The end is near, in perhaps 100 billion years. Is it too early for panic to start spreading?
“There will be a last conscious being, there will be a last thoughtJanna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College in New York, declared near the end of “A Trip to Infinity,” a new Netflix documentary directed by Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi.
When I heard that statement, it broke my heart.
I thought he was aware of our shared cosmic predicament—that if what we think we know about physics and cosmology is true, life is doomed. I thought I had made something of an intellectual peace with it. But this was an angle he hadn’t thought of before. At some point in the future there will be a last sentient being. And one last thought. And that thought, however profound or mundane, will fade into silence along with the memory of Einstein and Elvis, Jesus, Buddha, Aretha and Eve, while the remaining fragments of the physical universe continue to drift apart for billions upon billions of lonely years. and silent.
The universe originated in a burst of fire 13.8 billion years ago and its fragments have continued to separate ever since. Astronomers argued for decades about whether it would continue to expand forever or collapse into a “big contraction.” Then, in 1998, they discovered that the expansion was accelerating, driven by an antigravitational force that is part of the fabric of spacetime. The larger the universe becomes, the more forcefully this “dark energy” pulls it apart.
This new force bears a striking resemblance to the cosmological constant, a cosmic repulsion that Einstein had proposed as a correction element in his equations as a way of explaining why the universe did not collapse, but later rejected as an error. But the cosmological constant refused to die. And now it threatens to destroy physics and the universe.
If this dark energy prevails, distant galaxies will eventually recede so fast that we can no longer see them. The stars will die and not be reborn. It will be like living inside a black hole turned upside down, sucking in matter, energy and information over the horizon, never to return. Maybe it’s like falling asleep. Or like Einstein murmuring his last words in German to a nurse who didn’t know the language. I’d like to think my last thought would be love, gratitude, or wonder, but I’m worried it’s a swear word.
There’s an encouraging metaphor for Einstein’s equations: when you’re inside a black hole, light pours in from the universe outside, which seems to speed up while you seem to be frozen. In principle, one could see the entire future history of the galaxy or even the entire universe flash past one as one falls toward the center, the singularity where space and time stand still, and one dies. Perhaps death could be like this, a revelation of all the past and future.
Rather than complain about the end of time, most physicists say the idea is a relief. The death of the future frees them to focus on the moment.
John Archibald Wheeler, the late black hole evangelist, used to say that the past and future are fiction, existing only in the artifacts and imagination of the present.
DENNIS OVERBYE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6714526, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-15 20:30:06
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