cosmology

We rely on maps to make sense of the world around us. This isn’t just true for sailors navigating the oceans or families taking to the highways on vacations; it’s true for scientists who use maps of spacetime to study how empty space behaves around celestial objects such as black holes. 

But for most maps, points of extreme irregularity pop up. Those points are called singularities.

Singularities are geometric points where maps break down into distortions. 

Mathematicians are challenging the idea that dark energy is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. In a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, mathematicians from the University of California, Davis (Blake Temple, and prior graduate students C. Alexander (2022) and Z.