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The Death of A Universe
ninthwave writes "The Guardian is running an article on research into the visible effects of entropy in the Universe. Alan Heavens of The University of Edinburgh did the research also posted at The Royal Astronomical Society with this article" I dunno - expansion, heat death - it all reminds me of a teacher who said "I'm not a premillenialist, postmillenialist - I'm a pan-millenialist, as in it's all going to pan out in the end." Update: 08/18 16:36 GMT by S : Headline fixed.
And some slashdot them headline am grammar did die hot death ugh.
RST
So, if I'm alive in 5 billion years, I'll die in a fiery red version of our sun.
Doesn't this guy also go on to invent transparent aluminum then come back to the present and give away the formula to a fabricator in San Francisco?
"Computer! Oh computer?"
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Oh, and Karl Rove has declared that entropy was created during the Clinton administration and a partisan Congress has prevented W from eliminating it.
Does that mean we'll never get to see Duke Nukem Forver?
Alan Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing"
Just the other day I was told I couldn't put "minimize entropy" as my job description where I work. Now look what's happening. I'm going to take this article to my boss and say "I told you so!"
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
The reality is that we know so little about the universe that we can't even account for 90% of the gravity in our own galaxy. We call it dark matter because we can't see it anywhere but we need it to balance the visible mass against the visible size and rotation of the Milky Way.
We have only just begun to think about the shape of the universe. As in... What is at the edge, and what is beyond that? Or does it curl around in a sort of 11 dimentional sphery type thing. Figuring out the total heat or mass in the universe is still way beyond us.
We don't yet have a theory of gravity that works for the galaxy, or fits with electromagnetic and nuclear forces.
Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird -- Proverbs 1:17
I read somewhere recently (forgive me, I remember not where) of a new-ish theory that if the rate of expansion continues to increase that the universe will be ripped apart. that is to say, the rate of expansion would be so great that not only gravity would fail, but even strong and weak forces. All matter would be torn to shreds as it accelerated ever faster and faster.
IANAP, so anyone who is one, or studying to become one care to comment?
my pet machine
I for one welcome our old entropy overlord!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
I oonilaterally disagree with your oonique position. Ur ooninformed.
By the time any of the effects of this are seen, the human race will have wiped itself out anyway. I wouldn't give us more than another few thousand years, much less billions.
In the future, all spacecraft will be made of cheese.
You down with Entropy? Yeah, you know me! (mp3 link)
The fact is, we are rather unsure of what will happen as the universe ends.
When I was an undergraduate, my astrophysics and cosmology courses went into a number of models. The problem isn't that any of these models are inherently wrong. The real problem is that we don't have the observational evidence to choose and properly parameterize any particular model. Hasn't anyone else noticed the constant influx of observations that favor one model or another? I don't think these observations are necessarily wrong either, they are just pushing our techniques to their limits.
Not long ago, a new and very interesting model was published. It fits well with observations. Anyone with a passing interest in cosmology and/or string theory should read that paper, it's very short and easily digestable. This idea is, of course, very interesting. Is it actually the way the universe works? Hmmm, I don't know. We just don't have the observational capability to say with a high degree of certainty how the universe will evolve on a long timescale.
Sure, I like hearing about the latest measurements and calculations. But, I take it all with a megaparsec-scale cloud of sodium. It's interesting, but not too meaningful, most of the time.
This debate is definitely going to go on for some years to come. In fact, it may well not have a good answer for 5-15 gigayears.
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
You must be new here...
aaaahhh, forget it..
I, for one, welcome our grammar-challenged Slashdot Editor overlords.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Interrestingly enough, Isaac Asimov already told us just that.
-- search the web
The answer is obvious.
Perhaps they will find a way to teleport into the new universe they create, each life form becoming truly a God.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Although it pains me to say it, I believe "it's" has now become an acceptable way to write the possesive of "it," for example, given that nearly everyone does it.
So what benefits are there for having one rule for the 'it' pronoun and another for every other noun? I've been corrected many times on this issue, and I'm genuinely curious as to the origin of this rule and why it's supposed to make more sense.
Announcer: "Today, in our studios, we have an Elk, I mean, an expert..."
Anne Elk: "Not Anne Expert, Anne Elk!"
Announcer: "Yes. Sorry. Today we have a-n expert, not a-n-n-e Expert on... the Universe..."
Anne Elk: "That's right Chris, I am."
Announcer: "An Expert?"
Anne Elk: "No... Anne Elk"
Tim
It also bugs me when people say "an historic" instead of simply "a historic," as in "that's quite a historic event." (Try saying it out loud both ways.)
The people who spell it "an historic" aren't pronouncing the "h". I say it and spell it the way you do, but AFAIK they're both valid pronounciations.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
The conclusions drawn by this article would appear to be fairly trivial at first. Basically energy can neither be created or destroyed and as the universe is expanding the overall energy density of the universe is faling. Less energy density means less luminosity.
I think, however that the scientists haven't accounted for the effects of hawking radiation, which is basically the energy given out when a piece of matter falls into a black hole. Hawking radiation is obtained from matter that is otherwise lost frrm the universe and as such does not obey the classical laws of thermodynamics. Because of this the amount of energy in the universe is actually increasing although the rate at which it is doing so is extremely slow. As mentioned by the article however the number of black holes is increasing (all matter is drawn together by gravity so in a long enough timescale it will eventually coalesce to form a black hole) and so the hawking radiation will increase. It is therefore likely that in a billion years from now, the sky will actually be brighter than it is now, not from stars (which as the article points out will have disappeared) but from a brilliant glow of hawking radiation.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
Dealing with this topic - "The Last Question" by Issac Asimov. Awesome ending.
it all reminds me of a teacher who said "I'm not a premillenialist, postmillenialist - I'm a pan-millenialist, as in it's all going to pan out in the end."
This guy must have been fun at parties.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
... i thought the blackout was confined to new york, detroit and cleveland?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Who then, if not humans, would you suggest make grandiose statements?
bad sig...no donut.
"But language is an evolving invention of the people and not a set of rules defended by an elite crackerjack force of grammar gnomes."
Tell that to the French.
*rimshot*
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
It's called "epenthesis"--the insertion of a sound becuase the language seems to dictate it.
:-P
Ex. A + hour ---> "An hour"
In this case, the [n] sound is epenthetic.
I'm sure some folks studying phonology can give us the official formula for English... I guess the [n] only pops up between the determiner "a" and a vowel sound-initial word. The "yoo" sound in "universe" is a semivowel
The sun will swell to become a red giant until it engulfs Earth.
Actually, it's been recently shown (1, 2) that Earth could survive Sol's expansion, though it would be really frickin' hot!
-l
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"We live in an accelerating universe now and so, as time goes on, the density of galaxies is going to thin out"
In my understanding the lights would be observed to go out for two reasons:
First, young stars form at vertices of intersecting matter bubbles and sheaths, where the concentration is highest. If a vertex reaches a high enough density it coalesces, gets critically hot so fusion can start. Problem is the average density of vertices is dropping, so less will go critical.
Second, cosmic expansion will make it increasingly less likely that the average new stars' light will be able to ever reach an observer.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
> The people who spell it "an historic" aren't
> pronouncing the "h".
But they are, and do! That's what's so silly about it. It seems to be a fashion amongst meeja types in particular to say, "an" before any word beginning with h, regardless of how it's pronounced.
For a word like "honour" (or "honor" for left-ponders), practically no-one pronounces the h so "an honour" is perfectly sensible.
For the word "hotel", there is a school of thought which pronounces it the French way, without the h and so for them, "an hotel" is perfectly sensible.
If you happen to come from the north of England and call a four legged creature like an outsize pony an "'orse" then saying "an 'orse" is perfectly sensible.
What's just plain dumb (and, if you accept any rules at all in language, just plain wrong) is twisting your tongue to use the indefinite article "an" in front of a word where you also pronounce the leading h - I've heard "an historic", "an horse", "an house" and lots of others, all with the h clearly pronounced.
> I say it and spell it the way
> you do, but AFAIK they're both valid
> pronounciations.
Indeed, this isn't an argument about pronounciation. If you don't pronounce the h then "an" is the sensible one to use; if you do pronounce the h then "an" is just silly.
John
you're kidding...
what ignorant fool writes "your" as the contraction for YOU ARE???
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
>>Galaxies shine with the combined light of all the stars in them. Most of the light from young stars is blue, coming from very hot massive stars. These blue stars live fast and die young, ending their lives in supernova explosions
So I guess that Jimmy Dean, John Belushi, Keith Moon and Bon Scott were blue stars eh?
wbs.
Huh?
I dunno - expansion, heat death - it all reminds me of a teacher who said "I'm not a premillenialist, postmillenialist - I'm a pan-millenialist, as in it's all going to pan out in the end."
Hemos, this does prove that you have been to a school and even listened to what the teacher was saying!!
I understand the concept of studying all of these various "snapshots" in time that show us what happened at thre far reaches of our universe billions of years ago, but I've never understood how astronomers can make such "matter of fact" claims when the amount of change that we've been able to observe in these windows to the past seem so statistically irrelevant (i.e. 100 years out of 100 trillion years).
Who's to say that light from thousands of new stars that were formed long ago won't reach Earth for the first time today.
The vastness of time and space is mind-blowing. It just seems silly to claim that these theories are anything more than best guesses.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
I'm sure this document is very enlightening to those with the property background knowledge, but any paper with the phrase "according to conventional four-dimenional quantum field theory" (page 3) is a bit beyond my comprehension, and I'm not sure if it can be called easily digestable...
No, it's called a mistake, because the language doesn't dictate it, a semi-literate "editor" does, who remembers half the rule he learnt in primary school. It's the mindless extension of a rule, like putting an apostrophe before every final "s" when it's neither a possessive nor a contraction.
Hemos,
You have embarrassed we for the last time. Get an box and clean out you locker.
Loves,
Taco
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
It was a good paper, at the time. Since it's publication; however, we have some fairly good evidence that the universe isn't going to slow down and compact in a "crunch" The evidence shows that the universe is actually accelerating outward. Additional evidence, seems to indicate that there isn't enough mass to reverse the acceleration. Current accepted theory is that the universe will continue to expand and thermodynamically "die"
phew!
What the "snapshots" of x billion years ago/light years away tell us is not just what that particular galaxy was like, but, we assume, other galaxies at the same age. (There's no reason to think otherwise.) So we can see a smooth evolution looking backwards the further away we focus. That gives us a perspective of not a hundred, but about 10 billion years.
I believe that the projected time when Andromeda galaxy collides with our Milky Way (they ARE headed for collision) is around 100 million years hence (correction anyone?). This collision will induce a profusion of star formations and may end up ejecting our star/solar system out of the galaxy entirely. Or, we may end up in the Andromeda galaxy as it moves on its merry way, or...
In any case, the lights are scheduled to burst anew in a plethora of star formation in the nearish future. Of course, several BILLION years later, the trend remains as mentioned.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
...who won the Nobel prize in 1974 for his work in discovering quasars at Cambridge University...
You'd think someone would have noticed before then. They were behind the couch the whole time.
Ba-BOOM! Thanks, I'm here all evening.
For a good foray into the future history of an open universe, see Freeman Dyson's classic, "Time Without End: Physics and Biology In an Open Universe".
It's worth pointing out that up until just recently, pretty much everyone was sure that the universe would be closed (although it appears pretty flat). The recent supernova measurements indicate a universe that's expanding faster and faster, so we now have very strong reason to believe the universe is in fact open, but when people like Dyson were speculating about the possible future of an open universe, it was considered highly speculative and rather academic (since everyone was sure that we didn't live in one).
No, because theoretically there can be multiple universes.
If there is another universe, which is in any way connected with our universe, I don't think you could really call it a different universe. It is just a part of our universe which has not been discovered yet.
If OTOH you think about a different universe in no way connected to our universe, they can not ever affect each other. In that case that different universe does not exist. At least it does not exist using physicist's definition of existence. It might exist using a mathematician's definition of existence. However in math any consistent universe you can think of exists, which doesn't make much sense either. So either we have to stick to the exists in our universe meaning of existence, or we would have a lot of trouble defining existence.
In short there can be only one universe, because any other universe would be a part of ours or nonexistent.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?