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Might gravity have mass?

Click on the image to read the whole article for free, courtesy of Physics World.

From Physics World:

When confronted with something unexplained in the data, scientists face several possibilities. Maybe there’s an error and the result is spurious. Maybe there’s a more mundane explanation they simply overlooked. Or perhaps the unexplained is a sign that a theory needs to be revised or supplanted. That last option is the rarest, at least when the theory in ques- tion is a successful one. After all, any new theory must explain all the same phenomena an old theory explained, and predict something new that can’t be handled with the old.

One unexplained result that’s been bugging physicists for more than 15 years is dark energy, which is the name we give to our ignorance. The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, but we don’t know why. To make matters worse, dark energy comprises roughly three-quarters of the total energy content of the cosmos, so it’s not a minor thing we don’t get. For that reason, a small but dogged group of physicists thinks the existence of dark energy might be a clue that we need to revise one of the most successful theories we have: general relativity.

One way to revise general relativity is to modify the nature of the gravitational force so that it behaves as though it has mass.

The rest of this story is in the print edition of Physics World, which you can subscribe to through membership in the Institute of Physics, which costs £15, €20, or $25 per year. You can join by clicking here. You can also get a nice mobile- and tablet-formatted version of the story using the Physics World app, available in the Google Play and iTunes stores. However, if you just want to read the rest of this article, Physics World has kindly allowed me to offer it to you as a PDF download, which looks exactly like the printed version!