While trying to wake up properly this morning I had an idea that I think might work towards solving the “dark energy” problem.

The summary: curvature of the empty-space manifold is negative.

Explanation: I personally subscribe to Einstein’s and Feynman’s explanation of gravity as a property of mass which curves space. It cannot be propagated by some kind of particle, among other things because the black holes would close themselves off at the event horizon. Gravity is simply a geometric property – as Feynman said, it wouldn’t confuse us if we used a different coordinate system. So, what gravity does is create a positive distortion of the spatial manifold. The simplest explanation as to why the Universe accelerates in its expansion is that empty space curvature is not zero, but a slight negative value. Even a small amount of mass is sufficient to cancel out this curvature, but in intergalactic space, the curvature of space becomes negative, which explains the structure of the Universe which seems to consist of “filaments” of galaxies that cluster together and then you have vast areas of empty space. This is consistent with my thesis because that’s exactly how the Universe would behave if empty space had a slight negative curvature.

As a disclaimer, I didn’t look all that much into physics recently so it’s quite possible that someone else solved the problem in the meantime, but I, at least, feel better having this explanation because the dark energy problem was a slight mental itch I couldn’t scratch.