I need help with a cosmological physics question. I just read this article today that says that the Universe will someday disappear from view. It happens that the universe, in a few billion or trillion years, will be expanding so quickly, faster than the speed of light in fact, that galaxies will simply become undetectable from one another.

This is very interesting, right? Well, I guess if you are a big geek - not like me. What actually caught my interest was this quote below:

"This is possible despite the universal speed limit being that of light, Krauss said, because the galactic clusters won't actually be moving; it's the space between them that will be expanding at a rate faster than light can traverse it."

Okay, what kind of spin is that? The galaxies won't be moving faster than the speed of light, but the space in between will be expanding faster than the speed of light? If some very powerful object that is placed immediately between you and me, say a gigantic balloon, is expanding at a certain speed, then it is essentially pushing you and I in directions away from one another at that very speed.

So how's it that the space between two galaxies can expand faster than the speed of light but not make the galaxies themselves move at that speed? According to the article it's something called "Dark Energy." Besides being a great possible name for a Pink Floyd album, Dark Energy is the growing tendency of empty space to spontaneously create more empty space. According to the article, and this is a direct quote: "No one can fully explain dark energy, but without it the universe we see today makes no sense."

Isn't that great? We made up something we can't explain to make sense of something that is theoretical anyway. I have a feeling some scientists are watching too much Sci Fi Channel. The greatest thing of the whole article is a quote from one scientist who suggested that we may even be experiencing something like this right now and not even know it! That is to say, because the distance between galaxies is expanding faster than the speed of light, we are literally traveling in time apart from one another! That means there could be galaxies that are undetectable to us that are still in the nascence of the Big Bang, and galaxies on the verge of the Big Crunch! All potential universes really can exist concurrently, though we won't be able to know, thanks to Dark Energy, the thing we made up that we can't explain to explain the thing that may or may not happen or be happening now! I love science.