Scientists in Greece have laid out a mathematical framework to help explain a so-far-unsolved gap in our understanding of how gravity scales up to the full size of our universe.
Specifically, cosmologists can’t yet account for how expansion of the universe increased in the “recent cosmological past”—a very relative term—because all attempts to quantify the change so far end up clashing with existing mathematical models. The Greek scientists suggest something particularly squiggly: microscopic wormholes, whose nature and density could fill up the missing pieces. These spacetime Orbeez require only a bit of fine-tuning from theories that are already in the zeitgeist.
In the paper, which appears in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review D from the American Physical Society, the authors explain that the “positive cosmological constant” meant to quantify our expanding universe has, instead, created math issues: “[Q]uantum field theoretical analysis predicts a value up to 120 orders of magnitude larger than the observed one.”
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