I'm a big beliver that anything is possible and that with sufficient time and intelligent anything can be solved - I have fondly referred to this as the Sans Ceiling Hypothesis since 1998.
Well if this article is correct, then we have a lot less time to figure out those pesky loopholes to runaway cosmological expansion - The Big Rip.
Original Article
PARIS - The bad news: The universe will end in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn apart and individual atoms of human flesh will be ripped asunder in the tiniest fraction of a second.
The good news: You can go ahead and book your summer holiday. It won't happen for another 22 billion years.
Mr Robert Caldwell, a physicist at Dartmouth College in the United States, says the doomsday scenario inverts the widespread belief that the cosmos will end with a whimper.
'Until now, we thought the universe would either re-collapse to a big crunch or expand forever to a state of dilution,' he told the British weekly New Scientist.
'Now we've come up with a third possibility - the Big Rip.'
The universe is famously believed to have been born in a 'Big Bang' 12 to 14 billions years ago and has been expanding ever since, driven by a mysterious force known as dark energy.
Most scientists believe that the acceleration will eventually weaken, or at least stay constant.
But according to Mr Caldwell's theory, the dark energy may be becoming more powerful, essentially acting as a foot on the expansion accelerator.
The universe would be stretched further and further away, until the light of the stars could not reach us. Eventually, phantom energy would tear apart all bound systems, sundering the electrical bonds that hold matter together.
In the most extreme scenario, the 'Big Rip' would happen 22 billion years from now, with the Milky Way destroyed 60 million years before the universe's very end.
'In the last moments, even atomic nuclei will be ripped apart,' Mr Caldwell told the New Scientist. --AFP
Edited by planetp, 10 March 2003 - 04:34 PM.