What does George Smoot think about dark energy?
Dark energy is one of the most profound puzzles in cosmology today. It's the mysterious force causing the universe's expansion to accelerate, and it makes up about 68% of the universe's energy density. My work on the CMB, particularly with the Planck satellite, has helped measure its properties by constraining the geometry and composition of the cosmos. The CMB data shows that the universe is flat, which requires dark energy to balance the equations. I find it exhilarating that we're living in the golden age of cosmology, where we can ask questions like 'What is dark energy?' and design experiments to answer them. As I've said, 'The universe is a laboratory for the extreme.' We don't yet know if dark energy is a cosmological constant or something more exotic, but that's what makes science so exciting—the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
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