In 1972 and 1973 two space probes, Pioneer 10 and 11, were launched to study Jupiter and Saturn. By the end of the 1980s they were in deep space, heading out of the known solar system. There has long been a belief, a scientific legend waiting to happen, that beyond Pluto there may be an as yet undiscovered planet, Planet X. Such a planet would disturb the motions of the two Pioneers, so it was worth tracking the probes in the hope of finding unexpected deviations. John Andersen's team found deviations, all right, but they didn't fit Planet X, and they didn't fit General Relativity either. The Pioneers are coasting, with no active form of propulsion, so the gravity of the Sun (and the much weaker gravity of the other bodies of the known solar system) pulls on them and gradually slows them down. But the probes were slowing down a tiny bit more than they should have been. In 1994 Michael Martin suggested that this effect had become sufficiently well established that it cast doubt on Einstein's theory, and in 1998 Anderson's team reported that what was observed could not be explained by such effects as instrument error, gas clouds, the push of sunlight, or the gravitational pull of outlying comets.
Three other scientists quickly responded by suggesting other things that might explain the anomalies. Two wondered about waste heat. The Pioneers are powered by onboard nuclear generators, and they radiate a small amount of surplus heat into space. The pressure of that radiation might slow the craft down by the observed amount. The other possible explanation is that the Pioneers may be venting tiny quantities of fuel into space. Anderson thought about these explanations and found problems with them both.
The strangest feature of the observed slowing down is that it is precisely what would be predicted by an unorthodox theory suggested in 1983 by Mordehai Milgrom. This theory changes not the law of gravity, but Newton's law of motion: force equals mass times acceleration. Milgrom's modification applies when the acceleration is very small, and it was introduced in order to explain another gravitational puzzle, the fact that galaxies do not rotate at the speeds predicted by either Newton or Einstein. This discrepancy is usually put down to the existence of 'cold dark matter' which exerts a gravitational pull but can't be seen in telescopes. If galaxies have a halo of cold dark matter then they will rotate at a speed that is inconsistent with the matter in the visible portions. A lot of theorists dislike cold dark matter (because you can't observe it directly, that's what 'cold dark' means) and Milgrom's theory has slowly gained in popularity. Further studies of the Pioneers may help decide.
The other discovery is about the expansion of the universe. The universe is getting bigger, but it now seems that the very distant universe is expanding faster than it ought to. This startling result -confirmed by later, more detailed studies, comes from the Supernova Cosmology project headed by Saul Perlmutter and its arch-rival High-Z Supernova Search Team headed by Brian Schmidt. It shows up as a slight bend in a graph of how a distant supernova's apparent brightness varies with its red shift. According to General Relativity, that graph ought to be straight, but it's not. It behaves as if there is some repulsive component to gravity which only shows up at extremely long distances, say half the radius of the universe. A form of antigravity, in fact.
Curiously, Einstein originally included a repulsive force of this kind in his relativistic equations for gravity: he called it the cosmo-logical constant. Later he changed his mind and threw the cosmological constant out, complaining that he'd been foolish to include it in the first place. He died thinking it was a blemish on his record, but maybe his original intuition was spot on after all.
There is also a possible link to the other deep physical theory, quantum mechanics. At first this looked unlikely. If there is an antigravity effect, then it should stem from Vacuum energy', a form of energy that, if it exists, is stored in empty space ... (As we write this, we can picture Ridcully's expression. We shall have to ignore it. This isn't something sensible, like magic. This is science. Empty space can be full of interest.)
However, quantum theory predicts that if vacuum energy exists in today's universe, then it would produce an antigravity effect 10119 (1 followed by 119 zeros) times as big as what's observed. Although astronomers are accustomed to larger experimental errors than you find in most other sciences, this is too much for even them to swallow. But late in 1998 Robert Matthews wondered whether the antigravity effect might come from a relic of the vacuum energy of an earlier phase of the universe. His idea is related to a sixty-year-old piece of speculation by Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum theory. Dirac noticed a strange coincidence. The electromagnetic force between a proton and an electron is 1040 (1 followed by 40 zeros) times as great as the gravitational force between them. The age of the universe is also 1040 times as great as the time it takes light to cross one atom. It's not hard to come up with numerologi-cal accidents of this kind, but Dirac had a hunch that this one might indicate some deep connection between the expansion of the universe and the microscopic quantum realm. Now Matthews has come up with a possible explanation of the coincidence, and it fits the antigravity effect.
According to the Big Bang theory, the early history of the universe involves a number of 'phase transitions', dramatic changes of state which result in big qualitative changes in how the universe works. The earliest one occurred when the strong nuclear force separated from the electromagnetic forces and the weak nuclear force. The last in this series of phase transitions was the quark-hadron transition, in which quarks grouped together to produce the more familiar protons and neutrons. If the universe has somehow retained the vacuum energy from this phase transition, then it will exhibit an antigravity effect of just the right size. So these curious observations may be telling us something rather curious about the early universe.
NEVER TRUST A CURVED UNIVERSE
PONDER STIBBONS HAD SET UP A DESK a little separate from the others and surrounded it with a lot of equipment, primarily in order to hear himself think.
Everyone knew that stars were points of light. If they weren't, some would be visibly bigger than others. Some were fainter than others, of course, but that was probably due to clouds. In any case their purpose, according to established Discworld law, was to lend a little style to the night.
And everyone knew that the natural way for things to move was in a straight line. If you dropped something, it hit the ground. It didn't curve. The water fell over the edge of the world, drifting sideways just a tiny bit to make up for the spin, but that was common sense. But inside the Project, spin was everything. Everything was bent. Archchancellor Ridcully seemed to think this was some sort of large-scale character flaw, akin to shuffling your feet or not owning up to things. You couldn't trust a universe of curves. It wasn't playing a straight bat.
At the moment Ponder was rolling damp paper into little balls. He'd had the gardener push in a large stone ball that had spent the last few hundred years on the university's rockery, relic of some ancient siege catapult. It was about three feet across.
He'd hung some paper balls of string near it. Now, glumly, he threw others over it and around it. One or two did stick, admittedly, but only because they were damp. He was in the grip of some thought, You had to start with what you were certain of. Things fell down. Little things fell down on to big things. That was common sense.