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Did Harvard Scientists Predict The End of the Universe? (gizmodo.com)
The universe will end with a bang -- and not a whimper -- reports The New York Post, citing a new study by Harvard Researchers predicting exactly when (and how) the universe will end. But Gizmodo's science writer takes issue with the media coverage:
That paper predicts that the universe's lifetime would be between 10**88 and 10**241 years, but probably probably around 10**139 years. "I think people don't have a sense as to how big these numbers are," study author and physicist Matthew Schwartz from Harvard told Gizmodo. "It's such an enormous out of time. But they think 10**139 years is 139."
The universe is around 10 billion, or 10**10 years old. 10**139 is a completely unfathomable number of years... It's more than the amount of time it would take to count every atom in the universe, if you had to wait from the Big Bang until now in between counting each atom. That number of years eludes any rational attempt to understand it (Which is probably why it sounds so close -- our heads just short circuit and say, threat!!!). It is forever.
The universe is around 10 billion, or 10**10 years old. 10**139 is a completely unfathomable number of years... It's more than the amount of time it would take to count every atom in the universe, if you had to wait from the Big Bang until now in between counting each atom. That number of years eludes any rational attempt to understand it (Which is probably why it sounds so close -- our heads just short circuit and say, threat!!!). It is forever.
I assume that handle is supposed to be ironic?
The end of the universe may occur sooner if proton decay exists.
#DeleteChrome
A range of 153 orders of magnitude isn't my idea of "exactly". The difference between the largest distances (the size of the observable universe) and the smallest distances (Planck's length) is only 62 orders of magnitude.
That paper predicts that the universe's lifetime would be between 10**88 and 10**241 years, but probably probably around 10**139 years.
Since when is "**" the way to write exponentiation on shitty systems that can't even handle an innocuous tag like <sup>, such as Slashdot?
Use a ^ like normal people. Or just let use <sup>. Jeez. It's bad enough that you still haven't got unicode, but <sup>? C'mon.
And yes, I know some programming languages use "**". This isn't a programming language, this is supposed to be a news site.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"... between 10**88 and 10**241 years..."
I hope it's okay with you if I don't worry about this now.
"On the face of it there is something rather strange about human psychology. Human beings live in a state of mind called sanity, on a small planet in space. They are not quite sure whether the space around them is infinite or not, either way it is unthinkable. If they think about time, they find that it is inconceivable that it had a beginning. It is also inconceivable that it did not have a beginning. Thoughts of this kind are not disturbing to sanity, which is obviously a remarkable phenomenon that deserves more recognition."
It sounds great writing up 'science' that could never be proven or disproven and get paid to write it. Or was meant to be sent to a tabloid?
Looks like the universe may last long enough for Twinkies to go bad.
When the time comes, will they be able to point to the Harvard article and say 'You heard it here, first' ?
The first 10**42 years were the worst.
rewriting history since 2109
Don't worry. You, everyone you will ever know, and all of humankind will be gone unfathomably sooner than that. Whether it goes out with a whimper or a bang, it's just going to be a bunch of dumb rocks bumping into each other without reason or meaning.
This is a poorly written summary that provides no details about the basis for these calculations. My knowledge of cosmology is rather limited, so I apologize for any errors in my post.
As I understand it, the issue involves whether the universe is metastable (we live in a false vacuum) or is stable (we live in a true vacuum). If we lived in a false vacuum, nucleation of a bubble in a true vacuum state would result in vacuum decay. The bubble would expand outward at nearly the speed of light. There are some issues with this.
It's not clear whether the universe is metastable or stable. Small differences in the mass of the Higgs boson and the top quark would influence the calculations of whether the universe is metastable or stable. Even if the universe is metastable, there is the issue of why vacuum decay hasn't yet occurred due to primordial black holes. The same question probably could apply to quantum tunnelling. One idea is that other, yet unknown process are stabilizing the false vacuum.
It's not even clear if the universe is metastable or stable, let alone what might be preserving a metastable state. Based on the uncertainty, predicting the demise of the universe would seem to be a fool's errand.
Who cares about this prediction? I have no problem with cosmology and efforts to determine whether the universe is stable or metastable. But considering the large uncertainty, why would anyone care about predicting how long the demise of the universe would take?
Okay, what the heck does "**" mean?
Do you mean 10^88?
10 billion = 10e9 or 1e10.
They can predict all they want. They simply cannot prove it.
Don’t wait until 10^139-1 year, invest in my bubble universe survival kit today!!! It’s an investment that will survive the end of the universe.
"It's more than the amount of time it would take to count every atom in the universe, if you had to wait from the Big Bang until now in between counting each atom"
That... is actually a really great way to communicate just how long that span of time is. That totally blew my mind.
The fact that the number 10**241 itself is unfathomable, is in itself unfathomable. Here's why. It is perfectly possible to generate a non-repeating series of random numbers many orders of magnitude larger than 10**241. In fact, if you generate 10**241 random numbers per second, your random number series need not repeat in 10**241 years, that is to say during the life of the Universe, as we know posit it.
Bear in mind that very large sub-sets of the random number series can occur a very large number of times, but every intervening subset of random numbers is unique.
To be more precise, it is clearer to say that a 10**241 digit number is unfathomable, because we do not have a machine that can contain or handle such a large number. We cannot prove that a random number series does not repeat, because we do not currently have a machine powerful enough to produce and hold such a series from beginning to end. But we can conceive of such a large number, because we have the software to generate a random number series of such a large magnitude.
"That number of years eludes any rational attempt to understand it"
Wrong, as demonstrated above.
...make that reservation at Milliways.
Earth will be swallowed by Red Giant Sol soon on that timescale.
That is predicted to happen in 5 billion years, last time I checked.
Life in our part of the galaxy will probably be killed off by gamma rays from a supernova well before then anyways.
The Earth is a death trap.
Our solar system is a death trap too.
If humans want to survive, we need to get 10+ LY away, at least. And keep spreading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvkIF0NlIzA
Good thing we are still in the first 6,000 years so thing to sweat. Unless another flood hits.
http://saveie6.com/
So we have a nice theoretical paper predicting the date of the End of Universe (with no much accuracy, btw), and the summary only focuses on how large 10^139 is.
So sad about Slashdot...
will Chris have published "Unemployable" by then?
"... between 10**88 and 10**241 years..."
I hope it's okay with you if I don't worry about this now.
How long have we known about the inferred effects of Dark Energy and Dark Matter . . . ? Less that 10**2 years . . . ?
I think it is a wee bit too early in our relationship to be making any long term commitments to the universe.
Maybe Dark Matter and Dark Energy will suddenly start becoming more Dark. That would majorly foobar these physicists' predictions.
Maybe the upcoming Webb space telescope will surprisingly spot evidence of the existence of Clear Energy and Clear Matter . . . which we won't be able to see either.
My prediction is that in less than 10**1 years . . . the physics equations will need to be dramatically modified again.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
they're not supporting Unicode just to spite us.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
in only 10**192 years. I can wait.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
People think this is 139 years? Another fucking indictment of the public education system. Fuck.
Doesn't that make everything we do sound just so... pointless?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Anything less than infinite years is infinitely far away from being forever. Yes, 10^139 is a big number but it is less than one millionth of one millionth of one millionth of infinity.
"My prediction is that in less than 10**1 years . . . the physics equations will need to be dramatically modified again."
I'm currently reading Three Roads To Quantum Gravity, by Lee Smolin.
I don't have a deep understanding, but I get the impression from reading the book that what you said is correct. Human understanding of the universe is developing rapidly.
In 100 years, there will be between 5 and 500 billion people on earth.
Next year, there will be between 1 and 500 hurricanes on earth.
Make your prediction boundaries wide enough, and you're sure to get it right!
It means that the universe will go out in an instant. Like a pop of a balloon. Not necessarily the other ways the thought of. Read the whole article.
[($)]
why did they decide that the upper limit 10**241 and not 10**242 or 10**240
Since it doesn't seem to say how long it takes to count per atom, its kind of a weird analogy to make.
1 atom counted per second? Per nanosecond? Planck second? (Idk if that one is a real thing either)
"It's such an enormous out of time. But they think 10**139 years is 139."
They probably think that because no one is using syntax a normal person can understand. Normal people are taught that 10^139 is the right way to express this value.
People who can program understand 10**139 is the same thing.
No one knows that (as TFA says) 10x139 is the same as 10^139 because it isn't. 10x139 is 1390.
there is nigh such thing as proof in astronomy or physic or heck even biology or chemistry.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Sometimes when you look at the big picture, you miss the trees. While we have less than a billion years before our own Sun starts it's own downward spiral (an infinitesimal amount compared to 10**139) , Earth itself could have a lot less time.
If a planet 'falls' in the universe, will anyone care?
There is a hope for escaping the end of this universe. (If this universe is really supposed to end.)
I have one holy book whose name start with a C, like in "Cow", which pretends God created many universes, and that he can translate people from one to another one, in case of needs, to save them, and give them confort and safety.
Then God can also rewind the spring of the universe, like one rewind the spring of a mecanical clock.
In the Bible, it is written by Jesus that Eternal Life come from the knowledge of God. Thank you for your good care and charities.
God is Love. Love is Eternal. Love precedes Love.
So there is hope that we may not be destroyed by the end of a universe described by funny numericals equations.
For if the universe has been created by eternal love, and a wise creator, it will last, and we will last.
Thank you for your attention, and your charities.
.. of this prediction
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
That number of years eludes any rational attempt to understand it [...]. It is forever.
Not to a buddhist. After all, remember the saying:
"All journeys -- no matter how long -- start with the first step and end with the last step."
In short: Forever is a big word to toss around by small minds. What's so bad about just saying: "Pretty frickin' long"? :-)
I'll let ya know.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
The first time I heard about the big bang when I was ten years or something old. It was on the original show Cosmos and it introduced the Big Bang. It was the first time that I heard about it en thought, if something has a beginning, it might also have an end. Even though this end will happen long after my natural death it still gave me a sad feeling.
It's more than the amount of time it would take to count every atom in the universe, if you had to wait from the Big Bang until now in between counting each atom.
That's a big Twinkie.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I just entered "10**88" on my calculator and it said "880".
Fuck global warming, everyone is going to die anyway!
#DeleteFacebook
I wonder if -- eons from now -- science will be so much more advanced that they'll look back at this prediction the way we look back at the Mayans' 2012 prediction. Maybe they'll make a scary thriller movie about the end of the universe, titled simply "10**139".
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
No, it does not depend. Betteridge's law of headlines holds strong in this case the answer is simply "no they have not". The paper uses our current understanding of the Standard Model to calculate the lifetime of the vacuum. However, we know with complete certainty that the Standard Model is wrong.
For a start there is no explanation of Dark Matter and Dark Energy which make up 95% of the universe and so are likely to have a very big impact on the vacuum state. Then there is a fine-tuning problem for the Higgs mass for which what we originally thought of as the most likely solution, Supersymmetry, is now starting to look decidedly unlikely so we really have no clue why the Higgs is so light. Then there are things like the source of Baryon number violation and the large amount of CP violation required to create the universe we see.
In short, we know that we have incomplete picture of the fundamental fields of the universe, not to mention the quantum nature of space-time itself. Hence any calculation on the lifetime of the vacuum based on this incomplete picture is going to be very wrong to the point where, as far as we know, the vacuum may just be stable. This calculation is equivalent to one of the ancient Greek philosophers before Pythagoras (who is sometimes attributed to coming up with the idea that the Earth was a sphere) calculating how long it would take to sail off the edge of the world.
Another scientist making predictions outside his life time, so we can't laugh at him when he is wrong.
Well back to my basement to work on building my Universe collapser. We'll see who laughs last!
For us humans, though, the end may come much sooner - if we continue to allow ourselves to be subjected to "leaders" like Trump and Kim Jong Un.
There is also a considerable number of fellow humans walking around with their "heads in the sand", which anyone knows is dangerous in itself.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
"...between 10**88 and 10**241 years"
"I think people don't have a sense as to how big these numbers are,"
Hmm, one side has four numbers and the other five numbers. So, about a 25% difference. What's the big deal?
"I think people don't have a sense as to how big these numbers are," study author and physicist Matthew Schwartz from Harvard told Gizmodo.
I think Matthew Schwartz from Harvard thinks "people," are really stupid, and while SOME people are demonstrably VERY stupid, I suspect most are not. Even if people don't know that 10**39 means the same thing as "ten raised to the 139th power,) that's not ignorance about the enormity of a number, but rather not being familiar with a particular form of notation. Of course this is an "inconceivably large" number, in that we don't DEAL, on a daily basis, or hardly ever, really, with ANYTHING like numbers of objects that large, unless they are invisibly small, or extremely far away, and so it's not that they (or we) are not CAPABLE of grasping such large numbers, it's just that we don't normally THINK about them. I am sure that if this same, condescending man from Harvard were presented a complicated arithmetic problem written in Roman numerals, he'd have a far tougher time with it, at first, than a Roman school child who deals with Roman numerals on a daily basis, learning and practicing arithmetic on his little wax tablets. Mr. Harvard'd probably feel offended by being compared unfavorably in terms of ability to do basic arithmetic to a school-aged child, but... too bad for him, as it is almost certainly true.
Likewise, the typical drooling morons he thinks "people" are, if they had the desire and free-time to review basic arithmetic and scientific notation, could, in less than an hour, EASILY come to grips with and understand, at least in the same way he does, numbers on that scale, I firmly believe. The rules aren't terribly complicated, and I rather doubt, that he could actually picture, in his head, that length of time, OR the same number of individual discrete objects, any more than I could, or anyone else could, because it's not like he routinely actually LOOKS at that number of discrete, distinct, individually identifiable objects.
In fact, you can probably get a pretty good idea of how many objects you can conceive of simultaneously, how many you can PICTURE, through a simple bit of arithmetic, just by considering the focal range of the human eye, and accounting for the fact that the eye cannot distinguish objects outside of the center of the field of vision in all directions, as clearly as that which is in the center. You just multiply the smallest object that can be discerned, (about one arc-second in diameter,) by the field of view, (let's pretend that it's 180 degrees by 180 degrees, and you find the theoretical maximum number of objects you can see simultaneously. Then you discount those you could detect in your peripheral vision, since it's nowhere near as able to discern small, discrete objects than the vision at the center of your field of view, (and that all assumes you have normal, healthy eyes, and either have and are wearing corrective eyewear, or you don't NEED said corrective lenses) since that part of the field of view is not nearly as sensitive or precise.
Since you can never see more objects than that, that's the highest number you can "picture". While confident that it's not 'ten raised to the one-hundred-thirty-ninth power,' it's a lot damned higher than 139, I'm pretty sure.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Actually, the trigger for the collapse of the Higgs field is the observation of its messenger particle, the Higgs boson. They have been very careful not to observe this particle so far (while announcing its discovery) but someone will observe it soon. Very soon.
Sleepy engineer: "Hmm, that sure looks like a typo. Any normal 10-bit ADC would have a natural range of 1024 distinct values. Weird, the engineering magic of LIGO must be somewhere else."
My joke actually praises the sleepy engineer: if reading that text correctly required consciously overriding deeply engrained subconscious intuitions about achievable scale, you possibly have a hope of comprehending 10^139.
There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Thanks for providing minimal (none?) useful information from the source other than how big numbers can be....and then attaching the unit of 'years'....woah, mind blown.
in any case, we as a human race, know how to escape to other universes at that point :-)
A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears. So it goes.
Ok. Fair enough. What about an error bar based on observations of similar universes exposed to similar conditions? :-)
I'm sure a double-blind study would be out of the question.
It's crappy conjecture, loosely based on "science" found in the Sun (the tabloid, not the bright object we observe in the sky).
And the new universe will be 5 feet lower.
I gotta say, the first 10^10 years of the universe passed by in blink. Things didn't really slow down until I showed up. I'm guessing I could do the full 10^139 standing on my head, if I were dead. The real question is, after those 10^139 years and then another 10^10, am I going to show up again?
Well it is Thor's Day after all. He is volatile and impetuous, that Thor is!
Sub:COSMOLOGY ORIGINS-BIG-BANG SELF_CONDRATICTIONS
The subject of Cosmology needs best f brains trust. one has no right to mislead humanity to chaoas,Confusion under ignorance
Necessity-Demand- East West ground-mat
Curiosity-sustain - divine cosmological index
http://archive.org/details/CosmologyDefinitioncosmologyVedasInterlinksVidyardhiNanduriCosmology
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just before Oprah