The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 honored revolutionary, completely unexpected observations of the inflation of our universe. The Award was divided: One half was awarded to Saul Perlmutter and the other half jointly to Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae."
The expansion of our universe was already noticed by astronomer Hubble long time ago in 1929, forcing Einstein to revise his famous equations about space, time and masses. So what made these new observations so special for the Scandinavian Award Committees? It was actually not the discovery that something inflates the universe, but that it expands with an increasing speed.
The scientists' approach to evaluate this expansion was very smart; the science teams observed special types of so-called Ia supernovae - explosions of aged stars that are as heavy as our sun, but with a size of Earth. They did a great job to discover more than 50 distant supernovae and to register that their light intensity was surprisingly lower than expected (so called redshift), drawing thereof the conclusion that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Einstein's formulas have been already revised a second time to cope with this new situation.
Two exciting, yet unsolved questions came up: What type of super force or super energy could be capable of pushing entire galaxies away from each other, revolting against the strong and far reaching gravitational forces of huge galactic mass clusters; and what stabilizes these galaxies on top in a way that the outer stars move much faster on stable orbits than Newton's and Einstein's formulas allow?
Some years ago, scientists introduced the term "dark energy" to describe the accelerating expansion and the term "dark matter" to grasp the phenomenon of stable galaxies despite very fast moving remote stars. Dark energy and dark matter add up to astonishing 96% of total energies of our universe, in case the new pictures are balanced against the earlier views of theoretical physicists and subsequent historical discoveries of astrophysicists.
This brings us right back to Einstein's imaginations of space and time, one hundred years ago: Is it possible to enrich his formulations of space, time and masses for the third time to cover the new discoveries as well? Might this revision navigate science finally towards a first solution to combine Heisenberg's and Planck's quantum physics with Einstein's space-time continuum?
The answer seems to be yes, because there is still one peculiarity in Einstein's formulations that has not yet been used in the reflections about an accelerating expansion of the Universe, extensively: Einstein's equating of length and time. Einstein introduced time as an equal fourth dimension to the three space dimensions length, width and height.
Let us now theoretically suppose there are two or more universes overlapping in a simple way that one spatial dimension coincides with Einstein's time dimension of all others, respectively. The result is as astonishing as it is exciting, because what we get are flat, overlapping 2D-spaces around us, utmost difficult to detect, since they have only two spatial dimensions. We could try to assign such flat spaces around us, for example to electromagnetism, in case electromagnetic waves turn out to be flat - and they are in fact flat, as everybody can prove it simply with horizontally and vertically polarized 3D-glasses for 3D-movies. These glasses use the flat 2D-nature of these waves to filter light and to differentiate between information for the right eye and for the left eye. This example proves that such flat spaces around us in fact exist and that they become visible by electromagnetism, just generating turbulences on these coinciding dimensions.
What would happen if the coincidence of Einstein's time progress axis with one spatial dimension of these flat 2D-spaces around us would get slowly lost? The answer is simple: Space of an observer expands with increasing speed at the expense of remaining time reserves for the future. From this point of view these flat spaces around us turn out to be one possible source of dark energy for the accelerating expansion of the universe. Serial space points in time leap into simultaneous points in space.
This is sort of a leakage from a potential future time span to space expansion towards a lower energy state, as the storage of events in time needs additional energy, just like battery charging.
Finally, we could rotate two overlapping flat space dimensions further against each other, until they oppose each other's time progress and space dimensions. We can do this without conflict to any of Einstein's descriptions only if we introduce Planck's proven quantization scheme for length minima and time minima. Below these Planck units time and length do not anymore appear as such. This way we derive a remarkable dark matter effect, accumulating as halos below undisputed Planck units and structuring together with dark energy NASA's confirmed 96 percent of energy processes throughout the universe.