NASA: Evidence Favors Infinitely Expanding Universe

Chris Gondek writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has a story here about how NASA is expected to announce this week that it has proved the existence of "dark energy," a cosmic force that counteracts gravity and will keep the universe expanding forever. The announcement will effectively demolish the theory that life will be wiped out in a "big crunch" when the universe collapses, and should end decades of academic dispute. Scientists ranging from Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist, to Albert Einstein, have argued that the universe eventually will stop expanding and then implode under the force of gravity, destroying all life. The Chicago Sun Times has also got some info."

Comments

Heat Death instead

[crow]

So instead of the Big Crunch, we get Heat Death. The universe is slowly cooling, and will eventually cool to absolute zero (killing all life), or so the theory goes.

I don't think that there is any reputable theory that doesn't have a "killing all life" at some point in the very distant future.

Re:Perception is reality

[KDan]

Expansion of the universe doesn't actually mean the space between the atoms in your body increases. The atoms in your body are tightly coupled by strong electromagnetic forces, which are stronger than the expansion of the universe. Imagine a cardboard disc on the elastic surface that usually represents spacetime - several cardboard discs will grow apart as you stretch the surface, but the discs themselves will not grow, they are rigid because of the internal forces.

Those discs are actually of sizes somewhere around clusters of (billions of) galaxies, so the atoms in your body are fairly safe.

Daniel

Re:Whew! That's a relief!

[Forgotten]

It's kind of a funny term. Heat death is actually the complete conversion of all the free energy in a system (in this case, of all systems) into the corresponding entropy. It's the victory of the second law of thermodynamics. It's not that all the energy goes away, but that it becomes so evenly spread that no further work is possible - there are no more free energy gradients to traverse. So it's not the death of heat, it's a death in heat - literally a tepid cosmos. ;)

As I noted in another message, an infinitely expanding universe means that the temperature of the heat-dead cosmos will constantly drop as the volume increases. It will asymptotically approach absolute zero.

Some others have noted that there are theories where energy and/or matter are spontaneously created in empty space. These can coexist with the heat death fate if the new energy is also evenly spread, which it probably would be in such a uniformly boring heat-dead universe. Still no way to create a new free energy gradient.

I find this an interesting fate because it's also reflected in some religions and philosophies, where everything becomes one at the end of time.

Re:Then how did the Bing Bang happen?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Turning a switch on in systems equations requires an infinite amount of energy. Think about that the next time someone tells you to switch the lights off if you aren't in the room for 5 minutes.

Seriously though, I think every cosmologist should be required to be an Electrical Engineer first. I should write a book, All the I needed to know in life I learned in Systems

• All of the mathmatical rules we have to describe the universe are approximations.
• There is more than one model to describe most phenominon.
• Any time you convert data, you alter it. Quantifying data is a conversion process.
• Quick, Cheap, Right. Pick any two.
• If the problem can't be solved, transform it into another domain or eliminate variables through constraints.
• And by the way, just because someone says it's a constraint doesn't make it so.
• Engineers are the center of the Universe. They get to pick the coordinate system.

They need to address Halton Arp's observations

[Kelvin]

Halton Arp, an award winning astronomer who used to be Edwin Hubble's assistant, has spent years documenting physically connected astronomical bodies with vastly different redshifts. That's simply impossible under the current theories. But they exist.

He's published several books on the subject including Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science which presents considerable information that's been surpressed by astronomers whose theories have been threatened.

In Seeing Red, he also lays out an alternate, simplified theory, which is a _slight_ modification of the general theory of relativity that ends up predicting the real world observations without resorting to magic constants, curved space, "dark matter", and other kludges that the currently accepted theories need.

Here's some other info about it.

Re:Then how did the Bing Bang happen?

[Jester99]

This concept of multiple universes makes absolutely no sense to me; doesn't, by definition, the universe mean "everything"? Hence, if multiple time/space continuums existed, they would just constitute different parts of the same universe?

The best way to think about it is to imagine a balloon. Blow the balloon up. See the inner walls of it? That's the universe. You can place a pebble anywhere on those walls and roll it around, and it's pretty much trapped there.

Our universe (theoretically, anyway) is a special, 3-d balloon wall. Supposing the inner walls of the balloon were 3d, you could travel around in there, but never escape.

Now take hold of some of the balloon in one hand, so you've pinched off a sub-balloon. Give the pinch-point a small twist so it stays that way. A pebble rolling around on the inner surface of that pinched off bubble will never make it into the original balloon inner-space. They're connected, but it is impossible to get from one "universe" to the other. This is what is meant by the multiple universes sprouting off from each other theory. Singularities in space, etc, cause baby universes to "pinch off" from the one we know and love.

Disclaimer: IANAPP (I am not a particle physicist), but I've read a few books / magazines on the subject :)

That's how I think about it, anyway.