Dark Empire Strikes Back

In 1998 Adam Riess was first author on a paper claiming evidence that the universe was accelerating. In 2011 he shared 1/4 of a Nobel Prize for the "discovery". Shortly after Oxford researchers published a paper saying the dark energy may not exist, Riess was compelled to write a denial in Scientific American blogs.

No, astronomers haven't decided dark energy is nonexistent!

It's on!

"Dark energy" still doesn't exist

Professor Subir Sarkar of Oxford has long been a skeptic of "dark energy". The idea of an accelerating universe was first proposed in 1998 by two competing groups of physicists, both based in Berkeley and both using the same data on Type Ia supernovae. In a new study of 740 supernovae, 10 times the original dataset, Professor Sarkar concludes that the data is consistent with a non-accelerating universe.

Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae

For years physicists have spent careers and their credibility professing that the universe is filled with a repulsive "dark energy". If DE really dominated the universe, objects would not fall toward Earth!

Data indicating an "accelerating universe" really shows a slowing speed of light. A simple equation GM=tc^3 predicts the data precisely.