After confirming dark matter, in 1998 astronomers discovered that the expansion of space, which was thought to be slowing under the force of gravity, was 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 energy of the universe is dark, dark matter is 27%, and particle matter is less than 5%. Hence, even if the standard model did explain ordinary matter, which it doesn’t, it still doesn’t explain most of the energy of the universe.
The effect of dark energy is spread evenly through space and seems to have changed little over time. In equations, it makes space flat, but a property of space itself should increase as space expands, and it doesn’t. If it is caused by particles, as the standard model might assume, it should weaken as space expands, but again it doesn’t. The standard model struggles to explain dark energy because particles should clump together, not remain evenly spread, and particles don’t have a negative energy to push the universe apart.
In this model, our space is the inner surface of a bubble expanding into a larger bulk, so it must lose energy, just as expanding a box cools the gas within it. Points of space add to space all the time, and being new, for their first cycle they receive but don’t transmit anything, so new space produces a negative energy that also has the properties of dark energy. It is spread through space because new points add everywhere, it doesn’t reduce as space expands because more space means more points to expand from, 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 don’t explain why dark energy exists, but the expansion of space does.