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.
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.