In the early 20th century, Einstein showed: gravity is the bending of the fabric of space-time. Later, the light from distant supernovae revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The mysterious accelerator was dubbed dark energy, but its predicted strength didn't match reality by billions of times.

Key insight: gravity without a built-in scale. After the Big Bang and inflation, the cosmos was like a smooth pond. Emmy Noether's symmetry theorem explains why this picture is stable. Yet quantum jitter, like rain, inevitably creates ripples. Those ripples are dark energy; no tweaking can remove it.

A remarkable fact: the same ripples seeded the first clumps of matter, without which no stars or galaxies would exist. The question 'why is dark energy small?' gives way to questions about the numbers underlying the cosmos — a trail leading to the work of Robert Dicke and the field of Higgs.