Michael Crichton said in a recent lecture that modern Physics was off course. "Easterblog" explores the nonsense.
REPEAL THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS!: The day before the Iowa primary, none of the major news organizations was remotely close to right about what would happen. This isn't stopping the media from predicting what will happen in billions of years! Last week on Tuesday, The New York Times declared that the universe could be torn out of existence in an ultimate cataclysm in as little as "a few billion years." Then, on Saturday, the paper backed down--maybe the Times received an angry letter to the editor from God!--and hedged, declaring "the universe may have a more peaceful end than recent theories envision." The cosmos, the Times mused, will continue to exist for at least another 30 billion years, perhaps forever. Those doomsday-heavy "recent theories"? Forget 'em, and don't expect the story to mention that the theories were prominently presented in the same paper just a few days earlier.
Meanwhile The Washington Post weighed in on Friday to report this vital caveat: "It remains impossible to predict the fate of the universe with certainty." Oh, so we can't be certain what's going to happen 30 billion years from now!
What's at work here? It's more on "dark energy," the number-one mystery of astrophysicists and, increasingly, the story that has science writers running in circles. As recently as the beginning of last week, the trendy line among cosmologists was that dark energy is getting so strong it will rip the entire universe apart--hence the Times' cosmic-doomsday story. Then, on Friday, this finding from the Hubble Space Telescope suggested that dark energy will achieve a sort of truce with gravity, resulting in a stable universe that exists for unfathomable lengths of time. Quickly the Times backed off and declared that maybe 100 billion galaxies aren't totally doomed after all.
Physicists and astronomers didn't even believe "dark energy" existed until less than a decade ago; now many think that somewhere around 90 percent of the content of the universe is this force. But, um, no one has the slightest idea what dark energy is or what creates it, nor has any device ever detected dark energy. Ninety percent of the universe consists of stuff that cannot be explained or detected, and it's either going to destroy reality or nothing will happen! Trust us, we're experts.
Belief in dark energy stems from the 1998 discovery that the galaxies are flying apart faster all the time. Since cosmic expansion was first seen in the 1920s, astronomers have assumed the galaxies were propelled away from each other by the impetus of the Big Bang and would, over the eons, gradually slow down. Instead the galaxies continue to accelerate, so some repulsive force must be pushing on them. Dark energy is the hypothesized repulsive power, and it appears that dark energy is getting stronger all the time: ever-more repulsion from ever-more dark energy being the reason the galaxies are speeding up.
But wait, don't we know from the second law of thermodynamics--the "entropy" law--that systems can only lose energy? The second law of thermodynamics is the one that dictates that a log can burn into ash, but ash cannot spontaneously assemble itself into a log. The second law holds that unless energy is added to a system from some outside source, the system must inevitably decay into a state of entropy, which can be conceptualized as an inert gray blur. Thomas Pynchon is just one of many intellectuals to seize on the second law as a proof that life is meaningless. Inevitably, Pynchon and others have asserted, the universe must descend into the gray-blur state, and then all thought and being will end. It's standard to assume that an entropy doom awaits the cosmos.
But in dark-energy theory, new energy is being added to the cosmos all the time. In fact, fantastic amounts of new energy are being added: We just, um, can't explain what the energy is or where it comes from.
Here's the current understanding of dark energy--and bear in mind there's a strong likelihood this understanding will be overturned many times. According to the current model, the vacuum of space is not a true void; all cubic units of space have a uniform "density" of dark energy, which repels matter. (Researchers speak of energy "density" because conceptually, matter and energy are two expressions of the same thing.) As the universe expands the volume of space expands, and new space brings with it new dark energy. Say for the sake of argument that when the cosmos was 1 billion years old--it's thought to be about 14 billion years old--there were 100 cubic units of space in the universe, containing 100 units of dark energy. When the cosmos was 2 billion years old, owing to expansion there were 200 cubic units of space, containing 200 units of dark energy. Then there were 300 cubic unit of space containing 300 units of dark energy, and so on. The bigger the universe gets, the more dark energy. Will dark energy eventually overwhelm gravity and rip space-time itself to shreds, or will the two forces achieve a balance? That is the trendy question regarding the next 30 billion years or so.
Assume science will eventually figure out what dark energy is, maybe even figure out how to harness it. To yours truly, the great thing about the whole theory is that huge amounts of energy are constantly being added to the universe from some unknown source. Every instant there is more dark energy than the instant before; creation was not a one-time event of the far past but is an ongoing process, with energy constantly added to the cosmic "system" and thus the firmament having the potential to be eternal. Repeal the second law of thermodynamics! |
