The universe has always been much bigger than we thought.
If you look at a problem from the wrong standpoint then you will always have difficulty in finding the right solution. This is why astronomers have failed to find a solution to the problem of dark energy. Ask any of them and they will all say that they have no idea what dark energy is.
The problem is even more serious. They actually have no idea about 95% of the universe.
There are some very imaginative ideas but the problem is they need to start thinking outside of the box, literally.
So what is dark energy?
As telescopes got bigger and better it became clear that the universe was a very very big place. Not the sun, planets and stars revolving around the Earth; not just a galaxy of stars we call the Milky Way; but trillions of galaxies each with billions of stars. 100 years ago they thought there was only one galaxy with a few million stars. It’a lot bigger than they thought
We have always wanted to know how the universe started and of course how it will end. Einstein wanted to believe that the universe was static. It is not. More recently it was thought that the expansion of the universe would slow down and under its own gravitational pull and collapse in on itself. A cycle which could presumably repeat itself infinitely.
The Dark Energy problem started about 20 years ago when astronomers confirmed that our galaxies were actually accelerating away from us. So what was causing our galaxies to accelerate away from us? They are not just moving away from us they are accelerating and acceleration requires a force. That force is called dark energy and it's makes up 70% of the energy of the whole universe. That is an awful lot of energy, but they do not know what it is.
One of the common features of most of the solutions is that they all talk about Dark Energy pushing our galaxies away from us. Here is an extract from NASA.gov which is typical and as good as any.
“Because dark energy is a property of space itself, it would not be diluted as space expands. As more space comes into existence, more of this energy-of-space would appear. As a result, this form of energy would cause the universe to expand faster and faster.”
Seriously, what kind of science is this, get real.
It is time they started thinking outside of the box.
The answer lies in history and not science. History tells us that the universe has always been much bigger than we thought. From the flat-earth of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century when it was believed that the universe was the Milky Way, the universe has always been much bigger than we thought.
The universe we see today, it is called the observable universe, is unimaginably enormous. 93 billion light years across, 14 billion years old,. billions of stars in trillions of galaxies, not to mention billions of black holes. Could the universe actually be bigger than this? Could the universe even be older than this?
What has surprised me, even annoyed me, is that science says no, but history says probably.
Because our observations are limited by the speed of light the observable universe is apparently 93 billion miles across. Because the universe started with the big bang then nothing can be older than 14 billion years.
Science still has a myopic view of the universe. One of the most common representations is this closed circle.
NASA again, and a favourite of at least one Nobel prize winner. Why use a logarithmic scale to depict the expanse of the universe. There is no limit to the expanse of the universe only a limit to our vision of it.
But science cannot explain 95% of the universe. It really is time to think outside of the box.
So let's come up with a theory which explains dark energy with no creative mathematics or surreal concepts. Let's stick to what can happen in the real world.
Then look to find some way of testing it.
Dark Energy it's simple it's just gravity.
When I first read about our galaxies accelerating away from us my first thought was that there must be some gravitational force pulling them out into space. The only force which operates on the scale of the universe is gravity. So there must be something out there, beyond our vision. A lot of stuff big enough to attract the galaxies. Now that is difficult to imagine, it is a bit of a conceptual leap, but 'the universe has always been bigger than we thought’.
It's generally accepted that there is something beyond our observable universe. After all why should the universe stop just because it's beyond our vision. But what is out there?
It is already known that after several billion years the expansion of the universe started to slow down as it would under the force of its own gravity. About 7 billion years ago it started to speed up again and the galaxies at the outer edge of our universe are accelerating out beyond our vision. It would not be difficult to construct a mathematical model to predict the speeds and accelerations involved. The trouble is, even with our most advanced telescopes the accuracy of determining speeds of the other galaxies is not good. Hopefully the James Webb Telescope may improve the quality of this data.
It's perfectly probable that our universe is only a tiny part of a much much bigger cosmos. If so, then dark energy is just cosmic gravity. How simple is that!
I go as far as to say that compared with all the other theories around this one is by far the most sensible. In fact for a long time my biggest concern was that this idea was so simple and obvious that it must be wrong. Gravity is the only force which is know to operate across the universe. So something out there is exerting a gravitational pull on the galaxies
What is needed is some evidence that there is a lot of stuff out there in the cosmos.
Obviously it is impossible to see anything beyond observable universe. But there are other ways to test the theory.
The best way to find out if there really is something out there will be to look for gravitational waves. If there is a lot of stuff out there it will have been around for a long time before the Big Bang then gravitational waves from events out there will have time to reach us.
More and more gravitational wave detectors are being built Are they capable of detecting the kind of gravitational wave which would be created by the kind of massive objects capable of producing dark energy and traveling hundreds of billions of light years.
Well you won't find them if you don't look for them.
Who would not want to be the first person to detect an event beyond our observable universe and occurred before ‘time’ began.
A cosmos where our observable universe is only a tiny part explains Dark Energy simply as gravity. Such a cosmos has been around for a very long time and could also explain the mystery of what happened at the moment of the Big Bang. Again a simple and real world explanation. No need for Inflation theory, no worries about antimatter.
Another imaginative concept, expansion of space and the cosmological constant can be replaced by the action of gravity.
In this much simpler world it's all about gravity and real matter. Gravity, the 'weak’ force rules the cosmos. No unified theory of forces will emerge, but a unified theory of matter, both dark and light.