your guess is as good as anybody's!
We do not know that. The universe may be in a state of steady creation, for all we know.UrbanXrisis said:
Wow! Most of us go through our lives (even doing little things like brushing our teeth and dressing ourselves) with enough commitment to make that a moot question. We can pose the question academically, but the fact that we (and other animals) act in ways that that enhance our self-preservation should be considered proof that life has value (at least to ourselves). Of course, even microbes seem to exhibit "behavior" that is self-serving, so perhaps we cannot blithely attribute value to such behavior - we're just hard-wired that way.UrbanXrisis said:
The universe may coast along forever, creating new matter incrementally. It could die a long slow "heat death", or maybe collapse in upon itself. There are a lot of possibilities. Maybe we're here to try to find that out.UrbanXrisis said:
The universe may coast along forever, creating new matter incrementally.UrbanXrisis said:
Matter can be created through Hawking radiation. The vacuum surrounding black holes is suffused with a sea of virtual particle/antiparticle pairs. Black holes can promote virtual particles of the quantum vacuum to real particles by capturing their partners. If the field of virtual particle pairs can be polarized by the presence of mass, black holes will be able to capture an excess of antimatter particles, thus promoting an excess of matter particles to "real" status. If CERN's Athena project detects a difference in the gravitational infall rate between hydrogen and antihydrogen (which they intend to produce in experimentally usable quantities) the mechanism by which the ZPE field can be polarized will be established.UrbanXrisis said:
UrbanXrisis said:
turbo-1 said:
Phobos said:
In regard to the "heat death" model, perhaps its fair to say that everything that exists in our universe is an expression of energy differences. When everything in the universe has died, diffused, and cooled to the point that there are no energy differences left, existence is over. The fact that the universe may not yet be at zero degrees absolute is moot. As you say, the energy has been converted to "less useful forms".Phobos said:
The vacuum (empty space) of the universe is not really empty, according to quantum theorists. It is a sea of particle/antiparticle pairs that arise spontaneously and annihilate spontaneously within the parameters set by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The existence of the the quantum vacuum (sometimes referred to as the ZPE field as an acronym for zero point energy) has been experimentally proven by quite a number of experiments that have been designed to demonstrate the Casimir Effect (do a Google search on that!). Steven Hawking has described a method (Hawking radiation) by which one of these particles (which we call "virtual particles" due to their fleeting and normally self-negating existence) can be captured at the event horizon of a black hole. It cannot annihilate its partner, as it would in the "normal" (if we can call it that with a straight face) quantum vacuum, so it becomes a "real" particle, which will persist in our universe. Thus "new" matter is formed in our observable universe.UrbanXrisis said:
turbo-1 said:
In Hawking's model, yes the black hole loses mass because it has to give up some energy to promote the particle outside the event horizon to "real" status.UrbanXrisis said:
UrbanXrisis said:
Chronos said:
Yes, the big freeze is synonymous with heat death.UrbanXrisis said:
One of the most popular theories is that it will end in a Big Rip, where all matter will be torn apart. A modification to this idea is the theory that will end in the Bigger Rip. Seems more scary even
I think he was saying that Gravitational Back Reaction (negating the Big Rip) was good news, but since none of us are going to live past the next 100 years or so, much less live out the cosmos, I can't see how it is good or bad news either way. Now if a white dwarf not too far from the Sun managed to accrete enough mass to enter the electron degeneracy stage, or if a large asteroid or comet managed to score a hit on our little planet, we would be toast. As it stands, though, our Sun will go red giant and cook all life on Earth eons before the Big Rip gets a shot at us. In more practical terms, if we don't smarten up, we will probably kill ourselves by imbalancing and poisoning our environment before the cosmos even gets a fair chance to take us out.Garth said:
True. The idea of Phantom energy was proposed in this paper
We are surely fried anyway, you are true, but it's not good to thow the towel so soon. We as humans have achieved great feats, don't understimate the capability of human intelligence. Who knows what we are capable to do
It's because dark energy, contrarily to the ordinary matter that we are used to, exerts negative pressure, that is, tries to separate things, is a kind of antigravity. It would be OK if it would not be the case that Phantom energy is a kind of dark energy that has the property that its energy density increases with time. The matter of the fact then, is that its power is increasing, so there's a moment that it really rips all known structure, that's the Big Rip. In Phantom Cosmology, the end of time will occur in the Big Rip singularity, it will occur 22 Gyr from now with the parameters of my previous post. But some structures will be torn apart a bit before. For example, according to
How does it increase in energy? Or do we not know that yet. Also, since the universe is accelerating in expansion, is this why theorists have concluded on the existence on this Phantom energy?
Good question. Do you have any idea? Look formula 4 of this paper. It gives the density of phantom energy as a function of time...
\rho is the density of phantom energy. tBR is the time of the Big Rip. t is the cosmic time, so introducing any cosmic time that you want in the formula, you get the density of phantom energy at that time
You know...the first milliseconds of the big bang was in violation of the weak, strong and dominant forces. Maybe, this is like similar to a mini-big bang. Let's say a super massive black hole underwent a "big bang" of its own. Releasing great amounts of energy causing an unequal expansion of the universe. That energy is now called dark energy and is the cause of the isotropic universal expansion.meteor said:
UrbanXrisis said:
Just a moment. Correct me if I'm wrong ( I most likely am wrong). But perhaps there is a discrepancy in the way the Cosmological Constant is measured and how it is calculated with QFT. It would "seem" that the CC is being measured in the past as we examine the distant past. But the calculated CC using QFT would produce the present value. Perhaps the calculated CC is 120 OOM more than observed value because the CC was 120 OOM less in the past than it is right now. We already know that the distant past shows a deceleration but the present universe is accelerating instead.Chronos said:
The discrepancy often quoted as 120 OOM is not a time-dependant one. QFT says that the energy of the quantum vacuum is VERY large (summing over all possible frequencies). The "flatness" of our universe as seen in GR seems to rule out these huge energies, since mass/energy equivalence should give these tremendous energies a huge gravitational effect.Mike2 said:
UrbanXrisis said:
This is very true, we need to look at our present situation because our current situation is more important than what will happen in billions of years. However, if in about 60 Billion years, our universe will end in a big crush and we will all be a singularity, or, everything will freeze dude to heat death, woudn't someone like a more "happy" ending? I mean, what's the point of human's existence when in 60 billion years, the WHOLE UNIVERSE will be "dead." Is there any "happy" theories out there? Einstein thought that the universe was stable and not explanding before Huble confirmed that it was turly expanding. Einstein's "biggest blunder of his life" might be the most "optimistic" one yet. Sure, there's theories that the universe will just rip into 'sub-universes' and such but what impact will that have on life? And these sub-universes will all die due to heat death. What is the purpose of life when in the end, everything will be "dead." Is there any meaning in life as a whole? Is there any meaning to the life of the universe?marcus said:
