Let Her Rip

The New York Times is reporting a possible consequence of so-called dark energy, the Big Rip.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to talk about the end of the universe you had a choice, as Robert Frost put it, between fire and ice.

Either the universe would collapse under its own weight one day, in a fiery "big crunch," or the galaxies, now flying outward from each other, would go on coasting outward forever, forever slowing, but never stopping while the cosmos grew darker and darker, colder and colder, as the stars gradually burned out like tired bulbs.

Now there is the Big Rip.

Recent astronomical measurements, scientists say, cannot rule out the possibility that in a few billion years a mysterious force permeating space-time will be strong enough to blow everything apart, shred rocks, animals, molecules and finally even atoms in a last seemingly mad instant of cosmic self-abnegation.

Comments

[Mike A.]

My, how cheerful! :)

Another good reason for us to pray that God exists.

[Mike A.]

I'll make a confession here. One reason why I didn't pursue science in college, despite my love of space exploration, was due to what seemed like an obvious absurdity:

How can biologists, physicists, or mathematicians possibly extrapolate accurately to events of five BILLION years ago (or more) from a present-day measurements confined to readings covering a couple of DECADES?

While I have no doubt that the experts are making their sincere best guesses, I still find the extremity of their extrapolations dubious.

[Rich]

The predictions are doubly dubious since dark energy is not at all well understood. A good semi-technical survey of the current state of cosmology can be found in the February 2004 issue of Scientific American. One advantage about making predictions billions of years into the future is that you can't be proven wrong. :-)