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Science

The Big Rip 44

Posted by michael from the sliced-thin dept.
WolfWithoutAClause writes "It's been known for decades that the universe is expanding. The current evidence points to this rate of expansion increasing, and if so, there's no obvious reason why the expansion rate couldn't continue to increase ever faster. A physicist, Simon Caldwell, has taken this to inevitable conclusion and suggested the expansion will eventually reach a point where the expansion rate is so high that any surviving people will ripped apart, followed a millisecond later by the destruction of all the atoms in the universe. Ouch. New Scientist says we may only have 22 billion years left. Almost enough time for a quick game of Everquest then."
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The Big Rip More

The Big Rip

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  • And then the lawsuit will come... (Score:5, Funny)

    by phamlen ( 304054 ) <phamlen&mail,com> on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:16PM (#5451258) Homepage
    Hmmm... if I read this correctly, the universe will be "ripping" all the digital media in existence in about 22 billion years.

    Sounds like it could be the target for a RIAA/DCMA lawsuit! "Your honor, we would like to sue the universe for clearly premeditated copyright violation."
    • They should just patent the process of destructions of the universe, and not license the process to the universe.

      And if the universe uses the patent without permission, sue the universe!

      1. Patent the Process of Universal Destruction
      2. ???
      3. Profit!

      Where "???" reperesents total destruction of everything.

  • Don't Panic! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lemmeoutada Collecti ( 588075 ) <obereon@gmail.cAAAom minus threevowels> on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:18PM (#5451276) Homepage Journal
    Given that humans have been on Earth only a few million(?) years, is this even something woth worrying about at this point?

    Given that as a scientific line of inquiry it is interesting, it is nothing more at this point than another pet theory based on abservations made of a (very) limited part of the universe, so I take it like all such with a grain of salt.

    • Re:Don't Panic! (Score:5, Funny)

      by WolfWithoutAClause ( 162946 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:33PM (#5451437) Homepage
      so I take it like all such with a grain of salt.

      Yes, a large one; and getting larger all the time ;-)

    • Yes, but it's depressing though. No matter how the universe ends, it will kill us all (let's pretend that the human race- in some form- will be around for billions of years despite President Bush). The idea of the universe expanding forever (if it has escape velocity) or actually accelerating is quite depressing (the former leads to all the stars running out of hydrogen and helium). I always liked the idea of a big crunch and this will all start again someday in some form. Now, you start to get into the ideas about fractal universes being created by different outcomes when a wave function is collapsed (in some universes, Schrodinger's cat is alive, although in my expeirment, I killed it :) but unless we can interact with these realities, it seems just academic.

      I know this is a redundent post as infinite other versions of me have already posted this on infinite other /. sites.

  • Hmm... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder if people will be hunting the "last post" before Slashdot servers get ripped apart.

  • My Results (Score:5, Funny)

    by scotay ( 195240 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:46PM (#5451554)
    the expansion will eventually reach a point where the expansion rate is so high that any surviving people will ripped apart, followed a millisecond later by the destruction of all the atoms in the universe.

    My experiments in expansion have proven that somewhere around a 44-46 waist the expansion rate is so high, you better start looking for a big-and-tall men's shop or any surviving jeans will be ripped apart, followed a millisecond later by the purchasing of sweatpants.

    Don't let this happen to your universe.

  • Shot in the dark (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Darkstorm ( 6880 ) <lorddarkstorm@hotmail. c o m> on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:47PM (#5451562)
    What I find so amazing is that half the theories are created on so little real fact. Just recently scientist have acknowledged that dark matter/energy exsist. But they have no clue what it is...or how it works...or how to include it in thier equasions. So they guess, start dropping it into the mathmatical grinder and presto...instant theory of the univers ripping to pieces.

    I wish they would wait at least long enough to get some decent information on new discoveries before twisting them into imaginary shapes and trying hard to get recognized.

    • I think you're being a bit hard on the scientists.

      Typically physicists follow a "if the equation predicts obsesrvation, it must be correct" point of view. So if they randomly plug together numbers and variables, and it seems to describe how things work, then it's at least 'probably' true.

      • Probably true within the bounds of the situations the experiments were testing, yes, probably. That's _interpolation_ and is pretty safe for most physics.

        However, making prediction what happens outside those bounds is _extrapolation_, and almost all extrapolation is wrong.

        Newtonian laws of motion? Extrapolate to high velocities, and you incorrectly predict the orbit of mercury. (Add SR to fix.)

        Classical models of black body radiation? Extrapolate to very short wavelengths, and you get the ultraviolet catastrophe. (Add Planck to fix).

        However, all these fixes still have _their_ bounds, and you can't use NM+SR to predict behaviour of particles small-enough to have wavelike behaviour.

        Extrapolation is what you do when you desperately need more funding...

        YAW.
    • This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain to me again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.
  • It looks like someone came up with just another theory. I would like the see the theoretical evidence that supports this theory. Because there are other theories that say that the universe will collapse again, due to gravity of dark matter.
  • Why do I get the ever-increasing impression that the New Scientist is nothing but a forum for crackpot theories?
    Does this mean that at some point black holes will start regurtitating matter?

    • Re:New Scientist (Score:3, Informative)

      by Goldsmith ( 561202 )
      Black holes have already been shown to "evaporate". That's Stephan Hawking's claim to fame really. Basically, by using conservation of energy and quantum mechanics, he was able to show that black holes would convert mass into very high energy light waves, which would then tunnel out. Small black holes could then potentially evaporate away.

      • Re:New Scientist (Score:3, Informative)

        by looseBits ( 556537 )
        The other mechanisim for black whole evaporation concerns virtual particles. If a e-/e+ pair get created right on the event horizon, the positron can possibly fall beyond the horizon and the electron could escape. The positron would then destroy an electron inside the backhole and decrease its mass. The reverse situation is forbidden as the electron wouldn't be elliminated inside the black whole and the positron may exist for a decent amount of time before coliding with another electron, thus breaking dE*dT = Hbar.

        That's the way I understand but I may be an idiot.
  • Actually the Universe started the Jared diet last week.
  • <sarcasm>
    that the universe is going to do something blatantly ridiculus they say that my simulation is wrong or that I dropped a minus sign or that it's just not worth considering.

    After all *their* simulation must be right and they *haven't* dropped any minus signs and they certanly have all the information they need to make radical but perfectly justifiable claims like this.

    Sure is good to know that ever since that whole flat earth thing they've always been right on.

    Yay :)
    </sarcasm>

  • The dangers of extrapolation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phamlen ( 304054 ) <phamlen&mail,com> on Thursday March 06, 2003 @04:39PM (#5452059) Homepage
    Mark Twain wrote on nearly this exact topic in 1883. He wrote a great essay on extrapolation [newspeakdictionary.com] , basing his conclusions on the fact that the Missippi between Cairo and New Orleans was shortening an average of a mile per year for the last two hundred years or so....

    To quote:
    "Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

    -Peter

  • well... (Score:1)

    by C21 ( 643569 )
    what about our galaxy being destroyed/consumed by andromeda in roughly one billion years? This rip sounds pretty stupid if you ask me, I think as it approached that critical expansion speed life would start faltering, i.e. gestation, procreation, etc etc. The last few seconds of life will NOT be "ripped".
    • Galaxy collisions are not nearly so violent as you make them out to be. Galaxies are mostly empty space, so while orbital chaos may ensue, rarely will you find stars actually running into each other.
      • Nah, but think of all the slingshot effects you could experience! You'd never know which direction's next!

        (Yeah, yeah, they'd probably be centuries apart, and quite weak, I know, but I've seen the screensaver, and I want a ride!)

        YAW

  • The Joy of Extrapolation (Score:4, Funny)

    by You're All Wrong ( 573825 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @05:25PM (#5452471)
    "A physicist, Simon Caldwell, has taken this to inevitable conclusion and suggested the expansion will eventually reach a point where the expansion rate is so high that any surviving people will ripped apart"

    What did Master Caldwell think when he first started getting his first erection?

    Sorry for being crude,
    YAW.
  • But what's going to happen to all those Angels dancing on the head of that pin?
  • The universe being ripped apart would leave what in its place?

    Perhaps the resulting emptiness could then undergo another big bang and create yet another universe? Wouldn't that be neat.

    Or not. I guess we'll never know!
    • The universe being ripped apart would leave what in its place?

      It's kind of like the universe would consist of lots of fundamental particles like electrons, photons and so forth, individually being dragged apart by the expanding space; so there's no way they could ever meet.

      Perhaps the resulting emptiness could then undergo another big bang and create yet another universe? Wouldn't that be neat.

      Yeah, that's probably possible, or atleast there are theorists that claim that this may already happen; in blackholes for example.

      Or not. I guess we'll never know!

      Maybe we can tell, by studying the universe closely enough we may be able to work out the rules, and if the rules allow subuniverses we may be able to experimentally show it happening.

  • Man, 22 billion years? I was hoping I could hold out until my protons decay (10^33 years, according to some supersymmetry models). On the other hand, the article does point out that the presence of dark energy makes stable, long-lived wormholes possible, thus enabling us to perhaps see more of the universe before its sudden and catastrophic end. Unfortunately, I suppose it may then be possible to lay waste to the universe manually by setting up bizarre time-traveling paradoxes that create loops in cause and effect. Dammned if you do...
  • Does this mean that the space between protons and neutrons is growing too, but the laws that govern? If so, wouldn't this imply that at some instant point in time you would reach an equilibrium where the weak nucular foce is just at the ende of how far apart they are from each other, and you can cause fission and fusion to happen at will, or something like that, and create a perpetual motion machine of some sort?

  • Most physicists probably will not be rooting for phantom energy. That is because if it exists, it will cause them all kinds of theoretical headaches. For example, Einstein's theory of gravity predicts the existence of minuscule wormholes - short cuts through space-time.

    Normally they snap shut so fast we never notice them. But phantom energy's repulsive gravity would be powerful enough to hold wormholes open, and perhaps even push them wide enough apart for spacecraft to use them for faster-than-light travel. "This raises the spectre of time machines and all their paradoxes, which physicists find very uncomfortable," says Caldwell.

    Ahhh, problem solved... If the wormholes are big enough to fly stuff through, then we can just grab as much matter as we can find, fling it all together towards an arbitratily chosen "center point" to the universe, and rely on good old gravity to hold it together. If we just keep grabing and hurling the matter of the universe back onto itself just a little bit faster than it can expand away from itself, we can keep the old gal together indefinitly.
  • The journal article that the New Scientist article has made a journalistic hack job of is here [arxiv.org]. The actual article is not presented as future history; it presents a possibility, a consequence of making an explicitly stated assumption about the nature of dark energy (about which very little is known.)

    I also wish to point out that extrapolation can be useful for precisely the reason many are criticizing it: it can reveal where current theories are wrong.

  • Any reasonably dense collection of matter (like a planet, our solar system, and our galaxy) is gravitationally bound and stays together. Universal expansion means that the galaxies get farther apart, not that they get bigger.

    Shame on New Scientist.

    And now the above, with (a little) math. The gravitational force between two objects is basically (leaving out mass)

    F = -k / r^2 + L * r

    where k is a constant, r is the separation between the 2 objs, and L is either a constant or a function of time (we don't know yet).

    The k term is good old Newtonian (or even Einsteinian up until a couple of years ago) gravity. Strong for small r, weak for low r.

    The L term represents the new discovery that the universal expansion is accelerating. It is (unnoticeably) weak on small scales, and only important for large r (i.e. size of the visible universe). For the L term to matter on planetary scales, it would have to become much larger in the future. But we just discovered that it even exists - how it behaves with time is the next thing to find. So don't worry (yet ;-).

    • Any reasonably dense collection of matter (like a planet, our solar system, and our galaxy) is gravitationally bound and stays together... Shame on New Scientist.

      Uh. No.

      As the expansion rate increases, the size of the observable universe shrinks i.e. the point of the universe that is moving away faster than the speed of light comes ever closer.

      Once the Sun 'falls' over that edge- you are no longer gravitationally bound to the Sun.

      Finally the 'observable' universe is smaller than a nucleus; then it's game over.

      • As the expansion rate increases, the size of the observable universe shrinks i.e. the point of the universe that is moving away faster than the speed of light comes ever closer.

        Once the Sun 'falls' over that edge- you are no longer gravitationally bound to the Sun.

        You missed the point. The Solar system isn't expanding. Galaxies are like the raisins in a baking loaf of raisin bread. As the bread rises the raisins move farther apart, but the raisins (and their contents) stay more or less the same size.

        What you said about shrinking horizons in an accelerating universe is correct - as long as the universe on the horizon scale is well described by the Friedmann equations. But the Friedmann equations assume a homogeneous universe for mathematical convenience, so not all of their predictions apply everywhere in the real universe.

        • The Solar system isn't expanding.

          Bzzt. Wrong. If the expansion is accelerating, then the solar system is expanding.

          It's only doing it slowly, but an accelerating universe is injecting energy into the planets- they are gradually moving into larger and larger orbits.

          A constant expansion doesn't do that; the planets end up just a bit nearer to the sun for the same speed than than they would be if the expansion wasn't there; but if the expansion rate keeps increasing, they continually spiral out. Eventually they will individually reach escape velocity and be lost.

          But the Friedmann equations assume a homogeneous universe for mathematical convenience, so not all of their predictions apply everywhere in the real universe.

          Doubtless true; all equations have limits to their applicability. It seems very unlikely that that would be enough though.

          If the rate continues to accelerate, the universe is really screwed. It may slow down again I suppose; the expansion is not well understood.

          • Bzzt. Wrong. If the expansion is accelerating, then the solar system is expanding.

            Exactly where are you getting this from?

            >But the Friedmann equations assume a
            >homogeneous universe for mathematical
            >convenience, so not all of their predictions
            >apply everywhere in the real universe.

            Doubtless true; all equations have limits to their applicability. It seems very unlikely that that would be enough though.

            ?!?! You know how they say space is a vacuum? They're talking about within the solar sy

            • So there's a HUGE difference between what goes on inside them and the large scale behavior of the universe, which is what the Friedmann equations are about.

              I agree completely. All that happens as the expansion accelerates is the line between 'large scale' and smaller moves. Eventually, the line is smaller than molecules, and then no more chemical reactions will occur.

  • Oops, I thought this was a about IRC.

    • -jake
  • My favoriate quote from the article: the scientist says, "It's unlikely, but it can't be proved impossible."

    Umm, ok..on that same note, my ass is the source of all knowledge.

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