If this post goes where I hope it goes it will roughly tie into the god thing. I always enjoy listening to concepts non scientific people have of the universe, this would include myself. I imagine the universe as being perfectly balanced and smooth running. Now if I could watch a video of the universe from it’s inception until now and I had the option of speeding it up at what speed would I start to think tt was chaotic with no organization? Or if it would ever appear this way?.
IMO as long as the action in teh vid is proceeding at a pace your brain can watch & follow it’ll appear as organized as it really is. Which might be smooth or might be chaotic depending on which scale you’re focusing on.
At which phase of the Universe’s evolution? The early Universe, viewed in real time, would be incomprehensibly fast to a human.
Will it continue to slow down? Or has it reached a stable point?
I mean, eventually you get to the point where the only action is the eventual decay of supermassive black holes. And eventually after that, so far as we can tell, nothing at all happens any more. Doesn’t get much slower than that.
Apparently it is waaaay faster than previously thought! (of course, “faster” is a relative term here)
That’s just for white dwarfs, and they’d (probably) die via proton decay long before that anyway. The last things in the Universe to decay would be supermassive black holes, at around 10^97 years.
Well, here are a couple of movies that you can watch at whatever speed you choose.
Big Bang to (approximately) now
From approximately now until the end (time scale doubles every 5 seconds and it is still ~30 minutes long)
Is proton decay still considered to be a real possibility?
I thought the concensus these days was that it doesn’t happen… at least, every time they have built a more sensitive instrument looking for it, none has been seen…
Well, all those experiments can do is put lower bounds on the proton’s lifespan. But so far as I know, every single model that unifies the strong and weak forces ends up predicting proton decay over some timescale or another, and all of those timescales are extremely long, and many of them longer than the experimental bounds. Though even the longest predicted proton lifespans, which are far beyond the bounds of our ability to measure, are still much shorter than the predicted lifespans of black holes.
Looks like I need to start on my bucket list.
True, it’s the old problem of trying to prove a negative.
Mind you, I was under the impression that a lot of those GUT and supersymmetry models etc are starting to feel a bit threadbare as a continuing lack of evidence piles up (or rather, sort of doesn’t).
The LHC did find the Higgs, of course, but as far as I know it hasn’t turned up anything that suggests radically new physics beyond the Standard Model?
I do know that what came out of the LHC is the most boring option possible, finding the Higgs but not finding anything else at all. Where GUT models stand in general now, though, is a question I’ll bow out of, as even when I was active in academia, it wasn’t my specialty. I think @Pasta is a particle physicist; what does he say?
My very soft recollection was that LHC in its current form lacks the power to find anything more esoteric past Higgs.
So it finding nothing is no more surprising than the discovery of bacteria had to wait until after the microscope was invented; a simple hand-held magnifying lens is inadequate to the task.
I don’t know why (because if anything is an “After I’m Dead Problem” it’s this), but this frightens me to the point of incoherence.
IMHO, a video is a very poor way to depict the chronology of the universe, for two very good reasons. First because a great deal of it isn’t visual; for example, much of what happened in the early universe can only be depicted diagramatically in the form of cartoons, or else depicted very inaccurately. And secondly, because there is such a vast range of timescales involved. A great deal happened in the first unimaginably tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang, but later on, nothing much happened for billions of years.
To me it makes a lot more sense to depict the chronology descriptively, as in the article below.
I find it…sad. Terribly sad.
So much of the universe’s life will be unwatched. Civilizations, if they exist, too far away from any others to ever know each other. White dwarf stars slowly slowly slowly cooling to equilibrium. Stars and galaxies fading over countless millennia. Lonely black holes shedding virtual particles for trillions of trillions of trillions of years, in an empty dark void. All life gone for so long that it would be a rumor, a legend, a ghost story. If there were anyone to contemplate it.
And the video ignores (because it would clutter an otherwise fine video) the possibility of Boltzmann Brains, which in the long slow death of the unverse, may outnumber actual living brains.
People don’t really have an understanding of how terribly long forever is. When you say “I wanna live forever”, THIS is the forever you’ll get. Be careful! Even living until the end of human kind in 10K, 100K, 100M years, is just a blip, merely the beginning of forever.
What @Chronos said is correct generally for grand unified theories (GUTs). You are correct that minimal supersymmetry (SUSY) is having some trouble, but GUTs don’t have to involve SUSY (minimal or otherwise).
Experimental limits on the proton decay lifetime have only ruled out the most bare-bones GUT models. Plenty of viable models fall into higher proton lifetime ranges, extending many orders of magnitude above current experimental limits.
Low-energy SUSY models (in a GUT framework or not) also allow proton decay. The experimental situation is the same: most models allow a wide range of proton decay lifetimes, so experimental searches continue in earnest.
Side note for interest: Because the mechanisms of the fastest proton decays differ in the non-SUSY and SUSY cases, the expected lowest-lifetime decay channel also typically differs. The decay p\rightarrow e^+ \pi^0 is the most generic decay for GUTs and also one that is relatively easy to spot if it were to occur in a relevant experiment. In SUSY cases, the decay p\rightarrow K^+\bar{\nu} is among the favored, but it’s trickier to identify this “fingerprint”, so current limits are slightly weaker.
How far into the future can a TARDIS travel?
Obviously to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.