Which will not be until
Posted on 03/27/2015 12:33:56 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
You've heard of the Big Bang, but what about the "Colossal Crash?" Get ready, because it might be coming sooner than you think ... relatively speaking.
In a paper published in Physical Review Letters a group of physicists have theorized a mechanism for "cosmological collapse" which predicts the universe will at some point stop expanding and then collapse back onto itself, destroying us and pretty much all matter.
The idea has been floating around the scientific community in one form or another for a while now, but the latest paper is noteworthy because its numbers and models suggest that collapse is "imminent" -- at least on a cosmological scale.
"The fact that we are seeing dark energy now could be taken as an indication of impending doom, and we are trying to look at the data to put some figures on the end date," Antonio Padilla at the University of Nottingham, one of the paper's authors, told Phys.org. "Early indications suggest the collapse will kick in in a few tens of billions of years, but we have yet to properly verify this."
Our universe is currently in a period of accelerated expansion so we have nothing to worry about for the moment, but in the paper's conclusion, the team of scientists claim they've found the cause our impending doom ... but they need to do a bit more research.
(Excerpt) Read more at aol.com ...
Which will not be until
I believe so.
Wow! That really sucks.
Or not . . .
Isn’t it sexist or something to bring that up? Besides I’m sure Reagan or Bush did the same thing.
Oh.
It's 42..
Drats, knew I forgot something.
I call that "carbon sequestration".
If you really want to help delay the collapse of the Universe, just leave your outside lights on longer. The extra light, dissipating into the night sky, will push matter of all kinds further into space. It's for the "chirren".
(Although I don't know what planet they may be from.)
I am skeered
If it doesn’t occur in the next 100 years, I don’t give a crap. My Star War figures are safely packed away.
Time reversal? I’m all for it. A couple girls I would want to meet again - Fran, Leslie, Leslie (I wanted to marry this one), Susie, Susan (there were a lot of Susans’ in Baltimore), Anne (Oh, Anne. California got a great person when she moved; hair like that of a goddess), and especially the flight stewardess on the Pan Am flight I took from the Philippines back to the US after leaving Vietnam and Cambodia. I was sick on the flight and really appreciated the attention she gave me. My bad luck was that she had just moved from DC to San Francisco. She was not only nice but more beautiful than Miss America). Timing: It’s always a matter of Timing.
I’ll take that Time Travelling phone booth of Dr. Who and “Ted and Bill” if it is available.
There is another theory, which states that this has already happened. ;-)
If you look very closely at the period at the end of this sentence, you will see me writing this
A big ol' hunk of The Matrix/42 sammich.
...but after a couple of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, who cares..
;-)
Women, minorities and homosexuals hardest hit.
This is what comes from putting beans in chili.
Don’t buy any green bananas or hard avocados! The universe will collapse in on them, then you’re screwed.
You can’t go wrong with canned Spam during the end days.
Cthilhi, an eldritch relative of Cthulhu.
In the interest of elevating the discourse, as if anyone is interested, I offer the following I received from a FRiend.
The underlying paper is much less dramatic, at least in the abstract.
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.101302
Sequestration of Vacuum Energy and the End of the Universe
Nemanja Kaloper and Antonio Padilla; Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 101302 – Published 10 March 2015
Abstract: Recently, we proposed a mechanism for sequestering the standard model vacuum energy that predicts that the Universe will collapse. Here we present a simple mechanism for bringing about this collapse, employing a scalar field whose potential is linear and becomes negative, providing the negative energy density required to end the expansion. The slope of the potential is chosen to allow for the expansion to last until the current Hubble time, about 1010 years, to accommodate our Universe. Crucially, this choice is technically natural due to a shift symmetry. Moreover, vacuum energy sequestering selects radiatively stable initial conditions for the collapse, which guarantee that immediately before the turnaround the Universe is dominated by the linear potential which drives an epoch of accelerated expansion for at least an e fold. Thus, a single, technically natural choice for the slope ensures that the collapse is imminent and is preceded by the current stage of cosmic acceleration, giving a new answer to the “why now?” problem.
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