The team’s proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.
“We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion,” he explains. “What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion – that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate.”
If time gradually slows “but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of ‘a standard flow of time’, then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an “effective accelerated rate of the expansion” takes place.”
I like Terry Pratchett’s “Troll” theory of time: when you walk down the street you can see where you’re going, but not where you’ve been… but with time we know where we’ve been but not where we’re going. Ergo: either we’re facing the wrong direction, or everything is going backwards.
Leave a Reply