Slashdot Mirror
The Big Rip
WolfWithoutAClause writes "It's been known for decades that the universe is expanding. The current evidence points to this rate of expansion increasing, and if so, there's no obvious reason why the expansion rate couldn't continue to increase ever faster. A physicist, Simon Caldwell, has taken this to inevitable conclusion and suggested the expansion will eventually reach a point where the expansion rate is so high that any surviving people will ripped apart, followed a millisecond later by the destruction of all the atoms in the universe. Ouch.
New Scientist says we may only have 22 billion years left. Almost enough time for a quick game of Everquest then."
Hmmm... if I read this correctly, the universe will be "ripping" all the digital media in existence in about 22 billion years.
Sounds like it could be the target for a RIAA/DCMA lawsuit! "Your honor, we would like to sue the universe for clearly premeditated copyright violation."
Given that humans have been on Earth only a few million(?) years, is this even something woth worrying about at this point?
Given that as a scientific line of inquiry it is interesting, it is nothing more at this point than another pet theory based on abservations made of a (very) limited part of the universe, so I take it like all such with a grain of salt.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
I wonder if people will be hunting the "last post" before Slashdot servers get ripped apart.
the expansion will eventually reach a point where the expansion rate is so high that any surviving people will ripped apart, followed a millisecond later by the destruction of all the atoms in the universe.
My experiments in expansion have proven that somewhere around a 44-46 waist the expansion rate is so high, you better start looking for a big-and-tall men's shop or any surviving jeans will be ripped apart, followed a millisecond later by the purchasing of sweatpants.
Don't let this happen to your universe.
What I find so amazing is that half the theories are created on so little real fact. Just recently scientist have acknowledged that dark matter/energy exsist. But they have no clue what it is...or how it works...or how to include it in thier equasions. So they guess, start dropping it into the mathmatical grinder and presto...instant theory of the univers ripping to pieces.
I wish they would wait at least long enough to get some decent information on new discoveries before twisting them into imaginary shapes and trying hard to get recognized.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
It looks like someone came up with just another theory. I would like the see the theoretical evidence that supports this theory. Because there are other theories that say that the universe will collapse again, due to gravity of dark matter.
Why do I get the ever-increasing impression that the New Scientist is nothing but a forum for crackpot theories?
Does this mean that at some point black holes will start regurtitating matter?
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Actually the Universe started the Jared diet last week.
that the universe is going to do something blatantly ridiculus they say that my simulation is wrong or that I dropped a minus sign or that it's just not worth considering.
After all *their* simulation must be right and they *haven't* dropped any minus signs and they certanly have all the information they need to make radical but perfectly justifiable claims like this.
Sure is good to know that ever since that whole flat earth thing they've always been right on.
Yay
</sarcasm>
Mark Twain wrote on nearly this exact topic in 1883. He wrote a great essay on extrapolation , basing his conclusions on the fact that the Missippi between Cairo and New Orleans was shortening an average of a mile per year for the last two hundred years or so....
To quote:
"Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
-Peter
what about our galaxy being destroyed/consumed by andromeda in roughly one billion years? This rip sounds pretty stupid if you ask me, I think as it approached that critical expansion speed life would start faltering, i.e. gestation, procreation, etc etc. The last few seconds of life will NOT be "ripped".
this is not a sig.
"A physicist, Simon Caldwell, has taken this to inevitable conclusion and suggested the expansion will eventually reach a point where the expansion rate is so high that any surviving people will ripped apart"
What did Master Caldwell think when he first started getting his first erection?
Sorry for being crude,
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
But what's going to happen to all those Angels dancing on the head of that pin?
No artist tolerates reality. -- Nietzsche
The universe being ripped apart would leave what in its place?
Perhaps the resulting emptiness could then undergo another big bang and create yet another universe? Wouldn't that be neat.
Or not. I guess we'll never know!
Government IS the problem.
Man, 22 billion years? I was hoping I could hold out until my protons decay (10^33 years, according to some supersymmetry models). On the other hand, the article does point out that the presence of dark energy makes stable, long-lived wormholes possible, thus enabling us to perhaps see more of the universe before its sudden and catastrophic end. Unfortunately, I suppose it may then be possible to lay waste to the universe manually by setting up bizarre time-traveling paradoxes that create loops in cause and effect. Dammned if you do...
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Does this mean that the space between protons and neutrons is growing too, but the laws that govern? If so, wouldn't this imply that at some instant point in time you would reach an equilibrium where the weak nucular foce is just at the ende of how far apart they are from each other, and you can cause fission and fusion to happen at will, or something like that, and create a perpetual motion machine of some sort?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Most physicists probably will not be rooting for phantom energy. That is because if it exists, it will cause them all kinds of theoretical headaches. For example, Einstein's theory of gravity predicts the existence of minuscule wormholes - short cuts through space-time.
Normally they snap shut so fast we never notice them. But phantom energy's repulsive gravity would be powerful enough to hold wormholes open, and perhaps even push them wide enough apart for spacecraft to use them for faster-than-light travel. "This raises the spectre of time machines and all their paradoxes, which physicists find very uncomfortable," says Caldwell.
Ahhh, problem solved... If the wormholes are big enough to fly stuff through, then we can just grab as much matter as we can find, fling it all together towards an arbitratily chosen "center point" to the universe, and rely on good old gravity to hold it together. If we just keep grabing and hurling the matter of the universe back onto itself just a little bit faster than it can expand away from itself, we can keep the old gal together indefinitly.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I also wish to point out that extrapolation can be useful for precisely the reason many are criticizing it: it can reveal where current theories are wrong.
Shame on New Scientist.
And now the above, with (a little) math. The gravitational force between two objects is basically (leaving out mass)
F = -k / r^2 + L * r
where k is a constant, r is the separation between the 2 objs, and L is either a constant or a function of time (we don't know yet).
The k term is good old Newtonian (or even Einsteinian up until a couple of years ago) gravity. Strong for small r, weak for low r.
The L term represents the new discovery that the universal expansion is accelerating. It is (unnoticeably) weak on small scales, and only important for large r (i.e. size of the visible universe). For the L term to matter on planetary scales, it would have to become much larger in the future. But we just discovered that it even exists - how it behaves with time is the next thing to find. So don't worry (yet ;-).
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
They should just patent the process of destructions of the universe, and not license the process to the universe.
And if the universe uses the patent without permission, sue the universe!
1. Patent the Process of Universal Destruction
2. ???
3. Profit!
Where "???" reperesents total destruction of everything.
-pyrrho
this means those AOL cds will be gone once and for all.
My favoriate quote from the article: the scientist says, "It's unlikely, but it can't be proved impossible."
Umm, ok..on that same note, my ass is the source of all knowledge.