Physical vacuum as a system manifesting itself on various scales - from   nuclear physics to cosmology
  Rising to Mach, the problem of establishing the unity of the physical essence of the Universe on all space-time scales of its evolution is, apparently, one of the main problems in contemporary epistemology. The issues are primarily related to the problems of the dynamics of the Universe, namely, the need to postulate hypothetical entities - dark energy and dark matter, whose nature is unknown, but whose contribution to the energy content of the Universe is about 95%. A "severe trial for the entire fundamental theory" turned out to be a discrepancy of 120 orders of magnitude between the experimentally established value of the cosmological constant and the calculated value of the energy density of the physical vacuum. Sharp questions arise also regarding the physical essence of gravitation and the nature of its unique smallness as compared with other interactions - nuclear ones, strong and weak, as well as electromagnetic ones. Sufficiently acute problems in the perception of the Universe as a single holistic system arise also at the level of microscales. First of all, we mean here the so called low-energy nuclear reactions, which are realized in the conditions of nonequilibrium low temperature plasma. The fundamental problems of such processes are usually not widely discussed, and many physicists are very critical of the very possibility of implementing such processes. Our main hypothesis for understanding the key problems of contemporary fundamental physics, including the indicated cosmological problems as well as a new class of electron-initiated nuclear chemical processes, is to introduce the basic reference system associated with the electromagnetic component of physical vacuum - EM vacuum of the expanding Universe, with a selection of global time t, being common for all points of the expanding Universe and measured starting from the time of t = 0, which corresponds to the Big Bang. 
Serge F. Timashev
physics.gen-ph