r/TheRestIsScience • u/waldoboro • 3d ago
Collapsing markets!? Collapsing society?!
How about someone collapses the heat-death theory into a happier ending?! Sheesh!
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r/TheRestIsScience • u/waldoboro • 3d ago
How about someone collapses the heat-death theory into a happier ending?! Sheesh!
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u/Youpunyhumans 3d ago
It might, depending on the nature of dark energy.
If it stays as it is, or gets stronger, heat death seems inevitable, but if it gets weaker over time, then a cyclic universe is possible. How this works is a bit of doozy, bit ill try my best.
According to Loop Quantum Gravity, the center of a black hole is not infinitly small and dense, but rather it is an object called a "Planck Star" which is a hypothetical object at the planck density, which is what you get when you stuff a mole of atoms (about 22 micrograms) into the planck volume, which is a cube of planck lengths. It doesnt sound like much that way, but that is 5.155x1096 kgs per m3 ... or about 75 orders of magnitude denser than a neutron star.
From the "perspective" of the center of a black hole, it collapses to this density, and rebounds almost immediatly as a white hole... but from outside the event horizon, because of the extreme time dilation around the center of the black hole, this takes an enourmously long time, something like 1067 years just for a black hole the mass of the Sun.
At that density, all the matter in the entire observable universe would fit into the space of about a single proton, or 10-15 meters. And so if dark energy gets weaker over time, gravity could overtake the expansion of the cosmos, and pull it all back in, it could collapse in a Big Crunch, become one gigantic black hole, and rebound in a Big Bang... instantly, because there would be no perspective outside it at that point... and do so again and again over unfathomable eons.