Velvet Oblivion - Part 5

 Velvet Oblivion 

Part 5

In Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time, he begins his explanation of our universe's future with three simple graphs. Including original models done by Alexander Friedmann, a Russian physicist and mathematician. I began reading this book during fall term and I have never come across one hundred and ninety pages of more dense and mind blowing material in my life besides maybe the book of psalms.

"The universe is not infinite in space,

but neither does space have any boundary."

The three figures Stephen Hawking continues to explain are derived from Friedmann's research and predictions. Hawking's first graph demonstrates what I learned previously to be the "big crunch" in which galaxies continue to drift farther apart from one another since the big bang and beginning of time until they slowly begin to contract until they end up colliding and compressing into zero distance from one another, just as they had begun. His second graph addresses the possibility of the universe "continuing forever" where "the universe is expanding only just fast enough to avoid re-collapse." In his third graph, he explains the theory of the "big chill" where galaxies continue to move further from one another until they disappear from sight, left alone in space. It's known as the big chill because as time lapses and becomes father from the event of the big bang, the average temperature of the universe will drop until life in all galaxies would cease to exist. A lot like what Mark Shwartz analyzes in past predictions of what scientists thought the future of the universe would be.
 

 

From these three very different theories, Hawking makes a very interesting conclusion stating that "the universe is not infinite in space, but neither does space have any boundary." Now that he recognized the universe is not infinite there for potentially expanding, he directs his attention towards the facts to prove his statement. To obtain the answer "we need to know the present rate of expansion of the universe and its present average density." After calculating average density by adding up the mass of every star in our galaxy plus dark matter and the present rate of expansion, which he states to be between 5 and 10 percent every thousand million years, Hawking comes to the conclusion that the universe will probably be expanding forever. If it does contract, then it probably wont for another ten thousand years indicating that we are currently in the middle of our universe's life cycle.
  
I always find Stephen Hawking's explanations so satisfying to read because he's able to back up his thinking process with a number of provable calculations from an immense amount of history. What I learned from him was something so incredibly key to the meaning of my research. No matter how much I try and narrow these theories down to predict the existence of the entire universe, I must accept that humanity will never, ever know the truth. The unknown is inescapable, all we can measure, count, hypothesize, and relate to exists here on earth and is limited to the farthest galaxy we can see, which happens to be 13.3 billion light years away. I plan to continue space research throughout my lifetime and someday I might actually come up with a theory of my own to the question of what lies beyond the universe.