The story of the Big Crunch, the end of the universe, begins with the Big Bang, the currently accepted theory of the universe. The Big Bang was a huge exlposion in which this universe's energy, space, time, and matter were formed. All the matter and energy were compressed into a fiery mass of unimaginable density. The earliest moment that we know really happened came after an extremely short period of 10 ^-43 seconds called the Planck time. The whole observable universe, which may only be a portion of the whole, occupied an area 10 ^-20 times smaller than an atomic nucleus. The Big Bang sets the stage for the Big Crunch, the end of the universe, which will end this universe and be the start of another.
It is thought that at an even earlier time the four forces - strong nuclear forces, weak nuclear forces, gravitation, and electromagnetism - were combined into one force. When the universe was 10 ^-35 seconds old, the era of inflation started. During this time - about 10^-33 seconds - the universe swelled up to 10 ^50 times its previous size. After that first millionth of a second, the temperature of the universe cooled enough to start the leptonic era, in which the leptons (electrons, neutrinos, and their antiparticles) didn't interact intensely with hadrons (protons and neutrons made of triplets of quarks). The leptons survived longer, and the protons and neutrons began forming nuclei. Then during the next three minutes the lightest of the elements were made - helium and deuterium. After 100,000 years atomic nuclei began to get electrons and they formed complete atoms with positive and negative electrical charges blocking each other out. Photons travelled through the universe as background radiation, and rarely hit matter. During the early universe, the photons (radiation) were always buffeting particles. While the temperature fell from a high of 10^32, the photons lost energy and their wavelength increased. After a year the temperature was 10^7 Kelvin (K). After 100,000 years the temperature was 6,000 K, the temperature of the Sun's surface. Today the temperature is 3 K with millimeter wavelength photons. Scientists can trace this far back with the aid of discoveries from astronomy, subatomic physics, relativity, and quantam theory (Ronan 26, 27).
It is undecided as to when the Big Bang occured, but it's believed to have happened between 15 and 20 billion years ago (Ronan 30, 31) . Proof of the Big Bang is found in three pieces of evidence. The first is that the stars, galaxies, and all other matter, are moving away from each other. This expanding universe can be explained by the Big Bang. The discovery of radiation reaching us from every part of the universe is the second piece of evidence. The radiation is of equal intensity from everywhere. This is the dispersed glow of the universe a few hundred-thousand years after the hot Big Bang. After about 15 billion years, it has cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero (the coldest it gets). The third piece comes from nuclear physics. Studies of how the chemical elements would evolve after the Big Bang shows a certain ratio of deuterium (a form of hydrogen) to helium. This ratio has been found to exist. Today, particle accelerators can mimic the processes that occured during the first split second of the universe to help us understand the Big Bang better. The Big Bang sets the stage for the Big Crunch, as do black holes - one of the greatest mysteries of the universe.
Black holes are superdense objects that have escape velocities greater than the speed of light. Since light can't be emitted from them, they got the name "Black holes". The theory of their existence started in 1783 when astronomer and geologist John Mitchell suggested them. In 1915, when the Sun was found to be able to bend light due to the amount of it's density, the idea became revived. In 1969 scientists found that some galaxies were emitting strong X-rays, which implied vast amounts of energy. Superdense bodies would attract matter, and accelerate it to enormous speeds as it fell in. An accreation disc would form from the matter revolving around it. The speed of the matter would emit X-rays in great quantities. The density of the body would make an intense gravitational field. This would cause the space-time around the body to be so strongly curved that the interior would be cut-off from the rest of the universe (MMS 3).
Black holes have other effects besides absorbing all that falls into them. They cause the passage of time for an object to slow, as seen by the casual observer. The frequency of light the object emits falls lower and lower - it's called redshifting - and it becomes weaker (Goodstein 2). The object keeps getting closer and closer to the event horizon (the area where escape from the black hole becomes impossible) around the black hole, but never quite makes it, and finally looks like it's hovering there. Thus, the outside observer never actually sees it fall into the hole. For the actual object, there won't be any apparent change in the passage of time. It will undergo huge pressure that will rip apart any macroscopic body, and makes it impossible for any living thing to survive. The object will lose all knowledge of what it was before as it falls toward the singularity, where density is infinite and space-time is reduced to a mere point. Black holes have been found to have a temperature, on average of one ten-millionth of a Kelvin, with hotter temperatures the smaller the hole gets, and to have the ability to die (Goodstein 3). If a virtual particle ( a particle formed with particle and anti-particle parts so it cancels out its energy) is made near a black hole, and the particle escapes while the anti-particle is absorbed, then the black hole loses energy (MMS 1). This is really slow. It would take a hole with the mass of the sun 10^56 times the present age of the universe to evaporate. Black holes could be gateways to other universes, if they warp space-time enough, and connect to a white hole on the other side. The Big Crunch will bring about the death of this universe, but the birth of a new one.
Indian scientist Jayant Narlikar believes that our universe is only one of many in a vastly larger space. The Narlikar hyper-universe can be likened to a gigantic container of bubbling liquid, with our own universe as one of the bubbles, and the other bubbles other universes. The theory I believe in (Narlikar's theory) states thatwhen the universe collapses, it will instantly form a new one on the other side of the giant black hole that will form. The end of the universe, in my theory, will end like this: first the universe will begin to contract. It could be like living life in reverse, where dinner starts the day off, and when you're done with it you feel empty and ready for lunch. Life would be completely backwards. Eventually universes will touch and interact strongly and merge a lot more than they do now. The increasing number of black holes will make the process of collapse different than expansion. When the end is only a few centuries away, the temperature of background radiation (photons) will rise so much it will tear stars apart. Black holes will begin to swallow matter and radiation. In the final decade of collapse the black holes will begin to merge into a single supermassive black hole. This will swallow the entire universe. The black hole will send all the matter and energy through a wormhole, beyond the singularity, to a white hole on the other side, where energy and matter will pour out into an empty bubble (universe), in that universe's Big Bang. The wormhole would be unobservable from the outside of the universe (Halpern 268). A wormhole would collapse unless negative energy occured in it. Negative energy was first predicted in the late 1920's by English physicist Paul Dirac. It may sound strange, but it led to the discovery of the positron in 1932 and is related to the existence of antiparticles. Wormholes would display some strange properties: one is that they would permit objects that fell into them to travel back in time. They would also be "pinched off" from the space-time fabric, and, from the inside, an expanding universe would form out of the white hole. If the black hole stays around long enough, the formation of the universe on the other side would be violent, and thus cause some mutations such as electrons having a slightly different mass (Halpern 250). Some universes would be successful and exist long enough to form black holes, which will form still more universes. These are likely to be similar to ours. We got lucky when we got the universe with the right conditions to spawn life and to evolve intelligence. Most were unsuccessful. The only way for human kind to survive the Big Crunch (assuming we survive that long) would be to find a way into another universe. Though this theory has yet to be mathematically proven, the probability is high. Only time will tell us the ending.
The Big Crunch will be the start of a new universe formed from this one. But there are many possiblities besides the occurence of the Big Crunch. An ever-expanding universe, an ever-stabalizing universe, and bubble universes are three theories. An ever-expanding universe wouldn't have enough mass to contract back in on itself through gravitational pulls, and would keep expanding forever. In an ever-stabalizing universe the density is at a critical point between contraction and expansion. It's an infinite universe that never stops expanding, but it keeps getting slower and slower, like Xeno's Paradox. The Big Bang theory gives strong reasons for our universe to be ever-stabalizing. Bubble universes could conciveably merge into each other, and if our universe has a white hole, then another universe could send it's matter into ours, and cancel out the loss of matter during the Big Crunch. It's pretty unlikely, though. My model of the Big Crunch is the most likely and the most supported, except for the flat (ever-stabalizing) universe model. It's only fault is that we don't know if black holes connect to other universes via wormholes. It may just be Star Trek talking, but I think they do.
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