A little over a year ago, three physicists upset the cosmological apple cart by proposing a new theory for the death of the universe. Instead of expanding into an icy oblivion (“the Big Chill”) or perishing in a fiery implosion (“the Big Crunch”) -- the standard cosmic finales -- it would be violently torn apart in a “Big Rip.” Everything in the cosmos, right down to the protons and neutrons, would be blown apart by a mysterious force called dark energy.
The Department of Homeland Security has been silent on the matter, presumably because this particular catastrophe (if it happens at all) is at least 35 billion years off, probably more. Nonetheless, the notion of Grandma Bess and Little Bill exploding at the subatomic level sent us scurrying for reassurance from the people who started this whole thing, the physicists.
Not to worry, says Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University: “We will all be dead before it happens.” Our sun, the theory suggests, would incinerate the planets well before everything was ripped apart.
It’s just that sort of beaker-is-half-empty attitude that ticks off scientists like Paul Davies, a mathematical physicist in Australia who writes extensively about physics for popular audiences.
“Each new doom-and-gloom scenario underminespeople’s faith in science, and convinces students that physicists are incorrigible pessimists,” grouses Mr. Davies, who predicted some aspects of the Big Rip in a paper in 1988. He secretly confesses, though, that such an end would be fine with him. “I prefer to be ripped than crunched or frozen, which are the alternative scenarios,” he says. “The trick is to avoid extending the arms until the last moment.”
We were particularly curious to see how Robert R. Caldwell, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, is bearing up. He is the lead author of “Phantom Energy: Dark Energy With w1 Causes a Cosmic Doomsday,” the paper that proposed the Big Rip last year in the journal Physical Review Letters (the theory was named by a co-author) and that caused the scientific stir.
“I’ve sold all my vacation time shares on Alpha Centauri,” says Mr. Caldwell. Beyond that, he says, he plans “to enjoy the next several billion years, living each billion like it’s the last one, until the sun eventually goes nova and fries the earth to a crisp.”
Saul Perlmutter, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is more concerned, if only slightly so. “Our family has made only the usual preparations: a three-day supply of water, extra batteries, reading matter,” says Mr. Perlmutter, leader of one of the two teams of astronomers whose observations of supernovae in 1998 provided the raw data for the Big Rip theory.
What the astronomers noticed is that galaxies are moving away from one another much faster than anticipated. Researchers have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding, but the supernovae data showed that the expansion is actually speeding up, rather than slowing down. Cosmologists postulated the existence of an antigravitational force called dark energy that is causing the universe to bloat. According to the Big Rip theory, dark energy might continue to gain strength over time, in which case the cosmic expansion would ultimately shatter everything in the universe.
To the layperson, looming apocalypse means one thing: Now is the time to max out our credit cards, right?
“Well, Alan Greenspan says periods of inflation are inevitable,” replies Mr. Krauss, the astrophysicist at Case Western Reserve. “In this case the entire universe is inflating. So I guess so.”
Mr. Perlmutter says that higher education, too, would see enormous benefits under the Big Rip scenario. “Previous turnover in universes has led to early retirements, opening up new opportunities for younger faculty from a more diverse population of species.”
Not so the higher-ups, says Mr. Krauss. “Since most of higher-ed administration is weighted down with excess bulk, I expect they would be the last to get torn apart,” the astrophysicist says. “They would also probably be the last to know what is happening anyway.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Short Subjects Volume 50, Issue 34, Page A6
