April 10, 2019

Today, April 10, 2019, we have received the first ever photo of a black hole. If the photo doesn’t look that impressive to you, it’s understandable. We’ve been spoiled with beautiful depictions of black holes in both science and fiction for decades; the life doesn’t quite imitate the art. intersteller black hole

But this, this is real, and it gives me the same goosebumps as the first photo taken from space. The same feeling as the Pale Blue Dot. It is a single testament to the sheer immensity of the universe and how utterly unlikely we all are.

We, some partially evolved apes from a little planet in a very quiet corner of a relatively ordinary galaxy, have produced the ingenuity necessary to photograph the most mysterious, powerful, unknowable entity in the universe. How unlikely are we? How unlikely this photo should exist? It took multiple telescopes on multiple continents and just the right set of circumstances and conditions to obtain the data they used to construct this image. Then it took scientists months to extract this data and turn it into something our eyes and brains could understand. blackhole1

And this image, it’s a fuzzy, orange coffee stain of thing 54 million lightyears away. The image we are seeing is made up of light nearly as old as the dinosaurs, who by the way, would probably still be around if a massive thing didn’t randomly fall out of the sky and wipe them out. It all just adds to the improbability of it all.

This photo truly is a statistical miracle. The number of things to go so right, the things that allow us to witness something so grand? It really makes me believe in something. I’m not a religious person by any means, but this photo’s existence all by itself, makes me want to believe in something. It makes me wish Einstein were here to see it and all his predictions proved right. It makes me believe that someday we may actually be able to understand the universe and all its glory.

We’re so small and the universe is so, so big, but this fuzzy orange coffee stain makes me believe we could one day see it in all its endless forms, most beautiful.

Now, look again at this photo, and tell me it’s not impressive to you.

If the Universe Never Ended

This marks the end of my somewhat morbid series about the end of the universe. I wanted to end with the very first theory I ever heard, and the very first time I contemplated that the whole of existence could end.

The “Big Crunch” was a theory that was prevalent when I was a kid. And being the kid who watched space documentaries for fun and snagged obsolete science textbooks for recreational reading, I heard about it a lot. The Big Crunch was easy to understand and best of all, it is cyclical. The Big Bang, the Big Crunch, the Big Bang, the Big Crunch and endless sinewave of explosion followed by collapse and again explosion.

It barely warrants explaining, but I’ll explain a bit anyhow. The best theory we have for how the universe began is the Big Bang; the theory that the universe expanded from one, infinitely small point, called a singularity, and that the universe is continuing to expand outward at an ever-increasing rate. Our theory for how the universe began is a lot more solid than our theories for how it will end because it already happened. We’re pretty sure we’re right, but the question always comes up, okay, what happened before the Big Bang. I sometimes like to answer with the esoteric, “well time didn’t exist yet, so there was no before,” but that answer’s obnoxious. What caused the Big Bang is something as yet unanswerable, but the Big Crunch offers a nice little bow to put atop the universe. bigcrunch

If, and big if, there is enough mass in the universe, it will get to a point where its expansion will slow and then inevitably reverse. Gravity will cause the universe to collapse in on itself until it cannot collapse anymore; all the matter in the universe will be squished into a single point, a singularity.

We like symmetry. This makes existence symmetrical. If we can ignore the headache of an infinite universe with no real end or beginning we can appreciate the universal heartbeat the Big Crunch creates. The universe, in this way, becomes an endless cycle of contraction and expansion. In and out. Birth, death, and rebirth. It gives the universe an oddly biological affect. Living systems are a study themselves in expansion and contraction; it’s life’s mode of choice. It would be nice and neat if the universe were the same. A big, living ecosystem of stars and galaxies that breathe in and out eternity.

There would be no before or after, just in and out. It solves a lot of the problems that make our heads hurt. It’s a pretty theory and I used to like it a lot. I (and much of the science community due to the fact that the universe probably doesn’t have enough mass to facilitate a Big Crunch) don’t really find it as satisfying as I once did. Maybe I want the universe to end a long, long time from now. Maybe I wouldn’t want to live forever if I could or undergo a cycle of constant birth and rebirth. The promise of an end, a temporary universe, makes the middle more special. Life’s not special because we live it, it’s special because it’s fleeting; we’re tasked with making the most of it. And perhaps I anthropomorphize the poor universe a bit too much, but I like to think that we are the universe itself, the way it thinks, the way it sees, and the way it lives. Carl Sagan said it too, and he’s much smarter than me: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” I guess I sometimes like to think that the universe is so special, it only happened once.

Anyway, I hope contemplating the end of the universe leaves you as hopeful as it often does me. starstuff

The Big Instantaneous Obliteration of the Entire Universe

To continue on with what I am now declaring a trilogy of apocalyptic proportions, let’s talk about Vacuum Decay, the Heat Death’s faster, scarier, more quantum physical younger sister. vacuumdecay

Vacuum Decay is nearly the opposite of the heat death, which is also known as the “Big Freeze.” I’m mentioning this because I wanted to give vacuum decay a nickname that started with big and I came up with the “Big Instantaneous Obliteration of the Entire Universe,” which isn’t catchy at all, so I’m scrapping it.

Anyway. If the heat death of the universe will take pretty much all the time there is, vacuum decay will take exactly none. Without getting too much into the science that makes this possible, vacuum decay is what would happen if the vacuum of space decided it could calm down a bit. Everything in the universe is trying to get into its most stable state, this is also the mechanism that drives the heat death, but where the heat death is a gradual degradation into eternal nothingness, vacuum decay would be a sudden, cataclysmic hop down to a more stable state that would destroy the universe as we know it. vacuumdecaymeme

As usual, I’m not really here to discuss the actual mechanics of vacuum decay, there are physicists whose job it is to do that and would do it much better than I. I’m here to explain why vacuum decay is the purest form of existential crisis fuel.

Because existence is really big and long and extant, but it could all end in an instant. We often claim that human timescales are a blink of an eye to the cosmos, but what if the universe’s thirteen billion years is nothing but a blink in the grand scheme of things, whatever those things may be. The idea that the universe as we know it could, through real physical processes, cease to exist in an instant, so quickly we would not have time to react, rams a wrench in my entire fractured concept of time.

Is our thirteen-billion-year-old universe existing in the in-between moments between one energy level to another? Is the universe we know only here because another vacuum decayed before us, obliterating an entire universe whose observers also probably thought they were around for a good while? If the universe is just a cycle of decay, getting ever closer to a perfectly balanced system, what time scale is the universe really operating on? higgsfield

The universe is so huge and old we humans can barely comprehend it and yet it could be nothing compared to what there is to comprehend. Here, in our little universe, we might not be seeing the whole picture of reality. We may think as we’ve expanded our horizons outward past our planet, our star, our galaxy, our entire galactic family, that we are ever so close to understanding it all. Forget geocentricity, this is unicentricity. Who are we to assume we’re the only universe just because ours is the only one we can see?

If it was all to end tomorrow and start anew, new rules and new observers, nothing we ever did or saw would matter. We might as well be a single hydrogen atom, so far from its neighbors it believes itself to be the only atom, with it’s up and down quarks and it’s single distant electron, not realizing it makes up a whole star with its distant planets and their distant observers making their distant observations about their distant and tiny universe.

We may never know much more than we do now. We may never know close to all there is to know, and it might all end before we know it’s ending. So nothing matters. The fact that vacuum decay is even a possibility is nihilism at its finest. If it could all end this very instant, how can there ever have been a point at all?

I wish I could end on a hopeful, happy note, but vacuum decay just sucks all the fun out of everything. PUN.

How Long Until Nothing Ever Happens Again?

It’s the start of a new year, so let’s talk about the end of the universe. space I’m sure as soon as we had ideas about how the universe began, we were coming up with ways it could end. It’s kind of what we do. The idea that the universe is infinite is, with no end and no beginning, can be comforting, but the idea that the universe is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, is more human.

There are lots of ways the story could go; different alternate endings in a choose your adventure universe, and I’d like to discuss all of them, but today I’ll talk about death.

Once upon a time, over thirteen billion years ago, the universe was born. The universe lived out its bright happy days of stars and galaxies and us. After so many years that it doesn’t matter how many anymore, everything goes dark and the universe dies because the second law of thermodynamics. The end. Schematic diagram of the history of the Universe

This is more or less the basis of the “Heat Death,” hypothesis. I would suggest reading about it. It sounds like a bummer, but I really like it. I’ll tell you why.

The universe ages in one direction, the same way all of us do. Like us, it is a slave to entropy: order to disorder, complexity to simplicity. The universe is unimaginably complex, full of things that give of light and energy, things that give birth to more things, things that happen. We are in a comparably short summer of the universe, and there is a long winter coming.

Because stars don’t last forever. Eventually, they use up all their energy and they die. The hot remnants of once brilliant stars will stick around, cooling in the fall, for extreme numbers of years, but eventually, they go dark. Eventually, there’s nothing left to use; all the stuff in the universe is all used up. Even black holes die, radiating away all their energy until there’s nothing left. When the long winter comes, there won’t be anything to know about it, because there won’t be anything at all. Eventually, when there’s is no more usable energy in the universe, when everything is finally the same, lukewarm universe soup, nothing will ever happen again. All the matter that ever existed will still exist, don’t worry; the universe dies when time stops mattering anymore, and it’s all very inevitable.

This is why I really like it.

To quote my favorite show “time is an illusion, and so is death,” (if you know where this is from, you’re awesome). In this scenario, the universe doesn’t really die, time itself just stops being relevant. If nothing ever happens, then time doesn’t exist. Time will fade away along with the stars, and everything will be quiet and still and this will be the end.

I like it because there is a trajectory that started as soon as the universe did; this is where we’re going. I like it because it reminds me of a story. It’s not a happy ending or a sad ending, it’s just an ending and it feels like a blanket. I like the idea that the universe will be around so long it will outlive time, and when it ends, it won’t know it. It will drift off in its old age, in its sleep, peacefully, so softly it won’t even have to mourn itself.

I like it because it’s pretty. I like it because it’s anthropomorphic. It’s the way we all want to end. With a purpose, a bright summer, and a calm winter with no mourning.

Maybe the universe won’t end this way. Trust me, there are other ways the universe could end. It’s just the way I want everything to end, when nothing ever happens again. heatdeathmeme

Into the Multiverse

I was a bit late to the party, but I just managed to see “Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse.” Aside from it just being flat-out awesome, having some of the coolest animation to come out in recent years, and just being a movie about my favorite superhero in general, it also had a lot parallel universe nonsense, which is always fun.

This is nothing new. Comic books are a haven for alternate universe storylines; it’s practically built into the medium. Something the writers don’t like happens, start a new universe. Want to pit your favorite superheroes up against their evil alter ego, start a new universe. Want to have them team up with their badass future counterpart, start a new universe. Creating a new universe is as easy as thinking it up and writing it down in the comics, no Big Bang needed, and anything goes. Alternate universes are a narrative Swiss army knife in the comics, and though perhaps overused and abused, might not be as far-fetched as they seem. Astrophysicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were proponents of the idea of “superposition” in the 1920s. Grossly simplified, superposition is the idea that quantum particles can exist in an infinite number of states and thus there could be an infinite number of alternate universes similar to our own where each particle inhabits one of the infinite number of states dictated by that particle’s wave function. Essentially, anything that can happen, will and has happened. It’s Schrödinger’s Cat made infinite.

To use a simplistic example, I decided to have pizza for dinner instead of taquitos. In this universe I had pizza, but there could be another, identical universe where I decided to have taquitos. Everything leading up to pizza was the same, but a new, taquito universe was created when I made that decision and now everything has changed. Apply this to all the decisions you’ve ever made, all the decisions ever made for you, all the decisions everyone else that has ever lived has ever made, and all the possible positions of every particle in the universe, and you get an infinite number of universes, plus the one where you had taquitos.

We may even know how to get into the taquito universe, or at least where that universe once was. Some astrophysicists postulate that the Great Cold Spot, an area fractionally cooler on average than the rest of the universe when measuring the cosmic microwave background (CNB), could be where another universe bumped up against ours. It’s a wild idea and I highly recommend looking all this up, gently placing your brain in a blender, and setting it to “smoothie”. Multiverse

Even without all the mind-bending physics nonsense, it’s mind-boggling to think that everything thing that happens can affect the multiverse, but I’ve also found it weirdly comforting. Writers like to use the multiverse theory as a narrative device, a way to see a dead loved one again, right a wrong, or explore an alternate history. I like to use it as a reminder that this universe is special, singular. All the things that lead to this moment had to happen just like this, or everything could be different. There could be any number of universes that didn’t lead to you reading this blog or me writing it. Even the tiniest difference would make it not this universe. We’re one in infinity. But the real reason I like the multiverse theory is that in at least one of those universes, Spiderman is real and Trump isn’t president, possibly both are true at the same time, and I’d really like to go that universe.