"So when I finished my Ph.D., in retrospect its kind of hard to believe that I had the audacity to do what I am about to describe. But I sort of looked around and asked myself, "Whats the most interesting remaining , and where can I go to work on it?" ... the problem ..."
Christopher Stubbs is an experimental physicist on the faculty at Harvard University in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astronomy. He is the former Dean of Science at Harvard University and a former chair of Harvard's Department of Physics.
"In my opinion the situation constitutes a crisis in fundamental physics that is every bit as profound as that which preceded the advent of quantum mechanics. ... Today, in the absence of a clear theoretical framework with relevant predictive power, the Dark Energy problem is best characterized as a data and discovery driven endeavor, spiced with interesting theoretical speculation."
"Ground-based and s suffer from sources of image quality degradation that typically preclude achieving the . For 𝐷=10 m class telescopes at optical wavelengths (𝜆 ∼500), the typical achieved of around 1 for a celestial (absent correction) is about 100 times worse than the diffraction limit. A variety of factors contribute to this image degradation, including: • index of refraction variations in the , • “ground layer” or “boundary layer” due to the boundary condition of zero wind velocity at the Earth’s surface, • perturbations to due to local topography and structures, • turbulence within the enclosure, due to ambient and driven airflow through the slit and vents in the dome, • thermally driven air currents due to power dissipation on the telescope top end, and other locations, • turbulence and thermal currents in the vicinity of the primary mirror due to temperature differences between the mirror and the adjacent air, • tracking errors and vibrations in the , • wind-driven oscillations and motions of the mirror support systems, and • quasi-static s in the optical system."
"Much of the of the Universe is thought to reside in some as yet unidentified . This view is based on the analysis of trajectories of luminous ‘‘tracers’’ that map out the local potential, assuming that gravity is the only long ranged interaction between ordinary and dark matter. This assumption should be tested experimentally if possible. Laboratory tests of the can constrain (at an interesting level) any exotic coupling between ordinary and dark matter when analyzed as a test of the uniformity of towards the center of the Galaxy."