The End of Everything

“I love the fact that my work, even if I do it 100 percent perfectly and I’m an incredible scientist, it changes nothing about the fate of the universe,” she says. “All we are trying to do is understand it. And even if you do understand it, we can do nothing to change it. I think that’s freeing rather than scary.”
To Hložek, the Heat Death isn’t depressing, or boring. She calls it “cold and beautiful.” “It’s like the universe just sorts itself out,” she says.

How long do we have to wait for a breakthrough? We don’t (and can’t) know. We’re exploring off the edge of the map now. Clifford Johnson is very optimistic that we’re heading toward a better, deeper understanding of physics, but he acknowledges the caveat. “It might be that we go for a couple hundred years gathering all of this data before we see the signal and then we go back and realize that, oh, it was there staring us in the face all along. That’s an annoying possibility. But for questions as big as the ones we’re trying to answer, I feel that that’s okay. Why need it be of the length scale of a human lifetime?”
In the meantime, we’ll continue on, making new paths through the woods to see what we might find hiding there. Someday, deep in the unknown wilderness of the distant future, the Sun will expand, the Earth will die, and the cosmos itself will come to an end. In the meantime, we have the entire universe to explore, pushing our creativity to its limits to find new ways of knowing our cosmic home. We can learn and create extraordinary things, and we can share them with each other. And as long as we are thinking creatures, we will never stop asking: “What comes next?”

I just want to pause for a moment to say that this paper, titled “Phantom Energy: Dark Energy with w < -1 Causes a Cosmic Doomsday,” is one of my absolute favorite papers in physics. It’s not often that you get to take some very mild-seeming alteration to the current perspective, shifting a parameter down by a minuscule amount, and find out that this DESTROYS THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. Not only that, it gives you a way to calculate exactly how the universe will be destroyed, and when, and what it will look like when it all goes down.

Everything you see is in the past, as far as you’re concerned. If you look up at the Moon, you’re seeing a little over a second ago. The Sun is more than eight minutes in the past. And the stars you see in the night sky are deep in the past, from just a few years to millennia.

The less likely the configuration, the longer it’ll take, so a very rare event like all the particles huddling up in the lower right-hand corner of the box will take a lot longer to appear again, but in principle, it’s just a matter of time. This is called Poincaré recurrence. If you have an infinite amount of time to work with, any state the system can be in is a state it WILL be in again, an infinite number of times, with a recurrence time determined by how rare or special that configuration is.

Every attempt to bend some part of the world to our will creates disorder somewhere else, often in the form of heat.

You may have heard of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: it’s the idea that there’s a limit to the precision of any measurement, because the uncertainty built into quantum mechanics will always smear out the result in one way or another. If you measure a particle’s position very precisely, you won’t be able to determine its speed, and vice versa.