First of all, I recommend never reading New Scientist if you want a decent idea of what is going on in mathematics and physics. They seem to have a habit of randomly jumping on a recent paper that proposes a radical new idea and then going
“OMG!!!11eleventy-one!!!, time travel to ancient Rome possible?” In this sense they often distort what paper is actually saying and make it sound like theoretical physics is full of bonkers ideas. (As an example they have mentioned the possibility of time travel several times in the last few years and yet have never had a decent article mentioning quantum field theory.)
As for Wiltshire’s paper, the idea is certainly not new. In fact it originated with Kolb et al in 2005. This is Wiltshire’s second major paper on the idea. As an idea it is very clever. His basic proposal is that GR with visible matter already matches observations; there is no need for dark energy. In his previous paper people had a few problems related to acausal effects. However his new paper seems to get good numbers out and an excellent match to some observations. It would be interesting to see a paper comparing to WMAP’s five year observations rather than the three-year ones here in the paper.
This line of investigation is very new and so far there are only a few papers. Even Wiltshire’s paper above have no citations beyond a single trivial one mentioning the papers existence, so it’s best to give this idea some time. Here are a few results that you should know about this model:
1. It still needs dark matter; it only gets rid of dark energy.
2. There still aren’t predictions for certain important cosmological observables.
3. The results aren’t near strong enough to rule out the dark energy interpretation of standard cosmology.
4. The five-year WMAP produced results that match the standard model of cosmology very strongly, something this idea hasn’t been pitched against yet.
However really the idea needs more time for it to be given a fair analysis.
Edited by Son Goku, : Title and clarity.