Slashdot Mirror
Universe May Be Running Out of Time
RenHoek writes "With heat death, the big crunch and quite a few other nasty ways in which the universe could see its demise, we can now add "running out of time" to the list. A team of scientists came up with a new theory that would solve the problem of the elusive dark energy that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. They figure that the universe is not speeding up but we are, in relation to the outer regions of space, slowing down. Tests with the upcoming Large Hadron Collider will give more insight if we're going to end up frozen in time."
Ha, you only think this is offtopic!
... to book at Milliways !!!
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
With heat death, the big crunch and quite a few other nasty ways in which the universe could see its demise, we can now add "running out of time" to the list.
Sorry, it's the Holidays getting me down.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
It's our time. We needs more of it. I suppose we could try a time transplant.
I guess it's best to start work on a time conservation program.
We just keep using up all our resources these days.
Is there a fill up station somewhere, can we exploit time from another place?
Better start trying!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/09/1544200
Mr. Gore, have you been submitting stories to slashdot again?
If time turns out to be a non-constant, so goes everything we know about anything.
Ms. Cartman: Doctor, did you find out what's wrong with him?
Doctor: I'm afraid he's running out of time.
Ms. Cartman: Why, what's wrong with him?
Doctor: It's his time. It's running out.
Ms. Cartman: What can we do?
Doctor: Well, I suppose we can try a time transplant. I'll have to call a specialist.
Entropic Doom will get us anyway, that is if this theory doesn't work out.
So much to worry about. The collapsing universe. An asteroid striking Earth. Global climate change. Volcanoes that erupt and block the sun. Lnadslides and earthquakes causing devastating tsunamis.
I need a beer.
"We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect," he says.
Of course it could also flip us all upside down and turn everything a light salmon color!
Note to self: Patent method for garnering scientific celebrity. Come up with outlandish theory, then claim that LHC will move it to the mainstream.
I got a catholic block.
is this further evidence that we're approaching a black hole? The whole, unverse appears to be accelerating away from us in all directions thing?
kinda freakin' me out here people, if time slows down too much, it'll be 2:45 Friday afternoon forever!
the title is misleading
how many billions of years are we talking about?
should we (with our tiny lifespans) care whether the universe flies apart into nothingness or crushes itself?
dont we have more pressing issues as humanity to worry about (take a pick: global warming, george bush, global recession, peak oil)?
...of the universe are not slowing down, so let's move there!
I believe this announcement should be taken as a wake up call by the Duke Nukem Forever developers. I'm standing by to place my order while the cosmos collapses around me.
never mind the universe, I'm running out of time to get my Christmas shopping done!! best wishes to everyone!
We'll all be dead loooooooooooooooooong before then.
repeated below:
"If that happens, then these kind of theories will move out of the realm of speculation and into the mainstream."
There are a gazillion of these unsupported hunches out there, believe which ever one you want. Physics has become the domain of science fiction authors.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
... "Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations"
So...from all this, the ending is - We get screwed. Thanks. The universe is just rolling the dice to see which doom wins. Fantastic... Now, give me another Irish coffee and let the IRS know they don't win in the end.
If we're slowing down (even though time still SEEMS the same to us...) would that mean that we will actually have MORE time? (from a perspective of what our time originally was?)
Can all fish swim?
And Bill Gates may be running out of money.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Will time run out before then?
Fear, long time (relative) slashdotter gets a girl, starts a family and then time stops!
Great! Just Great!
My daughter is due early May 2008... not sure what would be worse.. my wife stuck forever pregnant, baby (diapers), or her as a teenager!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Assuming a Platonistic perspective (that there is this "thing" out there called time), then we would never be able to observe time slowing down. The slow down would never affect us in the least. All chemical reactions, all of your neural activity... everything... would slow down at the same rate. That may have been a badly worded statement, or I'm taking too literal an interpretation of it.
> get tea
No Tea: dropped.
If we have less we should spend it more wisely www.fivedayweekend.org
If time emerged during the big bang, then wouldn't that mean that there was no "before" the big bang? So where did it come from?
The problem with TFA is that it makes little logical sense. In what possible sense can time be "slowing down?" "Slowing down" is a statement that something is changing less per unit time. If you like, that dx/dt is negative.
But how can you measure the "rate" at which time itself is changing? If "change in time" (dt) is going to go in the numerator, what will go in the denominator? Can't be dt, of course. So how do you define the "rate" at which time changes? I can't think of anything. It's like asking the price of money. "Price" means "how much you get per unit money." You can't ask how much money you get per unit money. (Note to nitpickers: the price of currency, e.g. the price of dollars in drachma, is not a valid counterexample.)
I'm sure the physics makes sense, but the language in this news article does not. If anyone knows what the actual science is, I at least would be grateful for a better explanation than this news article provides. Anyone?
Maybe this isn't a sign that time is collapsing or that it will collapse at some point in the far off future. Maybe Space and time are being stretched. There may be finite amount of space and it keeps getting spread thinner, which could effect gravitational forces and then effect time. Somewhat how a black hole can slow time around it, maybe the spreading of the universe is in effect increasing the speed in the spread thin areas. Of course what does that mean when Space and time get spread to thin, so we get tears or does it collapse? Seems devastating either way.
:P
Then again I only took one entry level university class on the whole thing so I don't think that qualifies me. I just like to think of apposing theories
Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This... is wrong tool. [rummaging] No, not good. Not good. No. No-- never use this!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Zathras: "Cannot run out of time. Time is infinite. You, are finite. Zathras if finite. This.... is wrong tool."
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Maybe some sort of exra-dimensional black hole that we cannot detect with our current telescopes?
I always seem to read Large Hadron Collider as "Large Hardon Collider." Not sure how that's related to science.
I understand that one of the Manhattan Project scientists was taking bets on whether this would happen.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Being "frozen in time" would require a privileged frame of reference from which to observe this. Relativity precludes such a thing.
If time slows down, we slow down with it, and we don't notice because everything looks normal. This is precisely the gedankenexperiment of the moving train. If you can't handle the relativity, read some science fiction that uses it, such as Tau Zero (the ship can't stop accelerating and ends up crossing the entire universe and watching the big crunch and next big bang) or the Heechee stories (where the guy leaves the rest of his crew trapped around a black hole, and they're recovered decades later, havening spent weeks waiting).
To have an absolutely 0 tau would require a completely flat universe. As long as any matter and/or energy (dark or light) exists, this is impossible. The rate may approach 0 but cannot achieve it. Thus, there will always be duration, and we will experience it just as we do now.
Time could be speeding up and slowing down right now, like a lead foot motorist stuck in a traffic jam. We'd never notice because we're stuck in it, no matter what its rate is, like a passenger in said vehicle that can't see outside (minus the inertial effects, because we're talking the universe here, not a locally observable phenomenon).
The same argument applies to "the universe is expanding". We couldn't detect that either, because we're embedded in space time. We'd expand too. All we can see is the supposed effects of previous expansion, that of Hubble red shift. Try the dots-on-the-balloon experiment. The dots get farther apart. But the distance between them as measured by the size of a dot remains constant.
It's the same argument because time and space are integrated as space-time. It's essentially the inability to get outside a frame of reference known as "universe".
Whenever I see one of these goofy assertion articles, I hope for a summary of the math. These goofy results must be arrived at due to an error in assumption. Such an error, if considered to be a valid point, may be just the error that prevents us from integrating gravity with the other forces, and so illuminating and fixing that error could be a major step in theoretical physics.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If Soviet Russia isn't in a different universe, it is slowing down, too.
one that runs on both time and electricity, so as you slow down it charges the backup battery and you can keep going through the magic of hybrid synergy drive!
Did he set off a TIME DILATION FIELD around us?
or did they star messing with the ANCIENT TIME-LOOP DEVICE again?
Mmmmmmmmm.....frozen time. With chocolate sprinkles.
Hey! Someday he will save the world from immanent destruction and even you will say "Thank you Al Gore! You're super awesome!"
The game.
We're moving out of the Slow Zone.
If there was ever a SF plot device I wished was true, that's was it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I came accross this information. Seems if light is slowing down why not time? Australian physicist Barry Setterfield and mathematician Trevor Norman examined all of the available experimental measurements to date and have announced a discovery: the speed of light appears to have been slowing down over the years. [Roemer, 1657 (Io eclipse): +/- 307,600 5400 km/sec; Harvard, 1875 (same method): +/- 299,921 13 km/sec; NBS, 1983 (laser method): +/- 299,792.4586 0.0003 km/sec.] They all are approximately 186,000 miles/second; or about one foot/nanosecond.)3 While the margin of error improved over the years, the mean value has noticeably decreased. In fact, the bands of uncertainty hardly overlap. As you would expect, these findings are highly controversial, especially to the more traditional physicists. However, many who scoffed at the idea initially have subsequently begun to take a closer look at the possibilities. Alan Montgomery, the Canadian mathematician, has also analyzed the data statistically and has concluded that the decay of c, the velocity of light, has followed a cosecant-squared curve with a correlation coefficient of better than 99%.
"....a star moving away appears redder in colour than one moving towards us." Oh Dear. Another non-scientist tries to write about science and makes a boo-boo.
Let's all concentrate on making a big red cloud around the world, then we can remove ourselves from this universe all together!
My outlook on the creation of the universe is a bit different than any others and incredibly simplistic.
/.er who likes the natural patterns he finds in nature and thinks it points to something big; like the universe is telling us something.
From what I've seen of the universe, every single celestial body might have life cycles similar to the ordinary star: birth via supernova, maturation, and then collapse. If during a collapse the star is reduced to nebula, couldn't it be possible that the gravitational forces from each atom of the nebula pull one another together to create another supernova and bear forth a star? Maybe the universe works in the same way - expanding then pulling itself back and compressing? If stars do that, then why not galaxies and universes? Maybe sometime in the far flung future the energy that propelled everything away from the "center of the universe" (ie, big bang ground zero) will dissipate; and the only force acting upon the universe's numerous celestial body will be both their corresponding gravitational pulls and the gravitational pull found at the "center of the universe." If there is a pull at the center of the universe, that is. Perhaps its just some huge vacuum void of all matter, and its force is overpowered by the force created by the big bang.
I'm not a theoretical physicist, astrologist, or whatnot. I'm just a
Better cash in the kids' college funds, head for Vegas, find some hookers, some coke and go out in style.
What?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
the Universe is infinite in every respect. that is the only way that it can exist.
the Universe is in a constant state of change. time and distance are abstracts of man and not important to the Universe
when you gaze into the sky tonite and see all the stars out there what you are looking at is a tiny piece of the never ending process of creation
"We are but a moment's Sunlight
"Fading in the grass...
"C'mon people now!
Clearly, this is a wake-up call for the Universe. Our dependency on time must not continue if we are to survive. Contact your President, your Prime Minister, all of your representatives and demand investigations into alternative time resources.
Perhaps something corn-based.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Just like on the license plate on Dr. Browns DeLorian.
Their calculations are off because they are educated to be evil, and fail to appreciate that each day is actually four days long!.
When you account for this 1:4 ratio, the extra dark energy drops out of the equations, and the universe does not collapse into an academic singularity, but into four nodes, two major and two minor! The academic community will not teach this because it is brainwashing.
(Actually, I just really want this story to have the Time Cube metatag.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
but i read "Large Hardon Collider", I quickly figured out that it probably wasn't reading it right, but I am lamo.
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
All time is relative -- and all time with relatives slows down. With time-space being relative, we won't notice it is slowing down.
Wouldn't something like this be the equal of being frozen at the fabled "absolute zero" (a state of lacking all energy)?
8==8 Bones 8==8
the Universe is infinite in every respect. that is the only way that it can exist.
What cardinality does it have, then? There is no largest cardinality, so the universe obviously has a specific cardinality, otherwise it wouldn't exist by contradiction.
They figure that the universe is not speeding up but we are, in relation to the outer regions of space, slowing down. Tests ... will give more insight if we're going to end up frozen in time.
Come on now, that's utterly ridicuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Table-ized A.I.
T-Minus 15.193792102158E+9 years until the universe closes! ***END OF MESSAGE***
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
"Time as you know had a beginning, and time has an end, and then time begins again, as we shall each live our lives again, exactly as before. I have been gifted to see into the old Cycles of Time, not very clearly, mind you. But I have learnt that in the Future-Past, the Brunnen-G, the great victor in the War against the Insect Civilization, shall be destroyed at the hand of His Shadow. But after His Shadow leaves The Cluster, they will be destroyed at the hands of the Brunnen-G. This has happened before, it will happen again."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
"...a star moving away appears redder in colour than one moving towards us." This is not true.
I dunno if you were being tongue in cheek, but black holes are noisy, at least when they're eating. When "stuff" falls into them, it falls in in very close proximity to other "stuff". Not all that stuff can get eaten that fast, so some of it splashes back out as jets of particles with enough angular velocity to escape at the poles. I think.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
To test this theory, along with distant galaxies speeding away from us, we should also see the rotation of said distant galaxies speeding up.
No Large Hadron Collider experiments necessary. Anything wrong with this hypothesis?
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Sorry, it does not take you forever to pass the event horizon or become part of the singularity. It's only that photons emitted by you near the event horizon that are delayed in reaching the outside observer. Given that you only emit a finite number of photons your image will eventually fade away entirely. The experience will eventually give you a headache or footache, depending on which way you are falling as differences between gravitational pull on different parts of your body increase. In fact, you will be ripped apart before reaching the singularity and so will not really be able to experience it properly.
As to weather we are inside a gigantic black hole, with event horizon and singularity beyond the distance light traveled since the big bang, I am afraid we can not test that just yet.
If not, ill worry about it later, i have gifts to wrap.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is one of a couple of things that has confused me in the layman's explanations. If we look farther back in time (a far away supernova) we see it moving faster than something more recently ("nearer the center"). So since farther back in time the thing was moving faster, we conclude what seems to be the exact opposite... that things are moving faster now.
Sorry to ask a basic question, but how does something in the past moving faster than something nearer the present mean that in the past things moved slower? What am I missing?
The way TFA talks about the dimension of time turning into a dimension of space, it feels like deja vu all over again.
Is this the same idea as time becoming space-like?
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
Its like flowing at 2 seconds per second?
Two days before the day after tomorrow?
At universe time scales, where the whole planet earth life existence is almost a blimp, we (us, or the humanity, or wheatever evolves and leaves earth in a far future) will be affected by that or even a side effect? I know that looks a bit short sighted, but the "running out of time" headline should be read in a proper way.
So it would be a dt/dt^2.
We are the 198 proof..
Is it sad that the first thing I thought of after reading how they say we may all just "run out of time", was a storyline from Sluggy Freelance? http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=050210&&mode=weekly
(May want to continue on to the next week to complete the explaination of the science/logic behind the 'timeless zone')
I know it improves game play, but please think of the children.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Spoiler warning next time, please?
The enemies of Democracy are
So why don't they put forward this theory to explain the actual assumed expansion? Seems to me if time runs gradually slower out there, things get redshifted without the doppler effect. Time to re-visit some of the ideas of Jayant Narlikar and Halton Arp maybe? Can it be that being in an old grand design galaxy like the Milky Way, time runs faster compared to most objects we observe which tend to be young?
I dunno if you were being tongue in cheek
No actually I recognize this as a quote from a sci fi comedy called "Red Dwarf". How can you be a nerd without having seen Red Dwarf, man???
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Hello:
I hate lousy accounting. The fundamental coin of the Universe are events in spacetime. Talk about time separate from space, and garbage results. One needs to add, subtract, multiply, or divide events. The usual thing to do is to add. This is how we go forward in spacetime (mostly time, with a little bit of wandering in space to go from home to work to the grocery store and back).
There is no need for super symmetry either, a way of making spin 1/2 particles play nicely with spin 2 particles. Anyone who has watch diving at the summer olympics knows that one object can go around one axis at a different rate from another. It is easy enough to make a classical system where along one axis, it takes 2 pi to get around, and another axis 4 pi. I have the animations to prove it: http://picasaweb.google.com/dougsweetser/AnalyticAnimationsSpin12Spin1
doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
BTW, love your nick.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
In the big bang model, time and space form a hypersphere (in the case of the "big crunch") or an open shape in case of eternal expansion. Time does not "begin" or "end", any more than land begins or ends at the north or south pole. The situation does call into question the meaning of questions like "how old is the universe". We try to measure our (time+space) distance from the big bang (south pole) in our frame of reference. The measure will be different in other frames of reference.
"Dammit Chloe, we're running out of time".
[Insert pithy quote here]
Isn't this what happened at the end of David Brin's Uplift saga? One of the upper dimensions collapsed?
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
and I've been of the same opinion for years as well. Postulating that time is variable instead of the speed of light is nonsense.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
I say we blow it up now before it's too late. And no more looking up at the stars.
What?
Lunch time doubly so, of course.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
My physical and mental responses are becoming slower each and every day. I have a feeling that one day it'll just totally stop.
The summary is massively confused, and invents the claim that it's about time here in comparison to time somewhere else at the edges of the universe.
Having actually read the linked article, it's funnier. What it seems to actually say is that the time of the whole universe runs slower now, than it ran some billion years ago. It's not "dt(here)/dt(there)", but "dt(now)/dt(back-then)". If that makes any sense.
Let's say we look at the light of a star, some 5 billion light years away. The important thing there isn't the distance. It's that light also took 5 billion years to get here. So if time went faster 5 billion years ago, we'd see it red-shifted.
So, yes, the question isn't as confused as you seem to assume.
If we at least have "here" and "there" in the equation, we'd also have space in it, essentially. So they would have essentially linked dt to distance, which is palatable. But here we have time flow changing with... time.
Well, wtf? In relation to which time? It's like saying that the metre standard is bigger 1000 miles from here, measured with itself.
If it makes any sense, it's not as simple as "dt(here)/dt(there)". It may still make some, but I'd need a smarter explanation than yours (no offense.)
I can't even think of a way to express it in terms of "cost of money", because even money you can compare to something else. E.g., even in a closed economy you could say that a yen in 1800 was more valuable or less valuable than a yen in 1600, based, say, on how much rice you could buy with one yen. So we already have a comparison to _something_ else (kilos of rice), and with a whole other variable as the X of the graph, so to speak. You plot, say, yen vs year, which is two variable.
Now think plotting time, from 2000 BC to 2000 AD. You have, uh, time vs time. I'm not sure how you _can_ plot that without ending up with X = Y all along.
Even briefer, what they say, translated to scales laymen can intuitively understand, is like saying that time goes faster this year than in 1997. How would you measure that? In relation to _what_? One second is one second, by definition, and it was a second by definition in 1997 too. It may make sense to say that "time goes slower" in a metaphorical way, or maybe in a "perceived time" way, but in maths or physics it makes no sense whatsoever.
You have to introduce some other variable there, to compare time to that. Let's call that variable R, from the rice we compared yen to.
Linking it to galaxies and their redshift doesn't change much. "They're not accelerating, time is slowing." Well, blimey, then what do you use under the fraction line there? Because if you use time, they _are_ accelerating. dX/dt is a speed, but dX/dR is something entirely different, and saying that the latter didn't accelerate isn't exactly saying the same thing.
And how does that affect more mundane Newtonian mechanics? If you say that measured in dX/dR, you no longer need energy to accelerate them, then in effect you've re-linked the whole mechanics to dR instead of dt. With all that implies.
How would that affect our galaxy or our solar system, then? The solar system alone is some 5 billion years old, so dt/dR changed a lot in that time. If the mechanics -- thus, for example the planet orbits -- were linked to dR instead of dt, and the ratio between the two changed, then you should see some funky orbit changes in time. Oops, now you need some energy from outside just to keep Earth in the beginning from not being somewhere past Pluto's current orbit.
How would it affect some other stuff? Even quantum mechanics effects, end up depending on time, one way or another. E.g., no matter how you write Heissenberg's uncertainty, you'd notice some pretty nasty changes there in 5 billion years.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't know why people come up with these ridiculous "dark energy" theories, when there is a perfectly simple explanation for the expansion of the universe: stars. Remember the traditional illustration of how matter curves space; place a heavy ball onto a sheet of fabric and a depression forms. If the sheet is finite and not fixed at the ends, the depression will "suck in" some of the sheet, reducing its area as seen from above. Likewise, a heavy star curves space around it and "sucks it in", making the universe a little smaller. As the star shines, matter is converted to energy in a fusion reaction. Because radiation is massless, it does not curve space. The star gets lighter, the curvature gets smaller, and the universe expands.
On the other side of the balance are the black holes, which suck in energy and condense it into a singularity, which has mass. More light falls into the hole, the more massive the hole gets, the more space it sucks in, the more it shrinks the universe. At our current point in the cycle there are more stars than there are black holes, so the universe expands at an accelerating rate. As stars burn out and become black holes the expansion will slow and eventually reverse as all the radiation eventually finds its way back into a black hole. Black holes coalesce and the larger ones can explode, creating material for star formation, thus continuing the cycle. See? No mysterious dark energy is needed; only basic physics.
A preprint of the paper is available from arxiv.org.
The general idea seems to be this. We observe that distant galaxies have an anomalously low redshift relative to the expectations of the linear Hubble relation, and we interpret this as evidence that the expansion of the universe has been accelerating. General relativity allows you to interpret a redshift as a difference in the rate of passage of time, so then an anomalously low redshift correponds to an anomalously low rate of passage of time, for us, compared to the distant galaxies, which were in the ancient universe where time was passing more quickly.
A couple of things leave me scratching my head:
Find free books.
An astronaut falling toward a black hole (assuming for the sake of argument that he does not get torn apart by tidal forces) perceives that it actually takes forever to fall into the black hole. Externally we would seem him slow down and then stop at the even horizon, but this "stop" is merely the curve receding into infinity, so that further increments are so small we cannot see them. But the astronaut's subjective time becomes infinite.
So if time is slowing down locally, I guess that means in a few billion years we'll all be living in a static (albeit smaller) universe that goes on forever.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
We are shrinking....
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
I'm also slightly disturbed by the fact that you copied your post paragraph verbatim from http://www.khouse.org/articles/1995/58/, a web site that has as its mission statement, "To create, develop, and distribute materials to stimulate, encourage, and facilitate serious study of the Bible as the inerrant Word of God." Probably not the best source for a discussion of theoretical physics, methinks
Also, due to the finite propagation of light (and presumably gravity), that far out space is effectively from a much younger period of the universe, when the mass was more evenly distributed, before it all congealed into these gravity wells.
Since time passes slower, the farther down a well you go, relative to higher points, it stands to reason that you will see far off events happening at an accelerated pace, relative to your clocks.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
I don't understand how scientists can say dark energy exists if it's elusive.
How was the "Big bang" triggered without time if the bang made time?
Time runs out of YOU!
(And I,for one, bow before our presumably bankrupt time lords)
.
- aqk
F U
BTW, love your nick.
Yeah, but you'd *hate* his bills.
So, let's see... If we're all inside a black hole accelerating (by nano-creaks, as the onion adds another shell at the periphery) toward the center... and now we're slowing down... that just means the cookie in the middle must be getting done... As if ;-) Doesn't a relative wobble just mean that our private hell accretes new material at a variable rate?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Before you can say that the Universe will end, you must define what the end of the universe is. Heck, before you can do that, you must define what the universe IS.
So, the universe might be ONE reality? Possibly, then what would be it's end? If we define the end in terms of what we think the START was, then at least we have a theoretical point of reference.
If the beginning was the Big Bang. What was the thing that went boom? A neutronic mass of matter? An ultimate singularity? Did this singularity have it's source in another reality?
I think that matter is produced by taking nothing and dividing it into two somethings. Matter and Antimatter. When these two somethings come back together, there is nothing again. Therefore, the Big Bang would be nothing being divided into alot of somethings. Now if the matter is in this universe... where did the antimatter go? Another universe? That would mean we have a multiverse of at least two constituents.
My idea of the End of the Universe would be that matter is being converted from simpler atoms into larger atoms. The conversion process would continue until all matter was at some stable isotope.
Also, there is a theory of entropy where all energy was seeking it's resting or lowest level much like the universe winding down to a standstill. The conversion into larger atoms would be the energy being stored. What gets me is... energy is released when atoms are merged... energy is also released when atoms are split... some of the mass being converted back into energy.
Is it possible that the universe or reality was largely energy that was then converted into matter? Matter and energy are merely two forms of the same thing; one can be converted into the other. My question is... what is doing the conversion and why?
Questions...
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I hope they have WiFi.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." Darwin
What amazes me more is that noone has referenced the episode of Red Dwarf/Book called "Backwards".
:)
This had the universe run out of time, and then time started going backwards on itself and they found themselves in nodnoL
Just remember that if the world didn't suck we'd all fall off.
"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, Timey-Wimey... stuff"
aaaarrrr. A Red Dwarf fan! game on.
cardinal numbers are for quantifying things, ~~ such as two beers, one golf ball, and twenty dollars.
the Universe, being infinite, does not lend itself to quantification and it is meaningless to discuss that aspect.
generally, human being have a lot of trouble understanding that infinite means
simply it means this: you cannot go to the ends of the Universe: no such place exists.
Just time for another bath!
Dear Sir, you may want to check out the math here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.0820v2.pdf -> you will understand that it's all about a change in signature from Lorentzian to Euclidian an that it's in this sense that time ceases to exist. regard krisuzu
That was quite funny...
"Here, have your tooth back"
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I think we define time by counting oscillations of Cesium light out at the NIST clock site
so many oscillations of this particular type of light defined as 1 second
but this is a simple observation of the change in the state of matter
time is an abstract, similar to measures of distance, volume, weight.
I hear they are building a new clock for us though that is suppose to be many times more stable than the one we have now. hang on while I hunt for that ad for a NIST wrist watch. I love NIST clocks