This was written by Galen, age 13

This was written by Galen

Experience through Time

As I begin to wake up everything looks fuzzy and my head is on fire! I begin to sit up slowly. I look around and see that I am not the only one there! Grandpa Paul, Ewan, Rochester, and Ethan are all there as well. No one knows what happened or how we got there! The last thing that any of us remembers is being in the “Boom Room” at H.U.G.

Off in the distance we hear thumping and thudding! We all look at each other and ask “what was that?” Curious, we head towards the sounds. We were all nervous and asking Grandpa what the sound was but he didn’t know either! When we got closer to the sound we could see that it was a brachiosaurus! Being totally amazed we were still smart enough to keep our distance from the humongous creature.

Realizing that we were somewhere in the Triassic period, we had a lot to figure out! But first things first! We needed to find shelter and fast because it was getting to be nightfall and a storm was coming in! We found a cave but it wasn’t the deep. After gathering wood and trying to light a fire, we stayed in the cave over night.

The next morning as we are enjoying our dinosaur egg omelet we hear the whoosh and sizzle followed an explosion so loud and powerful that it knocked us to our butts. It was the meteor that ended the existence of dinosaurs! We quickly ran for the protection of our cave! We hoped that it would somehow protect us!

We waited for what seemed like an eternity to be able to safely leave our cave. Gathering particles from the meteor and some things from our pockets and grandpa’s “brains” we constructed an atom time-traveling bomb to send us back from the time we came!

Insights from my hypothesis.

In my hypothesis, mass acts like a vacuum cleaner that sucks in the tiny quantum foam particles that make up space. Those particles reappear at random locations anywhere in the universe. At any distance we are used to, it seems to act like gravity in every way that I know about.

 Inside galaxies where there is lots of mass, gravity dominates. At very long distances, large volumes of empty space would seem to expand, thus looking like a force that pushes galaxies away from each other.

Outside galaxies, there is vast space with virtually no mass, so the expansion force dominates. 
In our neighborhood (the closest 83 galaxies) there is roughly 10 billion times more space outside of galaxies than inside galaxies.  That expansion force pushes against the outside of the galaxies, gently squeezing each galaxy tighter at the same time it pushes them all apart from each other.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter may be the same thing

Consider that Dark Energy is a force that arises within vast regions of empty space that pushes galaxies apart.

Dark Matter is the name given to a force that acts like extra gravity within galaxies. Without that extra force, the edges of the galaxy would fly away.

If you have a force pushing galaxies away from each other, that force needs to push on something. It seems reasonable that the force would push on the outer edge of the galaxies the most, making it look like the galaxies have more gravitational mass than they really do.