End of the Universe....

[R1Geezer]

In Brian Cox's "wonders of the universe" on Sunday night, he clearly said that the ultimate fate of the universe was the "Heat Death" and implied it was innevitable. Now far be it from me to doubt the good professor but I thought that current thinking was giving credence to 3 possible ends, Big Freeze (Heat death), Big Rip and Big Crunch. So are the latter 2 now discarded as theories or is he just plugging his favourite? Personally the big Freeze is my own favourite based on current thinking but I was under the impression that the Big Crunch was alive and well too.

[AB Editor]

My favourite (on a smaller scale) is that human life will end when the n/s poles will swap/reverse as they tend to every few (million?) years. It has about 100 years to regain stability and in the mean time everything goes a bit Revelations...

To answer the question though, I thought all three were still considered valid theories.

Spare Ed

[R1Geezer]

I'm talking about the end of the Universe, the end of the world will occur much much much sooner. According to cox, the number of years till the "heat death" is greater than the number of atoms in the Universe!

[squarebear]

I won't worry about it too much then R1.

[R1Geezer]

this is a sensible question, can we keep religious cobblers out of it please.

[Ethersapien]

My take on the subject is that the big crunch is the least likely given current knowledge, the big rip depends on the acceleration of the expansion of space, if the cosmological constant governs the rate of expansion from here on then it would appear that the big rip is unavoidable and will occur a whole lot sooner than the heat death. Should the cosmological constant stop being the governing factor in the expansion at some point in the future, then given that there does not appear to be enough matter to cause an eventual collapse the heat death becomes the most likely fate.

[vascop]

Hi Geezer
Why not go on twitter and ask Brian directly from there? He uses twitter quite a lot.

[R1Geezer]

Would I have to sign up? can't stand all that twitter/facebook stuff.

[vascop]

You would if you wanted to send a message (tweet) to him. Try not to be too prejudiced. Anybody who is anybody is on Twitter.

[R1Geezer]

well I'm not, would you point him at the question and invite him to comment for me?

[Hippy]

The thrust of his argument was that everything in the universe obeys the laws of Thermodynamics, and he concentrated on the second Law that covers the general trend of things to decay from an ordered state to a disordered, homogeneous state.

He cleverly combined the thinking of empirical entropy and statistical entropy with his sandcastle and sand pile analogy, and showed how entropy leads inevitably to the arrow of time.

The first Law is about the conservation of energy, and that in any system the total amount of energy and matter is constant. The second Law is about the irreversible changes in a system, and the inevitable conclusion that all temperatures, pressures and forces within a system will eventually subside into a soup of equilibrium. That, in effect is the "Heat Death", and is a very vary long time off.

[thesecondcoming]

So the Universe is like a big fire work. Theres an explosion at the beginning which starts of all these chemical reactions, and sparked off all these galaxies, which contain stars surrounded by planets. One of which, we coincidentally develop on. If we are just a coincidence, then what an amazing coincidence, to make us from particles. The same particles (deep down) that keep stars shining. Our inevitable end is also amazing, how the Universe will destroy the things it made, and then when we do get to the Heat Death,(or whatever end happens) all that will be left are memories, but nobody to remeber them!

[merciasounds]

Well...does it really matter? - I mean none of us will be around to see it happen will we?!

[Count-A-Strong]

Mr Cox also said that life in the universe could only exist for a minute fraction of it's existence. So there would be billions and billions of years where no one / thing existed before it ceased to exist.

[R1Geezer]

yes mercia it matters not but intellegent people like to discuss and debate these things in science so I suggest you stay in chatterbank if you don't have a contribution to make.