Far Future Will See No Evidence of Universe's Origin

Dr. Eggman writes "According to an article on Ars Technica and its accompanying General Relativity and Gravitation journal article 'The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology', in the far future of the universe all evidence of the origin of the universe will be gone. Intelligences alive 100-billion-years from now will observe a universe that appears much the way our early 1900s view of the universe was: Static, had always been there, and consisted of little more than our own galaxy and a islands of matter. 'The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone. Its wavelength will have been shifted to a full meter, and its intensity will drop by 12 orders of magnitude. Even before then, however, the frequency will reach that of the interstellar plasma and be buried in the noise--the stuff of the universe itself will mask the evidence of its origin. Other evidence for the Big Bang comes from the amount of deuterium and helium isotopes in the universe.'"

Comments

Re:Perhaps

[644bd346996]

Just off the top of my head, I'm not a physicist but I like to read. If the universe is expanding then it must be a finite area. Nope. The rest of your logic is sound, but unfortunately it depends on that false assumption. The standard analogy is to imagine a 2d universe existing on the surface of a balloon. As you inflate the balloon, all points on the surface move away from each other. Now, realize that this is completely independent of the volume of the balloon, and it does not even require a finite surface area. Then extrapolate to three dimensions.

Re:Perhaps

[beyondkaoru]

well, regardless of the acceleration observations (which might be caused by other junk pulling on us, unknown phenomena, whatever), it is possible that our galaxy and others were given enough oomph to reach escape velocity relative to everyone else; since space could go on forever (that is to say, the stuff in it might only cover a small portion of it), the oil in a pot analogy doesn't work.

i know it might be a little counterintuitive, the concept of escape velocity (getting enough energy that you'll go fast enough to never have to be pulled back) might apply here. having finite energy does not mean that something can only go a finite distance.

i think the confusion arises from the definition of 'universe' -- people often use it to refer to spacetime or also the stuff in it. in terms of the expansion, we're usually referring to how we notice that we're getting further away from most other things we can see.

of course, all this speculation could get thrown out once we discover something tomorrow...

Re:Peak hydrogen

[Hewligan]

While 25% of the universe's hydrogen may have been converted to heavier elements, about 24% was converted in the first second or so, and then about 1% in the ensuing 13.7 billion years. At that rate, there will be plenty left in 100 billion years time.