• Question: how do you think the universe will end? will it be like the sequel to the Hichickers Guide To The Galaxy book?

    Asked by sonicsam to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 16 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Peter Williams

      Peter Williams answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      oh, wouldn’t that be absolutely priceless!

      this is an active area of study. at the present epoch the universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating. but will this reverse? cosmologists call a universe that expands forever an “open universe”.one that stops and starts collapsing is called a “closed universe”. all the evidence so far points to the univese being precisely balenced on the cusp between the two. why is this? nobody knows yet.

    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      As long as there is a restaurant why not!

      My favourite amongst current theories is that the Universe has no beginning and no end but instead goes in cycles. The Universe continues to expand and matter continues to fall in to ever bigger black holes until the Universe is nothing but super massive black holes. The Universe continues to cool and expand until the Black Hole is warmer than the surrounding space – at this point the Black Hole explodes and spews new particles into existence, restarting a Universe.

      This is an idea put forward by Professor Roger Penrose, he talks about it in his book Cycles of Time.

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      I’m not sure but I think that the Hubble Space Telescope found that the universe was expanding at an increasing rate in 2010. If this is the case then the Universe will end in a really boring way where it will all be spread out thinly and be very cold.

      Bit of a shame if that’s the case though, I personally prefer the idea of a cyclic universe.

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