7 Quotes by Eric Linder

I started out bad, ... You know what you have to shoot. This was disappointing, to start out that way and end that way.

Scientists have been arguing the question 'how precisely do we need to measure dark energy in order to know what it is?' ... What we have done in our paper is suggest precision limits for the measurements. Fortunately, these limits should be within the range of the JDEM experiments.

A quintessence scalar field is like a field of springs covering every point in space, with each spring stretched to a different length, ... For Einstein's cosmological constant, each spring would be the same length and motionless.

It was a bit overwhelming, ... I didn't have a problem going third (in the playoff order). Everyone was a little nervous.

The cosmological constant was a vacuum energy (the energy of empty space) that kept gravity from pulling the universe in on itself, ... A problem with the cosmological constant is that it is constant, with the same energy density, pressure, and equation of state over time. Dark energy, however, had to be negligible in the universe's earliest stages; otherwise the galaxies and all their stars would never have formed.

If the results from measurements such as those that could be made with SNAP lie outside the thawing or freezing scenarios, then we may have to look beyond quintessence, perhaps to even more exotic physics, such as a modification of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity to explain dark energy.

Because dark energy makes up about 70 percent of the content of the universe, it dominates over the matter content. That means dark energy will govern expansion and, ultimately, determine the fate of the universe.