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My pet theory: all atoms decay back to hydrogen given enough time, gravity pulls them together, stars form, the universe is one big loop that self resets :)
by foobarkey 1y ago
My pet theory: all atoms decay back to hydrogen given enough time, gravity pulls them together, stars form, the universe is one big loop that self resets :)
- ewzimm 1y agoYou're in good company. Something similar, minus the hydrogen phase, is proposed by Roger Penrose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 1y agoI went to a talk of his on CCC ages ago, and it was such a fascinating combination of geometry, causality, and asymptotics. I have absolutely no clue whether it's reasonable physically, but independent of that, it's just a really elegant fusion of topics in a fun to think about way. Worth a read for anyone who just appreciates elegant new ways of combining mathematical structures.
- sellmesoap 1y agoI've also seen this talk, at the behest of some spaced out friends of mine, an amazing experience and I still think about the universe through the lens of that talk!
- mensetmanusman 1y agoApparently time ceases when absolutely all mass is gone, because mass is required for a clock. This of course requires the decay of protons.
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoWhy would time cease because all the measuring devices were gone?
- sourdoughness 1y agoMy understanding of this idea is that once the universe reaches a state of maximum entropy (this is the “heath death” of the universe, where everything is a uniform, undifferentiated cloud of photons, then time stops being meaningful because there can be no change from moment to moment. In a sense, time _is_ the change from low to high entropy - if you don’t have any entropy gradient, you can’t have any time either.
- Panzer04 1y agoThis sounds sort of like the "if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound". if time passes and there's no observable difference, did it pass? I guess it makes no meaningful difference, but it's not really answering the underlying question of if some variable is advancing or not.
- joquarky 1y agoI enjoy this thought experiment. If nobody logs in to a multiplayer game, does the game world still exist? Sure there are files sitting on a server somewhere waiting to be read when the first user logs in, there may even be a physics engine polling abstract data structures for updates, but the game world doesn't render without players present with their computers bringing all this data into a coherent structure. Also, for an extra existential kick, realize that it renders /independently/ in the GPU/CPU/RAM of each player's computer.
- Zorass 1y ago[dead]
- eggn00dles 1y agostuff can still happen after the heat death. the universe will keep expanding, and quantum foam will keep foaming. heat death just implies no work can be done. time still flows
- 1y ago
- butlike 1y agoIsn't mass filtered into this [environment, reality] by the higgs mechanism?
- HideousKojima 1y agoMy pet theory: The Big Bang happened at the "north pole" of spacetime. Eventually all matter and energy will reach the "south pole" and recombine. The Big Crunch theory will never die!
- vlovich123 1y agoThe big bang happened at the center of the universe and every point of space is the center of the universe at all times. You could argue that the center of spacetime is definitionally the Big Bang since that’s when time is believed to have started to exist in the first place but we don’t have a good grasp of how to define the center of a 4D physical structure where one dimension is time which doesn’t seem to really act like the other dimensions.
- hinkley 1y agoAre you saying you're the center of the universe?
- layer8 1y agoThe evidence about the accelerating expansion of the universe would seem to contradict that theory.
- vlovich123 1y agoNot necessarily. A) We don’t know if all derivatives are >= 0. e.g. if the jerk rate is < 0, then you’d expect contraction eventually. Similarly, if the derivative of the jerk rate is < 0 & so on. So even accelerating expansion could eventually lead to contraction. B) We don’t have a lot of very highly compelling evidence that the universe is actually accelerating (at least nowhere like we do for the Big Bang). For example, alternate models have proposed that our apparent perception of the expansion is simply as a result of the effect of non-uniform gravity throughout the universe & that the vaccuum of space between galaxies has even less time dilation and that’s what make it look like things are expanding. In other words, I’d put the model of a permanently expanding universe as less likely to actually match reality.
- chasil 1y agoThe proton itself that forms the hydrogen atom might decay (we don't know yet; we do know that neutrons decay after 15 minutes). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay
- hinkley 1y agoNeutron decay is one of those things that I forgot between college physics classes and today and it was sort of surprising to rediscover it. We also know that electrons eventually decay but it's something like 10^26 years, which is long enough to say that probably not many electrons in the solar system have decayed since the universe was born but the universe is really stupidly big, so it absolute numbers that could still be a lot of dead electrons. Maybe a solar system's worth. Surprisingly there is no wikipedia page for this. Just rando articles.
- mr_mitm 1y agoElectrons do not decay, because there is nothing they could decay into. You need a lighter particle of the same charge due to charge conservation, and there is none. You might be thinking of protons.
- hinkley 1y agoAbout ten years ago a research team concluded that electrons last for at least 10^28 years. Which is just a lower bound, and did not establish an upper. Rereading it now, it does seem that proving they decay is an attempt at a new branch of physics. So they might decay or they might not.
- mr_mitm 1y agoCan you link that paper? Or name at least one of the authors? Not to mention that checking for a lower bound means nothing for a potential upper bound. It's ridiculous to cite an unnamed paper while being unable to procure a single source on the internet and then proclaim it's equally likely that they might or might not decay. With everything we know about physics there is absolutely no way imaginable that they might decay.
- kgwgk 1y agoIron is the most stable atomic nucleus (at least if we don’t consider Nickel-62).
- ThrowawayTestr 1y agoHeat death is just so depressing.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoMaybe we should siphon off hydrogen and helium from the Sun for storage elsewhere in the Solar System to reduce the burn rate to prolong the usable lifetime of its fuel? And build a Dyson sphere. ;D
- hinkley 1y agoI've watched enough Doctor Who to know that being the last one alive at the end of time is pretty goddamned lonely. And dark. You can have all of my poptarts, I'm likely to check out.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoYou've been watching too many bleak, post-apocalyptic, fatalist celebrations of losers. I'm talking about adding millions to billions of years of extra good life in the giant dome with plenty of temperature difference to keep entropy down for longer.
- poincaredisk 1y agoThis won't stop the heat death of the universe, just prolong the life of one particular solar system a bit.
- amelius 1y agoBut will the sequence of events be exactly the same in each loop iteration?
- cryptonector 1y agoWell... black holes don't evaporate into hydrogen, but into light and various light particles. The hydrogen left over at the heat death will necessarily be too diffuse due to the expansion of the universe. It can't light up again like that. Perhaps the computer in The Last Question was hallucinating at the end.