The Universe follows strict rules, like players at a table. One of them: gravity always attracts, and energy cannot be negative. The Standard Model ΛCDM, initiated by Georges Lemaître with the idea of the Big Bang, breaks these rules twice — during the inflationary epoch, predicted by Alan Guth, and now for the sake of dark energy. The alternative model $R_h=ct$ explains the expansion of the Universe, discovered by Edwin Hubble, without any tricks. It uses data on glowing hydrogen clouds in galaxies and the ages of objects, and honestly obeys all four conditions. The probability of its correctness is 92%. An unexpected fact: the standard model has been cheating for 10 billion years, secretly requiring matter that doesn't exist in nature. Perhaps the cosmos is more honest than we used to think.
as written by the authors arXiv:2605.28903
The four principal energy conditions (ECs) in general relativity prohibit negative energies, repulsive gravity and superluminal energy flows. One must invoke exotic matter to violate any one of these, yet $$\Lambda$$CDM does so quite prominently during inflation and in the epoch of dark energy dominance. In this paper, we carry out model selection between the standard model and the $$R_{\rm h}=ct$$ universe using a combination of HII galaxy and cosmic chronometer measurements in the local Universe, and directly compare the results to the constraints imposed by the ECs. We find that the latter cosmology is not only strongly favored by these data, with a likelihood of $$\sim 92\%$$ versus only $$\sim 8\%$$ for the former, but that its optimized fit is fully compliant with all four ECs, while $$\Lambda$$CDM's best fit violates the so-called strong energy condition at $$z\lesssim 2$$.
Gravity always attracts — that's a strict rule. But in the standard model, it has been secretly violated for the last 10 billion years.