Abstract
It is suggested that the apparently disparate cosmological phenomena attributed to so-called ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ arise from the same fundamental physical process: the emergence, from the quantum level, of spacetime itself. This creation of spacetime results in metric expansion around mass points in addition to the usual curvature due to stress-energy sources of the gravitational field. A recent modification of Einstein’s theory of general relativity by Chadwick, Hodgkinson, and McDonald incorporating spacetime expansion around mass points, which accounts well for the observed galactic rotation curves, is adduced in support of the proposal. Recent observational evidence corroborates a prediction of the model that the apparent amount of ‘dark matter’ increases with the age of the universe. In addition, the proposal leads to the same result for the small but nonvanishing cosmological constant, related to ‘dark energy,’ as that of the causet model of Sorkin et al.
Highlights
Since the 1990s it has become clear that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a phenomenon that was historically attributed to so-called “dark energy”1
There is no known physical mechanism or process underlying the phenomena attributed to dark matter and dark energy
This paper proposes such a physical process: a specific kind of spacetime emergence underlying a form of matter-based spacetime expansion that has not been previously taken into account
Summary
It is suggested that the apparently disparate cosmological phenomena attributed to so-called “dark matter” and “dark energy” arise from the same fundamental physical process: the emergence, from the quantum level, of spacetime itself. This creation of spacetime results in metric expansion around mass points in addition to the usual curvature due to stress-energy sources of the gravitational field. The proposal leads to the same result for the small but non-vanishing cosmological constant, related to “dark energy,” as that of the causet model of [1]
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