Billions, perhaps trillions, of years from now, long after the sun swallowed Earth, cosmologists expect the universe to end. Whether or not some will collapse under its own weight in a great battle is likely to continue to expand forever in an infinite great freeze. Others believe that our cosmic endgame will be decided by a mysterious energy that tears the universe apart.
But there is a more immediate cataclysm, perhaps already heading towards us at the speed of light: they call it the big slurp.
Said slurp begins with a quantum fluctuation, a bubble traveling through the universe like a cosmic tide, obliterating everything in its path. We should take this opportunity seriously, says John Ellis of King’s College London. In fact, the question is less if the apocalypse will happen, but when. “It could be happening as we speak,” he says.
Theorists like Ellis are surprised that there is no such catastrophe in the observable universe. But instead of taking our precarious existence for granted, they are using the fact that we are here as a tool. The thought is that there might be some exotic physics watching over us.
This kind of existential cosmology helps physicists sift through many models of the universe, and it could tell us how the cosmos began in the first place. “We may need something that stabilizes (the universe), and it may be a new physics,” he says. Arttu Rajantie…
