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"we know from Genesis 1 that God made the earth before He made the stars"
1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
14. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18. And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
Does Dark Energy Spring From the 'Quantum Vacuum?'SPACE.comby Mike Wall, Senior Writer 13 hours agoObservations of Planck and other satellites help to solve the equation of the state of dark energy.The mysterious dark energy that's driving the universe's accelerated expansion may have its roots in the background "vacuum energy" that pervades all of the cosmos, a new study suggests."What we think is happening is a dynamic effect of the quantum vacuum, a parameter that we can calculate," co-author Joan Sola, of the University of Barcelona in Spain, said in a statement. "Nothing is more 'full' than the quantum vacuum since it is full of fluctuations that contribute fundamentally to the values that we observe and measure."Though dark energy constitutes about 75 percent of the universe, scientists don't know exactly what it is. They've developed several different ideas, including the theory of "quintessence," which proposes a sort of anti-gravitating agent that repels rather than attracts.Another concept posits the existence of a "phantom field" whose density continues to increase with time. This theory predicts an accelerating expansion so powerful that it will eventually break apart the bonds that hold atoms together, tearing the universe apart in a "Big Rip" about 20 billion years from now.The quintessence and phantom field hypotheses are based partly on data gathered by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the European Space Agency's Planck satellite— spacecraft that have studied the cosmic microwave background, the ancient light that began saturating the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang.In the new study, Sola and lead author Spyros Basilakos of the Academy of Athens in Greece analyze the same spacecraft observations and find less support for either quintessence or the phantom field idea."Our theoretical study demonstrates that the equation of the state of dark energy can simulate a quintessence field, or even a phantom field, without being one in reality," Sola said. "Thus, when we see these effects in the observations from WMAP, Planck and other instruments, what we are seeing is a mirage."Basilakos and Sola instead suggest that dark energy is a type of dynamic quantum vacuum energy — something different than Einstein's cosmological constant, which describes a static vacuum energy density and is another possible explanation of dark energy's nature.Basilakos and Sola acknowledge there are some issues with the quantum vacuum energy theory but say it's a promising idea."However, quintessence and phantom fields are still more problematic; therefore the explanation based on the dynamic quantum vacuum could be the more simple and natural one," Sola said.
Relativistic van der Waals force[edit]Alternatively, a 2005 paper by Robert Jaffe of MIT states that "Casimir effects can be formulated and Casimir forces can be computed without reference to zero-point energies. They are relativistic, quantum forces between charges and currents. The Casimir force (per unit area) between parallel plates vanishes as alpha, the fine structure constant, goes to zero, and the standard result, which appears to be independent of alpha, corresponds to the alpha → infinity limit," and that "The Casimir force is simply the (relativistic, retarded) van der Waals force between the metal plates."[15]