To answer your question: yes it can happen.
Three major theories exist: big crunch, big freeze (or heat death), big rip.
Big crunch means everything is eventually crushed into a single point. Big freeze is that things get so far appart that "nothing" can happen anymore (except quantum stuff but that's another story), the universe becomes the most boring place in the ...hmm universe... Big rip means that eventually the fabric of time and space stretches so much that everything is torn appart (absolutely everything) in a rather short instant.
To simplify, they really depends on a ratio being smaller than 1, equal to 1 or greater than 1. Right now, the measurement of this ratio is that it's very close to 1... + or - a small quantity. But this small quantity makes all the difference. So until we can refine this measurement, we don't know. It's like keeping a pencil on its end: whether it falls left or right can depend on a very subtle initial imbalance. Right now, we say "it's sort of in the middle" which is not very useful!
No comments:
Post a Comment