Could mankind really shorten the life of the universe?

[aldiboronti]

Story from Daily Telegraph

New Scientist reports … cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe,” Prof Krauss tells New Scientist.

The team came to this depressing conclusion by calculating how the energy state of our universe - a kind of summation of all its particles and all their energies - has evolved since the big bang of creation 13.7 billion years ago.

On the face of it this seems ridiculous. How could anything we do have any effect on the whole universe? OK, maybe we can screw up the planet, but the whole damn shooting match?

[Q.E.D]

Ridiculous. In physics, particularly QM, an “observation” simply means an interaction: one particle interacts with another in some way. The kind of interactions which occurred during the detection of so-called dark energy happen all the time, all over the universe.

[CookingWithGas]

Here is the article in New Scientist referenced by the article in the OP. However, it’s only the intro; the rest is available to paid subscribers.

Here is a discussion thread which includes some brief posts from one of the authors. Here is a PDF version (105 KB) of the paper that started the furor.

The paper is short (4 pages), highly technical (and therefore over my head), and not primarily about this issue. The closing sentences of the paper are:

@Lawrence M. Krauss and James Dent

If observations of quantum mechanical systems reset their clocks, which has been observed for laboratory systems, then by measuring the existence dark energy in our own universe have we reset the quantum mechanical configuration of our own universe so that late time will never be relevant? Put another way, can internal observations of the state of a metastable universe affect its longevity?

As you can see, the popular press has grabbed a splashy phrase which seems to me just idle pondering and turned it into a news story.

[Darth_Nader]

Wasn’t this a key plot element in Callahan’s Key, written seven years ago?

[Napier]

Quantum mechanics is famous for being somehow true and yet not making any sense. In my understanding, “observations” happen all the time whether or not they are made by humans, as Q.E.D. says.

Moreover, in our current best understanding, the Universe is infinite and we can only influence a fraction of it, because of our “world lines” propagating outward from us at the velocity c. Anything outside that expanding sphere of interaction, which includes an infinite portion of the universe, is forever beyond our ability to interact with it in any way. At least, this is what Einsteinian special relativity requires. What we will learn some day that corrects or adjusts or completely topples that, I don’t know - but if you like, I’ll bet you we don’t learn it in the Telegraph.

[Crescend]

Would somehow tapping into and depleting the zero-point energy of the universe, thus triggering a new inflationary epoch do the trick?

[Peter_Morris]

The first time a caveman rubbed together two sticks and deliberately started a fire he increased the amount of entropy in the Universe and thus brought it’s eventual heat death just a little bit closer.

[Shamozzle]

I hate stories like this because it now means a ton of people are going to say, “OOoohh! We are destroying the universe! Look at how horrible we are!”

It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.