Brushing up

I was fascinated by your article about the work of Prof Richard Muller on the origins of time (May, p38). I like the idea that time is made as a series of ‘nows’, as space-time expands following the Big Bang. With new space, new time has to also come into being. It occurred to me, though, that there might not be any reason for each new ‘now’ to be the same size as the last one.

This would have a bearing on the current work on dark energy and the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. If, as space expanded, the successive ‘nows’ were actually becoming very slightly smaller over aeons, then the expansion of the Universe might not actually be speeding up, but only appear to be. Objects moving at a steady speed through successively smaller chunks of time would appear to be accelerating.

Do we need dark energy to explain this, or could it just be an artefact of the creation of time itself? Tim Curthew-Sanders, London