Bubbles of a different kind :)

Yours truly has written copiously about Quantum Foam and how it relates to reality, a take on same that actually seems to be relevant given that said writer's ability with math is limited to say the least. :) With that being said, I must say this Vice article supports, in part, what this rube has written over the years BRT has been in existence.

What was previously assumed to be empty space in the universe now had to be filled with huge amounts of mysterious anti-energy in order to explain observations of the universe’s ever-quickening expansion. Even so, observations of the universe’s expansion suggest that the energy is 60 to 120 orders of magnitude lower than what recent quantum field theory predicts.

What this means is that all of this extra energy is somehow missing when we look at the universe as a whole; either it’s effectively hidden or very different in nature to the energy we do know about.

It gets better ...

To try and solve the mystery of what fills the universe, scientists have been exploring the possibility that it's actually full of bubbles.

In 1955, influential physicist John Wheeler proposed that, at the quantum level, spacetime is not constant but "foamy," made up of ever-changing tiny bubbles. As for what these bubbles are "made" of, recent work suggests that spacetime bubbles are essentially mini-universes briefly forming inside our own.

The spacetime foam proposal fits nicely with the intrinsic uncertainty and indeterminism of the quantum world. Spacetime foam extends quantum uncertainty in particle position and momentum to the very fabric of the universe, so that its geometry is not stable, consistent, or fixed at a tiny scale.

The idea is that in spacetime foam, every point in spacetime has the huge amount of vacuum energy—the lowest energy state equivalent to "empty space"—predicted by quantum theory, but behaves differently to other points. For any particular way in which a point in spacetime is behaving, the exact opposite is equally as likely to occur at another point in spacetime. This is the feature of spacetime foam which “cancels out” the extra energy and expansions at a tiny scale, resulting in the lower energy that we observe at the scale of the whole universe.

For this to work, one has to assume that at the quantum level, time has no intrinsic "direction." In other words, there is no "arrow of time." According to Carlip, in the quantum world, this isn't such a wild suggestion. “Most physicists would agree that we don't know at a fundamental level why there's an arrow of time at all,” he said. “The idea that it's somehow 'emergent' on larger scales has been around for a long time.”

Ain't science grand? :)