Dark Energy and Dark Matter

The nice (aka hot and humid) weather does not preclude the fact that it was a fairly ordinary working day for me today, reading some more on ROOT and getting my mind wrapped around the showers after showers of cosmic ray particles. My first excursion into Emacs was somewhat bumpy, but I'm still hoping for some day when I can dash around Emacs with lightening speed -- with the keyboard, no mouse.

In the afternoon there was a seminar talk on dark matter and dark energy by a guy whose name, unfortunately, I did not get because I was a little late to the seminar. I had to say I was very fascinated. Some people I talked to after the seminar seem not very much attracted to the amount of equations and theories in the talk (which, after all, is all we can deal with dark energy and dark matter at this point, since experimental approaches so far provide just observations and conjectures, not explanations, as I understand), but I personally like the equations very much, especially all the mathematical terminologies that seem to sneak in from time to time (compact spaces, hmm...). It was the first time I heard about dark energy and dark matter from someone who really seem to know the topic (even though, of course, Prof. Adam Riess at Hopkins is famous for his work on this topic), and I admit I'm lost most of the time - but that really did not prevent me from liking it!