ABOUT DARK MATTER & DARK ENERGY
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I just found the article, below, in
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu ...
The article is about
1. THE PREPOSTEROUS UNIVERSE (Title as given)
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Do scientists expect us laity to believe that what is going on in the universe is contrary to nature, reason, or commonsense; absurd; senseless? Ridiculous? Laughable? Sounds very human (and theological?) to me. 
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I am not making the following up: "Surprising experimental results are the most common driving force behind significant advances in scientific understanding. The recent discovery that the universe appears to be dominated by a component of "dark energy" qualifies as an extraordinarily surprising result; we have every reason to be optimistic that attempts to understand this phenomenon will lead to profound improvements in our pictures of gravitation, particle physics, and gravitation."
I repeat, the above sounds very metaphysical, and even theological. And there is more:
"1.1. Dark energy
In general relativity, a homogeneous and isotropic universe is characterized by two quantities, the spatial curvature kappa and scale factor a(t). These are related to the energy density $ \rho$ by the Friedmann equation:"
... The equation cannot be reproduced here. It is in the article ...
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Below, I give the link to the full article, from which I give the following brief quote with a very interesting question:
2. WHAT MIGHT BE GOING ON?
It may seem misguided to put a great deal of energy into exploring models of a small nonzero dark energy density when we have very little idea why the vacuum energy is not as large as the Planck scale. On the other hand, the discovery of dark energy may provide an invaluable clue in our attempts to solve this long-lasting puzzle, giving us reason to redouble our efforts. Explanations of the current acceleration of the universe can be categorized into one of three types:
1. The dark energy is a true cosmological constant, strictly unchanging throughout space and time. The minimum-energy configuration of the universe may have a small but nonvanishing energy density, or we may live in a false vacuum, almost degenerate with the true one but with a small nonzero additional energy.
2. The cosmological constant is zero, but a slowly-varying dynamical component is mimicking a nonzero vacuum energy.
3. Einstein was wrong, and the Friedmann equation does not describe the expansion of the universe.
We briefly examine each of these possibilities in turn.
2.1. An honest cosmological constant
The simplest interpretation of the dark energy is that we have discovered that the cosmological constant is not quite zero: we are in the lowest energy state possible (or, more properly, that the particles we observe are excitations of such a state) but that energy does not vanish. Although simple, this scenario is perhaps the hardest to analyze without an understanding of the complete cosmological constant problem, and there is correspondingly little to say about such a possibility. As targets to shoot for, various numerological coincidences have been pointed out, which may some day find homes as predictions of an actual theory. For example, the observed vacuum energy scale Mvac = 10-3 eV is related to the 1 TeV scale of low-energy supersymmetry breaking models by a "supergravity suppression factor":
Equation 8 (8)
In other words, MSUSY is the geometric mean of Mvac and MPlanck. Unfortunately, nobody knows why this should be the case. In a similar spirit, the vacuum energy density is related to the Planck energy density by the kind of suppression factor familiar from instanton calculations in gauge theories:
Equation 9 ...
Is it possible for someone trained in physics to put this information in journalese so that we lay readers with an interest in science, but are not all that familiar with the jargon of physics, could possibly understand.
