Gravitational energy as dark energy: Average observational quantities

Abstract

In the timescape scenario cosmic acceleration is understand as an apparent effect, due to gravitational energy gradients that grow when spatial curvature gradients become significant with the nonlinear growth of cosmic structure. This affects the calibratation of local geometry to the solutions of the volume-average evolution equations corrected by backreaction. In this paper I discuss recent work on defining observational tests for average geometric quantities which can distinguish the timescape model from a cosmological constant or other models of dark energy.