[danharaj]

Actually, a cosmological constant is derivable from the Standard Model. But it's off by a very remarkable amount. Dark energy is the observation that that the Standard Model mispredicts the cosmological constant, so there must be something wrong with it.

[zwkrt]

Also known as the Vacuum Catastrophe, "the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of science".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_catastrophe

[acqq]

> cosmological constant is derivable from the Standard Model.

Well.. not really directly "derivable."

To be more specific, the "problem" is: when using the the "Standard Model of particle physics" (which is confirmed time and again for anything we do with the particles, and which, of course, we anyway know that is still inconsistent with the General Relativity model) to calculate the "renormalized value of the zero-point vacuum energy density" as the contribution to the cosmological constant, the number is calculated that, to our present understanding of the factors involved, can't match our cosmological measurements. Note that that "renormalization" process is a method used otherwise to "extract" the finite answer from the divergent expression (i.e. one that would involve infinities). Applying such method in this derivations gets the "wrong" number.

It's much less surprising when it is stated precisely. Attempting specific derivations in which the "infinities" are "avoided" by using a specific approach which for some other cases works, we discover that in these derivations the mentioned approach "doesn't work", that is, that something is missing in an attempt to compare two theories for which we anyway know that they aren't consistent when they have to be applied together.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.3365

Luckily, these inconsistencies aren't something that prevents us to use both General Relativity and the Standard Model independently to great success. Using them together is needed only to model very extreme conditions like writing the equations for some point inside of the black hole or something like that. And that doesn't disprove black holes in any way: we measured even their collisions(!) using the predictions of the models.

And we can claim already:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/29/seriousl...

"The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood"