# Is the Heat Death of the Universe necessarily permanent? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 30, 2010, 7:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-heat-death-of-the-universe-necessarily-permanent/551977 "2010-08-30T07:50:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2010, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-heat-death-of-the-universe-necessarily-permanent/551977/21 "2010-09-03T03:07:05Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Anyway, I am not sure that the heat death will really happen. It will take a bit of explaining. First, the free energy will never actually be 0, only approach it asymptotically. That means that motion will not stop, only get arbitrarily slow. What started me thinking on this was something I read somewhere that there is no minimum energy needed for computation; The less energy you use, the slower it goes. I assume the same is true of us; the less free energy we have, the slower we (or our successors) can move. But if we slow down and both our minds and our computers slow down correspondingly how would we notice. I guess light speed would appear to get faster and faster, but it is already essentially infinite as far as we are concerned, so again there would not seem to be any practical effect. Since there will always remain some free energy, I do not see, in principle, why this couldn’t continue indefinitely. This was a premise of Frederik Pohl’s _The World At The End Of Time_. ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2010, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-heat-death-of-the-universe-necessarily-permanent/551977/22 "2010-09-03T03:35:22Z")
I’m not really following the energy isn’t conserved talk. Light’s redshifted, but then aren’t we also interacting with that light for a longer period of time? In any case, how does the fact (conjecture?) that the total energy of the universe is zero affect this discussion? Stephen Hawking just caught some flak for saying God’s not needed since we didn’t really have something come from nothing. We had nothing come from nothing. Can we have another big bang at any moment? ---
**Author:** ![MattProle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ed8c4c/32.png) [@MattProle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MattProle)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2010, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-heat-death-of-the-universe-necessarily-permanent/551977/23 "2010-09-03T04:57:43Z")
> [@Snarky\_Kong](#): > > I’m not really following the energy isn’t conserved talk. Light’s redshifted, but then aren’t we also interacting with that light for a longer period of time? > > In any case, how does the fact (conjecture?) that the total energy of the universe is zero affect this discussion? Stephen Hawking just caught some flak for saying God’s not needed since we didn’t really have something come from nothing. We had nothing come from nothing. Can we have another big bang at any moment? This was actually something I also suspected before posting here. It’s an interesting idea and seems to jive with my intuition pretty well. ---
**Author:** ![MattProle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ed8c4c/32.png) [@MattProle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MattProle)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2010, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-heat-death-of-the-universe-necessarily-permanent/551977/24 "2010-09-03T05:08:53Z")
I originally suspected that the cause of the heat death would be the affects of ever increasing entropy. I tried to discredit this notion by noting that the second law of thermodynamics is merely a statement of statistics. For me it would be more enlightening to think of entropy as S = k ln w rather than S = Q/T. This implies that the entropy of the Universe may go down, and given an infinite amount of time, may even fluctuate to very low values, allowing for the development of life sustaining energy gradients. The only issue is determining all the other relevant parameters. The contribution of dark energy to the Universe seems to make it expand at an accelerating rate; this is truly mysterious to me. Can anyone describe what dark energy is all about? Is it supposed to be the manifestation of a “new” force of the Universe, only noticeable at very large scales? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2010, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-heat-death-of-the-universe-necessarily-permanent/551977/25 "2010-09-03T06:30:07Z")
> [@](#): > > Can anyone describe what dark energy is all about? Is it supposed to be the manifestation of a “new” force of the Universe, only noticeable at very large scales? That’s one way of looking at it. For all anyone knows, it may even be the correct way of looking at it. But it can also be looked at as the action of ordinary gravity, according to the rules of general relativity as we already understand it, on a very peculiar form of fluid which fills the Universe, and that’s the interpretation that’s currently favored. **Hari Seldon** , I’ve seen speculation that it might be possible for computation (and hence presumably thought and consciousness) to proceed indefinitely by asymptotically slowing to zero, but all the discussions of it I’ve seen have fallen short of completely answering the question. The problem is in determining just how quickly computation speed has to fall off, and whether it’s possible for it to fall off gradually enough to have a divergent integral. We don’t really care how many seconds we can continue to think for, but rather, how many thoughts we can think. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-heat-death-of-the-universe-necessarily-permanent/551977.md?page=1)