Slashdot Mirror
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.
Looks like the universe may last long enough for Twinkies to go bad.
The first 10**42 years were the worst.
rewriting history since 2109
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.
...make that reservation at Milliways.
If humans want to survive, we need to get 10+ LY away
In which direction? That supernova you were worried about? You might step right into the middle of another one.
Have gnu, will travel.
In EVERY direction. And don't stop at 10....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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...
"... 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/
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.
You cannot generate 10^241 random numbers per second. You cannot generate that ever, in this universe, no matter how long the universe lasts. That's because the maximum possible entropy of the universe is roughly 2.3*10^123 (that's the limit if the universe were a black hole - the actual entropy is quite a bit less). That's therefore also the limit on the largest number you could represent in any physical way.
I think it's fair to say that 10^241 is unfathomable. By the way, trying to store a number with an entropy of about 10^68 in the volume of the human skull will create a black hole.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Wish I hadn't used up all my mod points earlier today.
This. Ever so much this.
-- Alastair
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.
Earth will be a miserable place long before that. Like, surface temperatures over the boiling point of water in about a billion years. We better not be ugly bags of mostly water by then.
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.
[($)]
"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
.. of this prediction
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
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
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
Ok so we're all subroutines, admin can reboot the system or restore from a backup, and he can move us from one server to another.
#DeleteFacebook
"Look out there. Millions and millions of stars. Millions upon millions of worlds. And right now, half of them are fanatically dedicated to destroying the other half. Now - do you think, if one of those twinkling little lights suddenly went out, anybody would notice? Suppose I offered you 10 million bars of gold-pressed latinum to help turn out one of those lights - would you really tell me to keep my money?" - Gaila
#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.
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.
"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.
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});
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).
I'm not sure why you are going through the trouble of running permutations of 65536 objects.
If you want a non-repeating series, it's easy to write an algorithm that will count to 10^241. Even by wastefully representing each digit by a byte, you can easily run the algorithm with just 241 bytes of memory, which any computer can do. The problem is that it would take forever to run. Computers cannot run operations infinitely fast. There is a physical limit, although I am not entirely sure what it is.
I think the grandparent post is missing a logarithm in the definition of entropy. Entropy isn't proportional to the number of possibilities, but the logarithm of the number of possibilities. It's easy to store numbers greater than 10^241, in just 3 lines of text. On the other hand, it is impossible to store numbers of the magnitude e^(10^241).
just before Oprah
Well, they only need to render the bits that we can actually see. Or more precise that I can see. Haven't seen proper proof that anyone else exists.