14-year-old Canadian wins €5,000 prize for alternative theory to dark energy

Liam DesrePhoto credit: youthscience.ca In the grand quest to understand why the universe is expanding faster and faster, most scientists point to an invisible force called dark energy. A 14-year-old student from Kingston, Ontario, has taken a different path. Liam Desre, a Grade 10 teenager, proposed a thermodynamic extension to the standard model of cosmology that could explain cosmic acceleration without invoking dark energy. His project, ΛCDM+S: Evaluating a Thermodynamic Extension to Standard Cosmology, won a second prize of €5,000 at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) 2026 in Kiel, Germany, where 144 young scientists from 37 countries presented their work, according to Youth Science Canada News.A bold idea from a high school labLiam Desre is no ordinary teenager. While his classmates are busy with tests and extracurriculars, he’s been diving deep into one of the biggest puzzles in modern physics. His project challenges the prevailing ΛCDM model that relies on dark energy to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. Instead, Liam explored whether entropy-related thermodynamic effects could produce the same observational signatures.The standard cos...