During expansion, dark energy -- the unknown force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate -- pushes and pushes until all matter fragments into patches so far apart that nothing can bridge the gaps. Everything from black holes to atoms disintegrates. This point, just a fraction of a second before the end of time, is the turnaround.
At the turnaround, each fragmented patch collapses and contracts individually instead of pulling back together in a reversal of the Big Bang. The patches become an infinite number of independent universes that contract and then bounce outward again, reinflating in a manner similar to the Big Bang. One patch becomes our universe.
(Via KurzweilAI.net.)
This model is appealingly organic. Whether it triumphs over Big Bang cosmology or not, my gut feeling is that the Cosmos is effectively a living entity: the Gaia Hypothesis writ large in a tapestry of supernovae, galactic clusters and hard radiation.
2 comments:
Really? Gaia? Sheesh. I see it more as an aberration of nothingness. Like quantum particles in a vacuum. They appear, move around, and then disappear. No form, function or reason. It just is.
For my part every person have to look at it.
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