Albert Stebbins (Fermilab, USA)
Over the past decade a small community of scientists have been exploring the possibility that the dark energy phenomena" is not an indication of a new form of matter, but rather an indication that we should abandon the Copernican Principle and that we do live near a privileged position in the Universe. This is possible because no cosmological test of dark energy actually measures accelerations which would prove the existence of a gravitationally repulsive dark energy, they only infer acceleration by assuming cosmic homogeneity. This leads to the more general question of what can we infer about our universe if we abandon various assumptions such as homogeneity. An observationally based coordinatization of space-time is introduced which may help to explore this question.
