BAD TASTE AS A DOOMSDAY THEORY

It looks like bad taste may bring the world to an end in what's being called the Big Rip. Not content with being the bête noire merely of aesthetes and high-minded critics, bad taste has become a new obsession for cosmologists trying to understand "a mysterious force called dark energy [that] seems to be wrenching the universe apart."

This dark energy -- also termed phantom energy -- "crosses a boundary of good taste," says Darmouth physicist Robert Caldwell, co-author of a paper exploring "the possibility that a mysterious force permeating space-time will be strong enough to blow everything apart, shred rocks, animals, molecules and finally even atoms in a last seemingly mad instant of cosmic self-abnegation."

Bad taste is the stuff of "bad news," Caldwell says, because, as Dennis Overbye writes in The New York Times, "Phantom energy violates physicists' intuitions about how the universe should behave." Good taste would mean less weirdness. Imagine what could happen, short of a galactic apocalypse. A chunk of phantom energy "could be used to prop open wormholes in space and time -- and thus create time machines, for example," Overbye writes.

Other scientists are equally dismayed. One says it's "unphysical, but we're not ruling it out." Robert Kirshner, of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tells Overbye that the idea of a mysterious force wrenching the universe apart had been dismissed as "too strange." Kirshner says, "It sounds wacky, but I think we're in a situation where we're going to need a really new idea. We're in trouble. ... It might be our ideas are not wild enough, they don't question fundamentals enough."

Is it possible that 21st-century scientists need to take a cue from the bad taste of "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson? His first full feature film, made in 1983, put him way ahead of the game. Titled, yes, "Bad Taste," it's been called "a testament to what can be done with a small budget and a lot of dedication." That's something cosmologists ought to keep in mind with the expected loss of the Hubble Space Telescope, which could help measure the parameters of phantom energy.

Perhaps scientists should borrow one of the posters for that movie -- < B>Good  Taste Made Bad Taste -- as sandwich boards to lobby for continuation of the Hubble program. Or if it's not too disgusting, they might consider screening "the particularly gruesome effects" in Jackson's low-budget "Braindead" for NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe as part of a "save the Hubble" campaign.