Sunday, January 12, 2014

Today In Entropy: I Want To See The Sun
Blotted Out From The Sky

Getting my heart's desire, even if I don't see it.
“If the universe is pulling itself apart, does it ultimately disintegrate? Does it ultimately collapse?”

“No. There’s no evidence to say that we will ever recycle ourselves,” deGrasse Tyson responded. “All evidence points to we’re on a one-way trip to oblivion. So the universe expands, the temperature of the universe drops, all stars eventually will run out of fuel. So the stars, one by one, in the night sky will turn off. And in the extremely distant future, a quadrillion years into the future, there’ll be no light coming to us in the day or night sky.”
Not w/ a bang but a literal fade to black. Ironically heart-warming.

Turns out gravity falling down on the job is allowing entropy, & matter is not to blame.
The current term for the force fueling this expansion, deGrasse Tyson explained, is “dark matter,” but he clarified that even that term implied that it has matter.

“What it truly is is dark gravity. Boom,” deGrasse Tyson said. “That’s a problem that’s been around since the 1930s. It’s the longest-standing, unsolved problem in astrophysics.”

[...]

“It’s like me tossing a ball up into the air,” deGrasse Tyson said. “It’s moving upward even though it’s slowing down, okay? Gravity is slowing down that upward motion. We expected gravity to be slowing down the expanding universe. The opposite is happening. We don’t know what’s causing it.”
ADDED 22 January 2014 'cause we forgot it ten days ago:

1 comment:

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

So little time, only a few billion years!

I've actually met Dr DeGrasse Tyson on a couple of occasions. He is a GOOD guy.