Posted on 12/18/2007 5:03:53 PM PST by bruinbirdman
It's the end of the world - but not as we know it.
A Spanish scientist suggests that the universe's end will come not with a bang but standstill - that time is literally running out and will, one day, stop altogether.
Professor Jose Senovilla, of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, has put forward the theory as a rival to the idea of "dark energy" - the strange antigravitational force that is posited to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists.
It was noticed ten years ago that distant stars - the ones on the very fringes of the universe - seemed to be moving faster than those nearer to the centre, suggesting that they were accelerating as they shot through space. Dark energy was suggested as a possible means of powering that acceleration.
The problem is that no-one has any idea what it is or where it comes from.
Professor Senovilla's theory does away altogether with dark energy. Instead, he says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock that needs winding.
While the change would be infinitesimally slow from an ordinary human perspective, in the grander scales of cosmology - in which scientists study ancient light from suns billions of years dead - it could be easily measured.
Astronomers are able to decipher the expansion speed of the universe using the so-called "red shift" technique.
Light from stars that are moving towards the earth is of higher frequency than that from the same sort of stars moving away. The principle is the same as that of an ambulance siren which gets higher as it comes towards the listener but lower as it moves away. Similarly, a star moving away appears redder in colour.
Scientists look for exploding stars, or supernovae, of certain types that provide a benchmark to work against.
However, the accuracy of these measurements depend on time remaining constant throughout the universe, says Prof Senovilla.
If time is indeed slowing down, then the far-distant, long-ago stars seen by cosmologists would be from an era when time ran faster. It would therefore, from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.
"Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," said Senovilla.
He takes the basis for his idea from the superstring theory, which suggests that dimensions of time and space can move around and change places. His suggestion is that our solitary time dimension is slowly becoming a new space dimension.
In some number of billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether - and everything will stop.
"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Prof Senovilla told New Scientist magazine.
"Our planet will be long gone by then."
While the theory is outlandish, it is not without support. Prof Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, believes the idea has merit. "We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect," he said.
Oooh, I’ve got a clock that has a mirror-image face and hand direction, gotta add that one...
Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics at work. Why is this news?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for this foolishness.
Well, there’s a concept!
Time will just STOP.
???
INTREP
ping
The luckiest guy in the world, literally, will be standing in front of a firing squad when it happens.
Sounds like it just needs more money!?
May be. But somewhere, in a galaxy far away, the clintonoids will still be running for office.
'If I could save time in a bottle...'
The cosmic mystery is that the universe is speeding up as it expands. Where does the energy originate to speed up our existing acceleration?!
So scientists invented "dark matter" to explain mass that we couldn't detect/see...which is suppsed to explain the universe speeding up. It's rubbish, of course, but there you have it.
Except, Einstein explained Gravity as a warping of space/time. Well, the Einsteinian explanation for the speeding up of our universal acceleration would be that the time/geographical edges of our universe are warped/curved.
No dark matter required for that explanation...
The days seem as long as ever but the weeks sure fly by.
I was wondering how to make a buck off this. That one guy has some time saved up and will sell it.
Being retired, I have some extra time on my hands. Anyone interested? For a price.
yitbos
Time can not emerge from motion. Time >b>is motion.
Ignorant pinheads
Think of the universe as either a record (flat) or a sphere. Think of time as at the center, and at the same time, at the perimeter.
Now, think of the universe as rotating from the center point. We know not where the center is. Is that where God is? Where the origin of the universe is?
Now the speed of time is constant at the center. And, just as the edge of a record, or a sphere, the speed of time (and the expansion of the universe because of some cosmic centrifugal force) are all faster than the center and faster than every point on the radius as it approaches the origin point.
yitbos
Died too young, poor guy. Had a better understanding of time (at least in theory) than these latter-day ''scientists''. Much more original, too.
Hell's bells, we did better time theory in Tense Logic 51a 35 yrs ago that the bozo who's the subject of this article.
Just another heroin user needing some US Federal Grant money
You all died in your sleep last night. Let me be the first to tell you all.
"Time, As it Evaporates..." by Jean-Claude Dunyach, in Year's Best SF 10.
"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever,"No. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to hit a 300 million dollar lottery ticket and just when you go to cash it in... time will stop.
Crap! With my luck I'll be at work when this happens instead of doing something fun
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