The size of the universe

[jackson33]

Keeping to MB, first comment after the opening post, I think the thought was to stimulate 'out of the box' comments. However what he is probably thinking about HAS been written about at various scientific levels.

 

Big Freeze or Heat Death

The Big Freeze is a scenario under which continued expansion results in a universe that is too cold to sustain life. It could, in the absence of dark energy, occur only under a flat or hyperbolic geometry, because such geometries then are a necessary condition for a universe that expands forever. With a positive cosmological constant, it could also occur in a closed universe. A related scenario is Heat Death, which states that the universe goes to a state of maximum entropy in which everything is evenly distributed, and there are no gradients — which are needed to sustain information processing, one form of which is life. The Heat Death scenario is compatible with any of the three spatial models, but requires that the universe reach an eventual temperature minimum.

http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/u/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe.htm

 

Under 'Pulsating Universe' theory, like references have been made and as I recall with molecular action. What happens if molecular action ceases entirely and some supposed, that matter disappeared. Whether Dark Matter, Matter or a cause for deflation, heat or cold, could be involved, in my humble opinion..

[lucaspa]

One reason is that the Planck temperature unit is around 1.4 x 10³² kelvin.

 

Wow! That is high!. MB, the temperature of the sun is only 6³ degrees K! So we have temperatures much, much lower than the Plank temperature.

 

I suppose what MB meant was absolute zero. But as you noted, we have already gotten matter down to within a degree of absolute zero and it hasn't disappeared.

 

Also you claim to have read that when the universe gets to within a planck degree of zero (which it certainly already is) the universe will "shrink and implode".

 

Where did you read such an assertion!

 

Yeah, we need some sources. This is contrary to everything I've read on the subject. My reading doesn't extend to archXive.org, but I do try to keep up with the major discoveries in physics that are printed in Science and Nature and I haven't seen anything like this.

[Megabrain]

Why is it psuedo science to ask what proof if any there is that the universe is still expanding? when the only data we have is mega old? - Please put it back immediately.

 

Better still leave it where it is, I'll quetly leave.

[lucaspa]

Why is it psuedo science to ask what proof if any there is that the universe is still expanding? when the only data we have is mega old? - Please put it back immediately.

 

Because you are on the wrong time scale. As even you admit, the latest data is from galaxies 2 million light years away. Yes, that's 2 million years ago in time, but the universe is 13.4 billion years old. It has been expanding all that time! 2 million years is a lot in terms of a human lifetime, but very little time in relation to the age of the universe. So, what would make us think that there would be something that just appeared within the last 2 million years that would not only stop the acceleration of the expansion we saw last, but cause it to start going backwards and collapsing?

 

Let's see if an analogy helps. You are in a car and have been pushing on the gas for the last 5 minutes (300 seconds). The last measurement is 0.05 seconds ago and it shows you still accelerating (that is 0.00016 of the time you've been accelerating). The road is clear ahead of you, no obstacles. What would make you think that, in the last 1/20th of a second, an unknown force was not only stopping your acceleration, but actually causing you to go backwards?

[Klaynos]

I still think there's the issue of causality here, for all intense and purposes, 12billion years ago for a distant galaxy is "now" for us... As well as all the good points by lucaspa and martin.

[Bignose]

And there is no reason for matter to disappear no matter how close we get, a microkelvin, a nanokelvin.

 

We've actually gotten matter down into the picoKelvin range:

http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2000/isbn9512252147/

 

While it wasn't what the authors were looking for in their design of the experiment, I would think that if matter were disappearing, it would probably be the headliner in the abstract of the work in the link above.