My musings on the Revelation prophesy of the heavens being rolled back like a scroll are different from yours --- which might be expected since I am drawn to geometric physics.
To me, it is literal and is related to the structure of physical reality which I see as more than a four dimension block, three of space and 1 of time.
I tend to agree with Vafa and Wesson that there are more temporal (time) dimensions – also that the extra dimension(s) can explain mass. (Particularly expanded dimensions versus compactified Kaluza-Klein dimensions.)
After all, the Higgs field/boson which the standard model "needs" to explain ordinary matter (5% of the critical density of the university) has not yet been observed or made by either Fermilab or CERN. For those interested, 25% of the critical density is dark matter, high gravity such as in the center of galaxies. The remaining 70% is dark energy which behaves like negative gravity – or space/time “outdents” accelerating the expansion of the universe.
That is what I see happening in the Revelation prophesy, an inter-dimensional negative gravity phenomenon which accelerates the universe, making it “roll up like a scroll.”
BTW, Lisa Randall suggests (and I agree) that the reason gravity is so small by comparison to the other three fundamental forces (electromagnetic, strong atomic and weak atomic) is that gravity is inter-dimensional.
And my personal favorite is offered by P.S. Wesson in his article Five Dimensional Relativity and Two Times: that time-like paths of massive particles in four dimensions can arise from null paths in a fifth dimension, where there is an oscillation around the hypersurface we call space/time. His article also suggests that a particle in the fifth dimension could be multiply imaged in the four dimensions, and that the weak equivalence principle in the four dimensions may be the symmetry of a corresponding five-dimensional metric.
Or to put it another way, instead of there being 1080 particles in the visible four dimensions, it could actually be the case that as little as a single particle in the fifth dimension is imaged 1080 times in the four dimensions of normal human experience.
Any hoot, that’s my two cents for the discussion…
As space expands, the volume of the vacuum expands. That requires an increase in energy. The energy comes from the gravitational field that already exists. So, the strength of the field drops and the expansion accelerates. The expansion of the universe is driven by vacuum expansion. During the inflationary period, for the first nanosec of the universes existance, the vacuum energy was must higher due to the intial symmetry breaking at the beginning of time. Inflation ended and expansion began when the vacuum energy dropped.
Much of the dark matter is contained in particles called axions, which were found recently. The process that generates them, is what provides for CP symmetry in QCD/standard model.
"Vafa and Wesson that there are more temporal (time) dimensions – also that the extra dimension(s) can explain mass. (Particularly expanded dimensions versus compactified Kaluza-Klein dimensions.)"
Each of those particle models, with more than one time, has a corresponding string theory with compactified dimensions. The theories are the same, just different mathematical ways of looking at the same thing. Wesson's is a simple 10, or 11d string theory.
Randell's theories are on what's called anti-DeSitter Space, as opposed to DeSitter space. In DeSitter space, all the energy appears in the universe and the vacuum, and doesn't move back and forth. In anti-DeSitter Space it does. In string theory there are open strings and closed strings, which are loops. The end points of the open strings must lie on a brane. The universe consists of the strings and the branes. All interactions are string energies passing through the brane, between strings. If the ends of the string, weren't on a brane, the energy would arbitrarily wander off from the universe. Closed strings can't lose energy from the ends, because there is none.
In anti-DeSitter space(Randell) the grvitational coupling constant is high, the gravitons, which are closed strings, can lie off the branes and outside the universe. Some are essentially "in the vacuum". So, most of them do. The result is the few that remain in the regions around the brane, result in a weak field.
That Higgs boson experiment will be done next Nov. The guns haven't been as big as required so far, but CERN is. Regardless of the string theory and corresponding particle theory, such as Wessons, whatever is found will look just like a Higgs boson. That's because all the theories would show the same phenomina if they are correct. Differences are usually found in particle decays, like the proton decay rate, which causes some theories to fall.