Don, you have moved this thread far off topic from the question of whether dark energy exists or is an illusion caused by our being in an unusual region of the universe.

So I propose that you start your own thread in your own blog that addresses your theory, which I may have mischaracterized.

You seem to be saying that the universe has a boundary which has the property of attracting everything inside of it. That attraction causes the accelerating rate of expansion.

This assumption leads to two major questions and some lesser ones.

First, there is the question of a privileged frame of reference. If the boundary is finite, it has a definite center. That creates a privileged frame of reference in violation of one of the cardinal principles of relativity. Furthermore, if the boundary is not spherical, then it also leads to a privileged direction in space, namely its longest axis.

No astronomical or physical measurements have ever shown that such a center exists. It would, for instance, show up as an anisotropy in the red shift between galaxies on our side of the center of the universe and galaxies on the opposite side.

So the first challenge to your theory is to propose a way to find the center of the finite universe and its principal axis if it is non-spherical. All measurements to date support the idea that the universe has no center and no axis. At this point, all the evidence supports the conventional relativistic view.

An aspect of your proposal that you have not discussed are boundary effects. What happens when a particle or quantum of energy reaches that boundary?

We already know by red-shift measurements that the most distant galaxies are moving away from us at large fractions of the speed of light. Do they simply disappear when they reach the edge? If so, what happens to the law of conservation of mass/energy?

Even if the boundary is too far away for us to detect it directly, the boundary conditions would surely produce some effects inside the universe. What observations do you suggest so that we can detect those boundary effects.

Another point that needs to be addressed--it's really a consequence of both the apparent absence of both a center and boundary effects: the universe is nearly 14 billion years old. That is plenty of time for the outer edge to have accumulated a lot of mass while the region nearest the center to have been depopulated. Yet as far as we can tell, the distribution of mass in the universe appears to be quite uniform. (The same kinds of galactic sheets with the same densities everywhere.)

Finally, there is the question of the mathematical nature of the boundary force you describe. It can't follow an inverse square law in a static universe, as an anonymous poster pointed out. So let's flesh out your theory with some details. What force do we feel from the boundary here on Earth, and how will it change as we accelerate closer to the edge? What observable effects will that produce, and why haven't we observed them?

That's quite enough questions for you to address.

I suggest you start with the issue of the center and the boundary effects in a new posting in your own blog.

Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)