Thread: End of the Universe!

Originally Posted by David E. Eaton Sr.

Thank you, John, for the information. I appreciate it. I watched the video and found it interesting; however, I think Krauss is partially wrong as are the creationists. I'll have to read up on him some more in order to comment more accurately. (I think both evolutionists and creationists are wrong to a degree.) Thanks again.

My question is why call someone an evolutionist? In all honesty the suffix of "ist" or "ism" is a statement of belief. The only people who use that term tend to be either Christians or Richard Dawkins (who sometimes needs to take a chill pill, but oh well). My question would be where are the "evolutionists" wrong to a degree?

I won't go into depth about the heat death of the Universe, because Pelletier covered most of that (thank you for that one, sir!) but yes, effectively the Universe is condemned to heat death simply because of the laws of physics. You can only energize so many particles before they're highly unlikely to even conglomerate together again, and you can only convert so much mass to energy before you can't reach energy levels to switch them back again. It's unfortunate, but it's how the Universe works.

Ok. I see your point and it does makes sense...well...as much sense as it can make to someone who has no formal education in the matter(me). They say the universe is expanding faster and faster. So energy will be spread thinner and thinner until it can't sustain matter(am i getting this right?) But what we see of the universe is just a snapshot. Is there any evidence to say this trend will continue indefinitely? Heres my logic. When a gun fies a bullet, one would think that the bullet would be at peak speed right when it's fired. Not true. The bullet continues to accelerate until it's a few feet from the barrel. I'm not saying all matter has the properties of a bullet. I realize that a bullet has much different enviroment from the universe (friction, air pressure, etc.) but if you could only observe the bullet from the time it left the barrel, until it was a foot away, one could come to the logical conclusion that it would not stop accelerating. Is there any possibility that this is could be true with the universe as a whole? Are scientists open to the idea that it's behavior can change over time? OR is pretty much down to plugging X's and Y's into an equation then BOOM you found out when it will all end?

It's not so much plugging x's and y's, but there is quite a lot of math involved in the models that have predicted how the Universe will change with time.

The bullet analogy is actually a really good one to use, oddly enough, because it does illustrate a good point. Yes, there is always the possibility that we could be wrong. That's what makes science useful, because it is falsifiable. Unfortunately the only force that could effectively bring things closer together, stop the expansion or slow it down is gravity, and as the Universe doubles in volume, for example, the effective force of gravity would be halved, and the halved again, then halved again, etc. etc. So even if there was a great deal more gravity, as the Universe expanded it really wouldn't be able to pull it back in. This is partially why the Universe's galaxies and galaxy clusters tend to exist in a "cosmic web", because gravity yanks them closer together, opening up voids between the superclusters (some of these voids even being 400 million light years across!). As time goes on though, this cosmic web will grow thinner, and as stars shed their mass as starlight and neutrinos, there will be less and less actual mass to bend space-time (therefore creating gravity). The energy will be conserved, but so much of the mass will have been converted to energy you won't see a whole lot of star formation later on in the Universe's history.

A possible hypothesis for the nature of Dark Energy (which is what is driving the expansion of the Universe) is the energy of empty space (look up Casimir Effect on Wiki if you want a crash course on how we figured it out. Quantum Electrodynamics also has something to say about quantized space-time). Empty space if effectively quantized, and therefore not empty, so it is said that as there is more empty space, there is even more energy being donated to Universal expansion. This is, however, not a fully fledged explanation, as we do not yet know what Dark Energy is.

Even if the Universe wasn't accelerating its expansion, however, there is only so much hydrogen for stars to form from, so as it gets used up and all that mass gets converted to energy, you would effectively kill off that Universe anyway.

Originally Posted by John Partika

My question is why call someone an evolutionist? In all honesty the suffix of "ist" or "ism" is a statement of belief. The only people who use that term tend to be either Christians or Richard Dawkins (who sometimes needs to take a chill pill, but oh well). My question would be where are the "evolutionists" wrong to a degree?

Since you answered your own question, I will assume your first question was rhetorical and will proceed to your second. I think that the beginning, which hasn't been 'found' yet, was 'designed' and that the One who did the designing had also designed evolution to take over. The evolutionists...or to put it in a way that you may find acceptable, those that believe in evolution...generally believe that there was 'nothing' until the Big Bang but refuse to say how you can have a 'BB' without having something to 'blow up'. The creationist...I mean, those that believe in creation...generally believe that everything was created as we find it now...they, generally speaking, think we are only a few thousand years old. I, on the other (third) hand, think it was a combination of the two. That's just my opinion...your mileage may vary. BTW, I use the terms because that is what the individuals involved are...believers in whatever the 'ist'/'ism' is attached to, what would you have me call them?

So I can naturally, first of all ask how you would deduce the Universe being designed, and if you're going to posit that, then I can honestly just look at it and ask 'Where did this Designer come from?".

Evolution deals with the diversification, speciation, and development of life over generations, not cosmogenesis. It deals with allele frequencies over large and small populations, not the Universe. It is a separate field altogether. Evolution has nothing to say about quark mass or cosmogenesis, galactic superclusters or gravitational lensing. Evolution deals with how organisms diversify. So "evolutionists" actually don't generally believe that there was "nothing" before the big bang.

If a designer used evolution, then you can see that he must be feeling around in the dark because we have animals that evolve into such tight niches and becoming so specialized that they end up in an ecological dead end, so if the environment changes, they're effectively hosed. If evolution was "designed", then why are there so many flaws within a given organism? Say for example the human eye which has a blind spot in it which requires constant jiggling of the eye to compensate for. If an engineer handed me the human eye I would hand it back.

And cosmologists/astronomers don't really say that there was "nothing" and then "something". That's what creationists say, actually. We do not yet fully understand the very earliest epoch of Universal history (before T= 10^-43 seconds), but you will hear many physicists hypothesizing about what could have occured both at and before T=0. Physicists, which I might add, have the beautiful tools of mathematics and supercomputer modeling on their side, so they can actually test what it is they posit to be true. And the Big Bang was NOT an explosion. It was an expansion of space-time. This is an unfortunate mix-up of terms that tends to occur because the term "Big Bang" was coined by Fred Hoyle (a man who believed in a steady-state Universe that did not expand, and there for used to term to deride the theory).

Frankly, one does not "believe" in a scientific theory, per se, leastways not the way that creationists or the religious do. One accepts a theory, because a theory is a descriptive framework of reality, and therefore one doesn't necessarily need to believe it, but to accept it. So the term "evolutionist" is rather...off, I would say, because there is no "evolutionism". There is the theory of evolution by natural (and sexual) selection, which is now one of the most supported theories in science.

I think, overall, that there are a lot of misconceptions that people have about science, the theories themselves, and how science works (this isn't directed at you, but is just a general statement). I think there's a lot of misinformation floating around on the net as well because people have a lot of interesting mix ups as to how these different theories work. For example, evolution being a part of cosmology (which it is NOT). These misconceptions are rife in the U.S. right now partially because of the creationist movement effectively trying to retard the general public because they would rather believe a preferred conclusion than examine real evidence. Unfortunately, because of how many poor sources of info there are out there, the average Joe who just wants to know something often will be misinformed because you have so many different sources saying different things. (This is, again, not directed at you, but a general statement)

By default, if you want the science, find the scientific sources and research journals.

[Paige: "I need a f*cking cigarette!"
Me: "Why? What's wrong with a regular one?]

That's hilarious dude.

We can get rid of the Dark Energy hypothesis with the Entropic gravity formulation. That changes the whole interpretation of what's happening.

Actually, you're both wrong and unjustly rude. Yes, creationism is a red-state rejection of scientific philosophy. However one can posit many things that would offend your anti-creationist attitude without you realizing that it's modern scientific philosophy. For example, Stephen Wolfram may posit that the universe is a cellular automata computation, where there was a singularity that evolved according to a handful of update rules. Is this intelligent design or are the rules random? Well, both I and Stephen refuse to dignify that question with a response, because it doesn't matter now does it? It's like asking, where did our Lagrangians come from? However, it implies that you can run the rules backwards from the singularity as well as forwards. So in a sense, the idea of a Big Bang is meaningless in that picture, the program merely passed through a singularity. This does not imply there was a big crunch, it's a result of Poincare's Recurrence Theorem, which has been demonstrated ad nauseum by things like the baker's map and the cat map. So the statement that physicists have any idea about what happened at t=0 or t=10^-30 is ridiculous. In fact these quantities aren't defined if you understand physics. An observer falling into a black hole will experience an infinite time to fall into the black hole. However, to an observer outside the black hole, one sees the poor sucker smash into the event horizon at the speed of light. So if you have a singularity modeling your big bang, like most cosmologists do, you actually have a very stupid problem on your hands that cosmologists don't grasp. You can define a before t=0 and after t=0, but t=0 doesn't exist since time doesn't exist in a singularity. However, if it IS an automata, t=0 IS defined. So to say the big bang wasn't an explosion, but an expansion of spacetime is utterly incorrect on both parts. It was a phase transition apparently accompanied by the EMERGENCE of space AND/OR time. We do not know that the two formed SO(3,1) (the Poincare group of Lorentz transformations) at all points. 1 dimension may have emerged, and then time may have emerged and sent a single dimension extending across the entire universe...and then the notion of 2-d area may have set in. If you have a 2-d area, then you can create another 1-d hologram of existence, which is what happens in a black hole. So 1 dimension may be real, another may be a hologram of a higher dimensional space, another may be rolled up...these all get twisted around and inside out in a klein bottle...all of a sudden you've wrapped yourself around the undefined point t=0 which is now erased from your topology, but poof you have a bifurcation of energy moving both forward and backward in time AROUND the singularity topologically. Another dimension emerges and breaks this flow causing a mysterious matter/antimatter asymmetry...moreover, information from before the singularity may now be trapped in the post-singularity universe causing quantum entanglement between the pre big bang and post big bang epochs. 2 universes form, and some guy measures a particle in the alternate universe that affects the evolution of our universe by entanglement. This measurement causes a soliton solution that tunnels across the singularity and all of a sudden a quantum computation in one universe can teleport a state into our universe. This breaks a symmetry and mass forms, causing a condensate and all of a sudden you have a cosmic ray backround with no inflationary period. Now quantum gases undergo a process called self-organization, which is how patterns and galaxies form, as well as DNA replication and life. In fact the exact same reaction-diffusion equations for self-organization in organisms used in biology and evolution are used by cosmologists in cloud and cluster and star and galaxy formation. Now the fact is, physicists and biologists both have mathematics and computers to simulate their hypotheses, but as a theoretical physicist I can assure you we have no clue what's going on in either science during early periods. Inflation is not an accepted theory...in fact it makes no sense. If the universe conserves energy, then Poincare's Recurrence theorem must apply, which proves the 2nd law of thermodynamics wrong. All our laws are at odds with each other. Why the universe is expanding we don't understand. Some people say it's due to a big bang. It actually is most likely due to the fact that because of black holes causing self-organization, entropy is decreasing and the universe must expand in order to conserve information. The fact that it's accelerating would imply that the universe is undergoing "societal evolution", ie self-organization is speeding up as it does when a species is developing, and so the universe has to expand quicker and quicker to conserve information. Then a baby universe buds when the universe can't keep up with the self organization because an entropy outlet is needed, hence a new "species" with different lagrangians or governing equations or automata rules (ie, genetic code) forms and begins to undergo the same process. Some universes die out because their parameters cause them to go into heat death or crunch...either way they are "unfit" and die out due to "natural selection." No universe is perfect, in fact there's no such thing by Godel's theorem since any mathematical system must be inconsistent or incomplete. So even if there is a "creator," every universe must have its own flaws and niches, and most die off, while some survive for a while and then die a heat death, or some survive a while and then big crunch...and you can look at Poincare's Recurrence theorem as a formulation of the reincarnation of a chaotic system, ie. universe or species. Your insulting reply reveals a disturbing ignorance that you are not reading scientific sources and research journals. If you were, you would realize that the same mathematics apply systems of all scales in every science. Cellular automation is a fine example of a unifying principle between evolution of the universe and of life and of chemistry and of technology. Information Geometry is another unifying principle we are seeing in all systems, from black holes to neural networks. Natural selection maximizes fisher information as does galaxy formation. Reaction diffusion equations govern pattern formation and self organization in organisms and galaxies...they are responsible for neural computation as well as black hole formation. Protein folding such as in DNA or RNA or various messenger proteins is governed by information geometry, which describes statistical inference, neural computation, consciousness, gravity, black holes, systems biology, chaos control, computer programming, quantum mechanics, etc. This is all related, my friend. Start reading the papers if you're educated enough to understand them, and stop putting down people who have misinformation by giving them further misinformation.