Billions, perhaps trillions of years from now, long after the sun has swallowed the Earth, cosmologists predict the universe will end. Some people wrestle with whether the Big Crunch is likely to collapse under its weight, or whether it will become an infinitely empty Big Freeze, expanding forever. Some believe that the end of our universe will be determined by a mysterious energy that rips the universe apart.
But there is a more immediate cataclysm that may already be heading towards us at the speed of light. They call it “big sip.”
The slurp in question begins with a quantum fluctuation, causing the bubble to roll through space like a cosmic tsunami, obliterating everything in its path. We should take this possibility seriously, says John Ellis of King’s College London. In fact, the question is not so much if this apocalypse will happen, but when. “It could be happening as we speak,” he says.
Theorists like Ellis are actually surprised that such a catastrophe has not yet occurred in the observable universe. But rather than take our precarious existence for granted, they use the obvious fact that we are still here as a tool. The idea is that some weird physics is protecting us.
This kind of existential cosmology also helps physicists filter through the myriad models of the universe, and could tell us how the universe began in the first place. “Maybe you need something to stabilize it. [the universe]And it could be new physics.” arthu rajanti…
