Is the universe repelled by itself?

Does the universe repel itself? That is roughly the idea that researchers from the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, Russia proposed in a recent paper. Their paper refers to the Casimir effect, which involves a quantum-physics phenomenon that was predicted and also later confirmed by the Dutch scientist Hendrik Casimir. The Casimir effect causes two conductive plates arranged in parallel in a vacuum to be attracted to each other by a force.

The idea that it might be...