I recorded a new song the other night that I actually wrote! It’s all instrumental, but I ended up doing a decent job on it. It’s about how I feel victorious in life in general, right now. With Olivia, and school, etc.

A couple weeks ago I applied for the Anna K. Suter scholarship at IUPUI. It’s a scholarship for math majors, and my calculus professor told me he thought I’d be a very strong candidate for it. The committee had their meeting yesterday, and I should find out on Friday about whether I win one of the awards or not. I’ll definitely post about it, if I’m one of the award winners.

Today, one of my old friend’s sister Biz Strother came over and we recorded some of her music. We recorded two songs. I’m working on one still, but the other came out great! It’s called Paper and Glue, and Biz wrote it herself.

I now have condenser microphones, and am able to record vocals and acoustic instruments really well. I also recorded a cover of Polly by Nirvana with my dad the other night, but we both sang in it, and are pretty embarrassed. We did it just for fun.

Winter Break has been great! I ended up with straight As for my first semester! 4.0! Mike and I recorded some music with our drummer friend Nick Walker last week. I’m working on getting more equipment. Expect more music in the coming months!

Back in the day, Einstein, after discovering a few important implications about gravity, through the theory of relativity, realized that if there is a certain amount of gravitational force between two objects, then, every object in the universe must be pulled towards the other.

Einstein didn’t like this idea much, so he came up with a new force called the Cosmological constant. This force would counter gravity causing the universe to be static, or standing still… Einstein later called this his biggest blunder, when the Hubble telescope was used to discover that the universe is expanding, and definitely not standing still.

Nearly 10 years ago, physicists found out that not only is the universe expanding, but its expansion is accelerating. Now, just think about what that means for a second. That means that gravity is being overcome by something. It’s effect isn’t wholly resisting some other force that is forcing galaxies apart.

Scientists are now finding that there must be some cosmological constant to explain this accelerated expansion. They’re calling it dark energy, and it’s not just enough to overpower gravity, but they’re saying that this ‘dark energy’ makes up roughly 74% of the universe.

Observing these galaxies that are accelerating away from ours, physicists are able to calculate what’s called the “w-parameter” which describes the ‘density’ of this dark energy (or just the cosmological constant) that opposes gravity. In order for Einstein to be correct with the model he created, the w-parameter must be exactly -1.

So what have they calculated? The team doing the research won’t have a final answer until next year, but as of now… it is -1 with a plus or minus 10% error! So, according to these results, Einstein was correct in what he called his biggest blunder. Now this isn’t just it. After this, there is a lot of theorizing and explaining to do.

Physics describes physical phenomena, but there is absolutely no explanation for why this dark energy exists or how it manifests itself without being traced. There are many (currently) untestable theories of the universe that could explain it, but obviously, physicists have a long way to go.