Thursday, August 28, 2008

Cosmic Wonder I

It came! I'm devouring The Universe, A Biography by John Gribbin! Holy hubaloo!
I'm kind of obsessed with cosmology, so I was kind of anxious to get this in the mail already.

(The P is the density..) A value less than 1 is an open universe--infinite.
Imagine! Just one silly little equation.
And I hate math.


A couple of months ago I watched an episode of History channel's The Universe on the future of the cosmos. It was interesting, and the idea that humanity had a grim future (like the near future isn't grim already), didn't bother me so much. But it still clung to me, like wet clothes, our lonesome end. Basically all that will be left will be several dying dwarfs and black holes. Then those dwarfs will finally die into black holes, and utlimately they'll all evaporate leaving a very cold empty space. Hmm. Lovely. It was a bitter aftertaste.
I got over it but I'm just curious as to why it affected me. Who cares? We'll all be dead by then, right? Poor dwarves. Poor galaxies.
But on the veeery last 4 minutes of the show, the narrator touched upon a hopeful alternative regarding quantum physics and if the universe lives at an infinite time span then there is an infinite number of probabilities that our basic laws of physics might change because a tiny, miniscule particle might go berserk and spark the development of whole new dimension and bwkajsjdhaheifks!!!!!
Exactly.

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