in 2018. A proposed Space mission to find more DE, once called SNAP or JDEM, has been postponed at least until 2025. The unfunded mission, now called WFIRST, would cost at least 1.6 billion. JWST was also once projected to cost less than 1 billion. Hypothesis of "dark" energy has led Physics nowhere. Even if a WFIRST mission were flown, it would not return a single particle of DE, only an "equation of state" that would be subject to systematic error. If DE existed it would have no conceivable use, it would be too diffuse in Space to power a flashlight. The answer is not in darkness but in light. Observations of an "acclerating" Universe are signs that the speed of light has been slowing down. GM=tc^3, a child could figure it out.