After confirming dark matter, in 1998 astronomers discovered that the expansion of space, once thought to be slowing under the force of gravity, is actually accelerating. Some sort of negative gravity was 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%, and particle matter is less than 5%. Hence, even if the standard model could explain ordinary matter, which it can’t, it still doesn’t explain most of what constitutes our universe.
Dark energy seems to 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, yet it doesn’t. If it is caused by particles, it should weaken as space expands, but again it doesn’t. Particles can’t explain dark energy because they should clump together by gravity, not remain evenly spread, and they don’t have a negative energy that can push the universe apart.
However, now suppose that our space is the inner surface of a hyper-sphere bubble expanding into a quantum bulk, so it is expanding everywhere, like an expanding balloon surface. It must also lose energy, just as blowing up a ballon cools the gas within it. Points then add to space all the time, and being new, for their first cycle they receive but don’t transmit anything. The negative effect of new space then 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 explain why the expansion of our universe is accelerating.
Dark energy is expected if our universe is a bubble expanding, but for a big machine it is inexplicable. Particles can’t explain dark energy but the expansion of space can.