What If Dark Energy is a New Quantum Field?

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What is Quintessence? Well we know that something is up with the way the universe is expanding - there’s some kind of anti-gravitational effect that’s causing the expansion to accelerate. We don’t know what it is - just that it competes against the inward-pulling effect of gravity. And it’s winning - it looks like the universe will expand forever, at an ever-increasing rate. We call this mysterious influence dark energy, but while we’ve talked a lot about how it behaves, we’ve never really explored what it is. So, what is dark energy, really?

One strong possibility is quintessence. Quintessence is a hypothetical form of dark energy, more precisely a scalar field. Watch the episode to learn more.

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Hosted by Matt O'Dowd

Written by Matt Caplan & Matt O'Dowd

Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini, Pedro Osinski, Caique Oliveira, Adriano Leal & Stephanie Faria

GFX Visualizations: Ajay Manuel

Directed by Andrew Kornhaber

Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour

Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber

Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez

Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing

Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell

Spacetime is produced by Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.

This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.

© 2022 PBS. All rights reserved.

End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg

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