What is the most popular view in modern times about how the end of the universe will come about? According to wiki The Big Crunch has been ruled out because the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. Will the universe end? Will it eventually repeat itself since the beginning of time on some infinite loop?
A Big Crunch/Infinite Loop is somewhat comforting. But the last I heard it’s not going to happen. So the Universe will expand, and eventually all of the energy will be converted. So it will be a whole lot of nothing.
I don’t know I find the infinite loop theory kind of disturbing having to go through some pretty bad stuff all over again, even though it would be new again.
The most popular view, at this point, is that the universe will continue to expand at an accelerating rate–that is, the space between objects will expand–eventually overcoming gravitation, electromagnetic, and possibly even nuclear exchange forces, rending objects to their component particles accelerating away from each other at greater than the speed of light. (Note that this is not inconsistant with General Relativty; the velocity of the particles themselves is low, but the space between them, which has no discrete physical instantiation in GR.) The universe will literally evaporate into a homogeneous quantum gas.
It’s possible to model this as occuring on the event horizon of black hole, and some theories hold that the “expansion” of the universe might be, in a very weirdly distored way, due to the collapse of the universe, but only by people who have spent a decade or more in a physics graduate program for the sole purpose of dominating the conversation at University socials and making the big bucks by selling pop science books to the masses. (I’d aspire to that myself but I lack both the academic credentials and the ability to choke a catchphrase to death in the pursuit of making a personal trademark.)
What does all of this tell us about the end of the universe? Not all that much, actually. We’ve made some astonishly groovy inferences from the little we can actually observe about the universe from our little blue dot (see! I used a catchphrase…oh, damn, that one’s already taken, isn’t it?) and from thence performed some really wacky extrapolations, but that’s like trying to decypher the content of a cell phone call from one tiny timeslice. We have a few bits of information compared to the megabytes needed to actually understand and model the behavior of the universe. So, it’s all barely educated, SWAGish guesswork at this point. But fun stuff, or at least the best you’ll find on public broadcasting.
Stranger
I thought that brane cosmology allowed for a cyclic rebirth of the universe even without a Big Crunch in the classic sense.
Erg…sort of, if your notion of “cycling” is branes repeatedly interacting with one another. “Brane theories” (as a general subset of or adjunct to M-Thorery) are really nothing more than errant speculation at this point; totally unfalsifiable, and will remain so for any conceivable future. They dispense with thermodynamic detractions against history cyclic theories, but have their own set of problems about which I’m totally unqualified to say anything useful regarding.
Stranger
But we’ve already been through it an infinite number of times. We oughtta be pretty good at it by now.
If true then yeah good point, besides maybe my life just gets better and better after this point. 