Sep 15, 2025 09:16 PM
How understanding nothingness might just explain everything
https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/under...everything
EXCERPTS: . . . as cosmologists put it, the assumption is that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic. That makes sense when we’re looking at the very early stages of the Universe, when it was small and dense, like a kind of primordial soup.
But as the Universe evolved and expanded, it became more like what we see today – having some regions that are full of stuff, like stars and galaxies, and other regions that are much more empty.
[...] Some theorists, like Prof David Wiltshire at the University of Canterbury, argue that these assumptions are so far off base that they’re leading us to see the Universe in the wrong way.
[...] Gravity slows down time, so time passes differently in regions of the Universe with more matter than in parts with less matter. Different parts of the Universe will expand at different rates based on how much stuff is in them – that is, whether you’re looking at a bunch of galaxies or a void.
And so perhaps we don’t need the concept of dark energy at all. Perhaps the expansion of the Universe only looks like it’s becoming faster, because we’re looking at voids where the expansion appears faster, rather than areas with galaxies in them where the expansion appears slower.
Perhaps it’s all just the result of the counterintuitive effects of gravity on time.
“It really is saying, right, there’s this effect in Einstein’s theory, which we’ve not thought of before’,” Wiltshire says... (MORE - details)
https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/under...everything
EXCERPTS: . . . as cosmologists put it, the assumption is that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic. That makes sense when we’re looking at the very early stages of the Universe, when it was small and dense, like a kind of primordial soup.
But as the Universe evolved and expanded, it became more like what we see today – having some regions that are full of stuff, like stars and galaxies, and other regions that are much more empty.
[...] Some theorists, like Prof David Wiltshire at the University of Canterbury, argue that these assumptions are so far off base that they’re leading us to see the Universe in the wrong way.
[...] Gravity slows down time, so time passes differently in regions of the Universe with more matter than in parts with less matter. Different parts of the Universe will expand at different rates based on how much stuff is in them – that is, whether you’re looking at a bunch of galaxies or a void.
And so perhaps we don’t need the concept of dark energy at all. Perhaps the expansion of the Universe only looks like it’s becoming faster, because we’re looking at voids where the expansion appears faster, rather than areas with galaxies in them where the expansion appears slower.
Perhaps it’s all just the result of the counterintuitive effects of gravity on time.
“It really is saying, right, there’s this effect in Einstein’s theory, which we’ve not thought of before’,” Wiltshire says... (MORE - details)
