Dear Ms. Alamo-Girl,
What a wonderful post!! Thank you.
It has taken me a while to respond because, well, I have a job and kids. Moreover, I wanted to work through your post and read the references. This is wonderful. Your central thesis is something I have believed essentially intuitively. However, you have provided an elegant proof. It reads like a legal brief.
It is always a delight to find that something you may have thought intuitively actually has a formal basis. Thank you, I will bookmark this for continued reference.
I also agree with your thoughts about the beginning and end of the universe / time. That has been, indeed, a concern of physics. There has been no formal, experimental reason why the notion is abhorent, but many of the cosmological theories have attempted to disprove it.
The original problem was with Einstein and General Relativity, as you point out. Because of the measure of the total mass density of the Universe at the time, General Relativity predicted that the universe would expand forever. Then, the Universe had a definite beginning, which was the big bang, but it would end with a wimper. At the "end" the universe would expand forever, and as the stars used up their nuclear energy and as entropy inevitably increased, the universe would simply die, slowly. Somehow, this was so unappealing, that scientists searched for a way to make it not true. The idea was that if the Universe could recollapse, then the energy which had been converted to gravitational potential energy would be recovered and the universe could restart.
Einstein's cosmological constant was one approach. After that began the search for the missing matter. When astronomers found black holes in the galactic centers it was greeted with near ecstasy. However, it wasn't enough. After that there were experiments on Big G, the gravitational constant. Ander et. al. found a variation of Big G on large distance scales, but his data were not sufficiently resolved from the statistical noise to make an absolute proof. Stephen Hawking in his book, "A Brief History of Time" considered the issue. He postulated the possibility of imaginary time. Imaginary in this context means imaginary numbers, which are numbers that are the product of the square root of negative one (an impossible, therefore imaginary number). There is a whole study of mathematics and physics that deals with imaginary (complex) numbers. The idea of imaginary time meant that true time and imaginary time could move at different speeds. Then came the search for "dark matter" which would provide the necessary gravitational pull to stop the expansion.
Well, in the end, it was all blown away. Not only is the universe expanding, it is accelerating. Given this, the ultimate end will be a cold, dead universe, with all the energy and entropy used up. Nothing left at all except cold iron and other middle-heavy elements.
Not an appealing end from either the theological or phsical perspective.
And thank you so much for the summary of the expectations and disappointments of cosmology/physics concerning the beginning and end of the universe!!!
Indeed, Hawking's imaginary time model is quite fascinating. But as with Steinhardt's cyclic universe it was considered a weakness that there must nonetheless be a beginning of real time.
What a blessed assurance we Christians have - to know that there is reason for something rather than nothing and that the end of "all that there is" is not simply maximum entropy.