It might not be obvious to those of us only grappling with more mundane concerns, but for cosmologists bent on unlocking the universe’s deepest secrets, there’s no shortage of problems keeping them up at night. “Dark matter” is the shorthand explanation for stars and galaxies moving much more quickly than the gravity of their luminous matter should allow. Let’s not forget “dark energy,” too—the preferred solution to the mystery of the universe expanding faster than anyone expected and doing so at an accelerated rate. Meanwhile a hypothesized “evolving” form of dark energy might resolve something called the Hubble tension—the term used for a major disagreement among researchers about the present-day cosmic expansion rate.
Cosmologists have been losing sleep over such quandaries for generations, wondering what missing ingredients they need to add to their models to fix what seem to be glaring gaps in their understanding. But what if the answer to some—maybe even all—of these problems isn’t a radical new theory but rather an old one, devised almost a century ago by none other than Albert Einstein himself? It’s called teleparallel gravity, and according to a loose collection of theorists who study it, this theory deserves a closer look by the wider scientific community.
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