Dark energy is the deus ex machina of cosmology, able to save even the
most inflation-prone calculations from destruction or - worse - being
provably wrong. But while we’ve been busy watching the X-energy
apparently accelerating all of creation while hiding in plain sight,
some believe it’s responsible for much more than that. It didn’t just
save the universe - no, no, that’s far too small scale - it saved
INFINITE universes.
Scientists at Princeton and Cambridge say that most of the universe is
regularly destroyed. It’s space-time-twisted into black holes, in
fact, which is about as utterly destroyed as you can get without
pissing off Zeus. In each destruction cycle only a small seed of
habitable space survives, which grows phoenix-like to provide a new
universe due to the apparently all-powerful dark matter.
The model is based on M-Theory - an expanded limit of string theory
with an extra dimension, making it only slightly less esoteric than
studying the symbolism of Chopin’s work in a universe where the Nazis
won the war. I’m not saying that M-theory is poorly understood or
developed, but they can’t even agree on what the ‘M’ actually stands
for. Seriously.
In this model, the universe is a region on a multidimensional membrane
called a “brane”, and it’s only one of many. When these branes collide
huge regions of our brane get bunched into extremely uninhabitable
black holes, with only a small region of space left for us. Without
dark energy to inflate these gaps, a few cycles of this would
annihilate everything.
As with all string-theory siblings, it’s an extremely interesting idea
with less proof than the “Hitler shot JFK” theory, and the reasons for
including dark energy sound suspiciously like “because our math doesn’t
work without it.” Plus, since it deals in six hundred billion year
timescales and the End of Almost Everything, it’s slightly less
measurable than a unicorn horn diameter.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
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