There is a quite serious flaw in the "logical" assumption that because the universe is accelerating outward, that therefore time and space are expanding.

Lets take outward expansion first. The assumption that the universe and space with it was expanding, resulted from the work of Edmund Hubble...which led Einstein to remark that his "cosmological constant"...and conceptual idea that the universe was quasi-static, was "his greatest error".

Now scientists have discovered that the cosmological constant was not an intuitive figment of Einsteins imagination...it really exists. Not only does "dark energy" exist, it makes up at least 74% of the universal mass.

Also,in 1999, it was discovered that the rate of universal expansion in not slowing...rather the universe is accelerating outward.

It is interesting that in spite of the fact that these new discoveries are compelling, there has been no rapid acceptance of the concept they confirm...Schwarzschilds higher dimensional GR. Even when WMAP and other related experiments found that space in the universe is marginally closed with an omega total of 1.02, the idea that space is universally flat, not just locally flat has continued to be bandied about.

The data of WMAP indicates conditions in the universe about 1/2 million years after the "big bang". At that time, the universe was not only very different from today...the universe was very much smaller. A smaller universe at any time in the universes evolution is hardly a portrayal of "flat space".

In fact 14.6 billion light years outward in every direction, space in the universe did not exist at all...the universe was singular.

Acceleration outward is powerful evidence that the universe exists in a Schwarzschild "two sphere" geometry...that the universe "pulses"..."bangs" and "collapses" everywhere...and that the observed conditions in the universe are determined by the way we observe it. The same universe which is expanding is also collapsing- and thus accelerating- outward, as observed from our frame of reference.

www.geocities.com/aletawcox

There is no need to 'embed' our universe into a higher dimensional one, you can have expanding n dimensional systems without putting them in an n+1 dimensional system.

The cosmological constant was Einstein's 'greatest blunder' not because Einstein or other physicists considered it viable, but because Einstein hadn't stuck by his new theory's implications that unless there was fantastic fine tuning, the universe must be expanding or constracting. He could have predicted Hubble's discovery about a decade before experimental evidence prompted Hubble to make his models.