Increasing with distance... Maybe the frame of reference is not the micro but the macro. That the cause and effect is flipped — and the expanding universe is producing the force and not the other way around?
“That the cause and effect is flipped — and the expanding universe is producing the force and not the other way around?”
Perhaps. I have a similar hypothesis, but about gravity, which I see as kind of the flip side of this force of expansion. I believe gravity is simply an effect of drag caused by the interaction of the expansion force and the inertia of the matter that the expanding space is trying to pull along with it. Spacetime is free to expand where there is no matter, but when matter is present, its inertia resists the expansion, causing spacetime to distort when it tries to pull the matter with it, and this distortion in the geometry of spacetime causes the gravitational effects we are familiar with.
In that case, what is making the universe expand?
“Dark energy” is just shorthand way of saying that something is missing from relativity or the standard model, something that we can only observe across vast scales.