THE ENIGMA OF THE END OF EVERYTHING
Future
Around 13.7 billion years ago, the universe was created by way of Big Bang. Life, of course, appeared later but whenever it did, it must had known that like itself, the very universe wherein it thrives would come to an end. But how will it happen? For a long time, this question has remained a source of perplexity for mankind and, in fact, still continues to be. So, while much remains uncertain about the end of the universe, scientists, nevertheless, have been successful in coming up several theories over time, each supported by its own reasoning and evidence. They include: Big Rip, Big Crunch and Big Freeze.
In physical cosmology, ‘Big Rip’ is a hypothetical model which suggests that the matter of the universe from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles and even spacetime itself will be torn apart at a certain time as the expansion of the universe overcomes gravity (a force that holds all this matter together in place). In the past, it had remained a long-standing belief among scientists that the universe was in a static state. However, according to the “most precise measurement” ever made recently, it has emerged that the universe is, in fact, stretching, increasing in size with time and at an escalating rate. Surprisingly, this has even called into question Einstein’s general theory of relativity!
“For a long time, scientists, including Albert Einstein, thought that the universe was static and infinite,” explained Thomas Kitching, a lecturer in Astrophysics at University of College London. “Observations have since shown it is in fact expanding, and at an accelerating rate.”
It is quite manifest that if the universe persists in this behavior, it will eventually reach its expansion limit (by this I mean the point where it will not be able to expand anymore), and any further expansion -no matter how small the magnitude is- will result in it exploding.
‘Big Crunch’ is another potential theory of the ultimate fate of the universe. It is a hypothetical scenario in which the expansion of the universe actually slows down to a crawl, and then as gravity overcomes the expansion, the universe starts shrinking, causing stars, planets and even entire galaxies to collide into each other, finally resulting in the universe, for all intents and purposes, collapsing in on itself. This process is also known as a “phase transition”, and researchers in Denmark recently claimed to have proved that it could already be occurring in our universe: effectively ‘eating away’[2] at the cosmos.
The third and the last theory describing the ill-fate of the universe is known as ‘Big Freeze’. Also somewhat conversely called ‘Heat Death’, it is a hypothetical scenario that explains that in the universe, entropy (a measure of energy dispersal or spread at a specific temperature) will increase until it reaches a ‘maximum value’. Once this happens, heat in the system will be distributed evenly throughout the universe, causing the universe to approach absolute zero temperature (to elaborate, heat is not concentrated at a specific point that it would raise the temperature, rather it has spread out leading to only a small amount of heat per unit space and hence an extreme drop in temperature). As a consequence, all the contents of the universe will freeze and so die.
Considering what they already know about physics and the universe, physicists believe that among the above-mentioned theories, ‘Big Freeze’ or ‘Heat Death’ is the most probable way through which the universe could meet its end. However, the bottom line is that we still do not know for sure. That said, it indeed translates into the enigma of the end of everything.
[1] Victoria Woollaston, “A Big Freeze, Rip or Crunch: How Will the Universe End?,” Wired UK, October 10, 2016, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-will-universe-end.
[2] Woollaston.
