After confirming dark matter, in 1998 astronomers discovered that the expansion of space, once thought to be slowing down due to gravity, is actually accelerating. Some sort of negative gravity is pushing the universe apart, against the gravity that pulls it together, so it was called dark energy. Cosmologists estimate that 68% of the matter-energy of the universe is dark, dark matter is 27%, so particle matter is less than 5%, so even if the standard model could explain ordinary matter, which it can’t, it still can’t explain most of our universe.
Dark energy seems to be spread evenly through space and has changed little over time. In equations, it makes space flat, but a property of space itself should increase as space expands, which it doesn’t. If particles cause it, it should weaken as space expands, but again it doesn’t. Particles can’t explain dark energy because they would clump together by gravity, not remain evenly spread.
In this model, our space is the inner surface of a hyper-sphere bubble expanding into a quantum bulk, like the surface of a balloon being blown up so it will lose energy, just as blowing up a ballon cools the gas within it. Points then add to space everywhere all the time, and being new, they receive but don’t transmit for their first cycle. The result is a negative energy that has the properties of dark energy. It is spread through space because new points add everywhere, it doesn’t dilute as space expands because more space increases it, and it could be why the expansion of our universe is accelerating.
Dark energy is expected for a bubble universe that is expanding but for a big machine it is inexplicable. Particles can’t explain dark energy but space expanding can.