Bonus Info on Dark Energy and Muons

I had two pieces up this month, one in New Scientist and one in Quanta. I figured I’d give a bit of “bonus info” for both here. The New Scientist piece covered a paper arguing that, according to the supernova evidence, there is no need for dark energy, because the universe isn’t speeding up after all. That’s a pretty dramatic claim, and it’s one the majority of cosmologists don’t agree with. But a small group has been hammering at the consensus. Long-time followers of this blog have already heard of these folks. I criticized news coverage around a paper with one of the authors, Subir Sarkar, back in 2016, when he was only arguing that the supernova evidence was insufficient to establish dark energy, not that it was literally the wrong way around. He and his co-authors wanted an opportunity to state their case, so I posted their response a few weeks later. Later, I got to know Rameez, another author on the new paper. He ended up doing a guest post in 2019, on the next step in the…