How good is the evidence for Dark Energy?

An interview with Subir Sarkar, Professor for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford, UK. He is referring to the following papers:

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[paulfrunza]

Amazing minds, what a great pleasure to listen to even though I don't know many things you are talking about. This is the great advantage of Internet, being schooled by the greatest. How else we will have such a chance?

[picksalot]

Absolutely brilliant presentation by the Professor Sarkar, and good decision by Sabine to let him speak uninterrupted. He had a lot to say and he is amazingly articulate about a difficult subject. 5 Sigma all the way. Thanks Sabine for getting and sharing that interview!

[RobertSmith-pwio]

An excellent explaination of the how easily it is to jump to conclusions without adequate data, and modification of the data used for a particular study. Very good work Dr. Hossenfelder, , and thank you very much!! I strongly suggest cosmologists to watch this..

[robertfraser]

Sabine ! You must do another interview with Subir to update this very superb interview. It is fantastic to see you in a serious interview mode adding gold nuggets to the discussion. This is far and away your best interview i have seen so far (aug 2023)

[piotrliach]

I am still impressed by the breadth of prof. Sarkar's knowledge. Thank you, Sabine, for your interest in the pursuit of thought-provoking scientific ideas and debates.

[sholinwright]

Dr Sarkhar has a tremendously scientific mind. I’d love to see more interviews with him.

[AndrewBlucher]

I learned a few things ...

100 megaparsecs is small scale!

They only analysed a million galaxies.

They need to analyze 100 times that.

On the shoulders of giants, indeed!

[agrimsharma]

This is how all scientific interviews should be: Expert to expert.
They capture all the important points without oversimplifying it.
The conversation and bouncing of thoughts happened so smoothly and precisely,
unlike most pop-sci interviews.

Definitely hope that such interviews happen more frequently.

[franimal]

Thank you for updating us with the guy who did the study!! Amazing work. Wish this kind of stuff actually made it on tv. Thankfully you provide us with this content regardless.

[AnthonyBouttell]

Brilliant! Subir did an excellent job in explaining the problem he sees with Dark Energy.

[billbrockman]

Rarely have I had to pay closer attention to a video to even begin to understand. It was well worth the effort. Thanks.

[cipaisone]

this channel deserves more subscriptions !

[NomenNescio]

Thank you so much for taking the time to make content like this!

I've got a M.Sc degree and I'm very interested in these topics, but I still sometimes lack the knowledge required to follow all the details in the conversation.

But I'm very pleased that my knowledge is challenged and I have the opportunity to learn something.

[En_theo]

Thank you very much for taking the time to explain all this, Mr. Sarkar. Also thank you Sabine and team for making this possible !

[Williamtolduso]

Fascinating interview. It's a little scary that this natural skepticism is not more prevalent in the cosmo community.

[paulb]

I remember reading an article on this, so it's great to have an interview. Many thanks!

Edit: @Sabine Hossenfelder now change the video from unlisted to listed!

[MrBrelindm]

The old adage of "garbage in equals garbage out" applies to LCDM. Of course, it goes without saying that in order to confirm published conclusions, the dataset used must also be made available. True science is not an exercise in 'black box cosmology'.

Kudos for a very interesting interview Sabine!

[leighcoulson]

I can't say I understood everything ...as I'm not a physicist or an astronomer but I got the gist of it pretty well. This is a great example of scientific thinking in action.

[rc]

I enjoyed learning so much from the careful explanation from Professor Sarkar.

[ps]

Thanks for this amazing interview Sabine. I was delighted to find I could just about follow it all. Prof. Sarkar was really good at explaining his points. Would love to see more like this.


When I studied astrophysics I got the idea that a lot of analyses were very imprecise. Order of magnitude estimates were common. One lecturer said even pi was commonly approximated as 1. In recent years we're supposed to have entered the era of "precision cosmology". Looks like not everyone has the same idea about what "precise" means. When I learned about the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect nobody ever told me it hadn't been measured precisely enough to even know if it exists!