Talk:Dark Energy

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Science

Very nice scientific explanation about the nature of dark energy! Kudos to who wrote it.--Amitakartok 15:42, February 24, 2010 (UTC)

Not a single piece of this page is canon

This page has existed for seventeen years and not a single figment of it is backed up in any capacity (besides the citation leading to Alyx's dialogue). Shouldn't this go into some sort of a "fanon" or fan-fiction category, at this point? Erkor (talk) 19:55, 21 July 2025 (MSK)

It's certainly far from being in total compliance with modern standards of the wiki, but it's an exaggeration to say that not a single piece of [the] page is fanon. There's plenty of stretches and really old-timey forum-theory like wording, but there's no denying that Dark Energy is vital to Combine technology and is referred to in the game, albeit infrequently.

While technically it's never stated (to my knowledge) that Combine weapons use the Dark Energy itself, it's commonly accepted that "Combine energy" (that is, the energy balls, the Core, energy discharges related to either of them, Pulse weapons, etc) is either the same thing as "Dark Energy" or is derived from it.

To me the most deserving of criticism pieces of the article are those speculating about the mechanics of Combine reactors (a completely undisclosed subject as far as I know), the history of what Black Mesa knew or didn't know about Dark Energy (similarly undisclosed afaik), the relation between Dark Energy and Zero-Point energy (it's possible whoever wrote it drew the idea from the Gravity Gun being supercharged in the Citadel?), and using unnecessarily "scienced-up" style as if it was a stated fact about how these particles and matter conversion work (all sounds like pure speculation).

The paragraphs about specific equipment like the generators and sockets are more salvageable, although they are also subject to a lot of that "particles this, energy that" speculation.

What I personally can say right now is I'll look into what can be excised and reworded in the article to make it more in line with the standards, sourcing and making it verifiable. I think a better version of the article should both point out how vague Dark Energy is in the setting, explain that it's usually a stand-in for Combine energy, describe its effects on matter, show various tech commonly believed to be related to Dark Energy, and source dialogue like Alyx's and Kleiner's (from Ep1, about a "dark energy flare", as that would corroborate that the Core, etc is related to Dark Energy). Cvoxalury (talk) 20:14, 21 July 2025 (MSK)