December 2010
32 posts
NG: Time Will End in Five Billion Years, Physicists Predict →
nationalgeographicmagazine.tumblr.com
Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Published October 28, 2010
Our universe has existed for nearly 14 billion years, and as far as most people are concerned, the universe should continue to exist for billions of years more.
But according to a new paper, there’s one theory for the origins of the universe that predicts time itself will end in just five billion years—coincidentally, right around the time our sun is slated to die.
The prediction comes from the theory of eternal inflation, which says our universe is part of the multiverse. This vast structure is made up of an infinite number of universes, each of which can spawn an infinite number of daughter universes. (Related: “New Proof Unknown ‘Structures’ Tug at Our Universe.”)
The problem with a multiverse is that anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times, and that makes calculating probabilities—such as the odds that Earth-size planets are common—seemingly impossible.
“Normal notions of probability—where you say, Event A happens twice and Event B happens four times, so Event B is twice as likely—don’t work, because instead of two and four, you have infinity,” said Ken Olum of Tufts University in Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study.
And calculating probabilities in a multiverse wouldn’t just be a problem for cosmologists.
“If infinitely many observers throughout the universe win the lottery, on what grounds can one still claim that winning the lottery is unlikely?” theoretical physicist Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues write in the new study.
Physicists have been circumventing this problem using a mathematical approach called geometric cutoffs, which involves taking a finite swath of the multiverse and calculating probabilities based on that limited sample.
But in the new paper, published online last month at the Cornell University website arXiv.org, Bousso’s team notes that this technique has an unintended and, until now, overlooked consequence.
“You cannot use [cutoffs] as mere mathematical tools that leave no imprint,” Bousso said. “The same cutoff that gave you these nice and possibly correct predictions also predicts the end of time.
“In other words, if you use a cutoff to compute probabilities in eternal inflation, the cutoff itself”—and therefore the end of time—”becomes an event that can happen.”
(read more on National Georgraphic.com)
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”
—F Scott Fitzgerald
“I want to grow in a garden, I want to have the sun, I want to eat and drink and sleep and make love, and that’s it.”
—(Carlos Kleiber, to Leonard Bernstein)
“Never pause again to stare at them. Photographs are dangerous, you must never look at them too closely, they get inside you to the point that you begin thinking about a place, a person, a situation, an all you mind is really doing is running through a series of slides; you think you remember someone, but instead you remember the photo of that person; you think of a place, and you are really thinking about one or more photos of that certain place, and so on. Into the bag, one at a time, those on the walls and those propped up on that awful little living room table that was her mother’s. Those revolting pewter and silver frames which she never forgot to polish every day. Away….”
— Vitaliano Trevisan (from a short story entitled Vol 1. in collaboration with a body of photos from Italian photographer, Guido Guidi)
Barcarola (You Must be a Christmas Tree)
Sufjan Stevens
New Christmas song from Sufjan Stevens. Considering that even though I am in Italy — I am still hearing Mariah Carey on the radio (ugh). So this is a festive, calm and heartwarming (even breaking) change of pace. Always amazing, Sufjan.
“Hirst also describes another painting assistant who was leaving and asked for one of the (spot) paintings. Hirst told her to, “‘make one of your own.’ And she said, ‘No, I want one of yours.’ But the only difference, between one painted by her and one of mine, is the money.’”
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