Creative Retirement - Friday Roundtable
The UNIVERSE
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Video was of the opening sequence of Cosmos telling the scope of the universe and how certain men have tried to uncover its secret. Significantly Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) an Italian Dominican friar whose cosmological theories went even further than the then-novel Copernican model, proposing that the stars were just distant suns and that the universe is infinite. The Inquisition found him guilty and he was burned at the stake in Rome. After his death he gained considerable fame as a martyr for science.
Discussion was of science and religion, compatible or not? We are all products of the way we were raised in answering the question of What, How and Why? The What? is that the universe exists. Science tries to identify How? Religion answers Why?
Looking 100,000 billion years into future of our the expanding universe, existing stars burn out, stars cease to be created, and the universe goes dark. Over a much longer time scale in the eras following this, the galaxy evaporates as the stellar remnants comprising it escape into space, and black holes evaporate via Hawking radiation. In some grand unified theories, proton decay after at least 1-with-34-zeros years will convert the remaining interstellar gas and stellar remnants into a dilute gas of leptons (positrons and electrons, ie. elemental hydrogen and anti-hydrogen) and photons (energy). Some positrons and electrons will then recombine into photons. In this case, the universe has reached a high-entropy state consisting of a bath of particles and low-energy radiation.
Heat death (the death of heat/energy) is a possible final state of the universe, estimated at about 1-with-a-hundred-zeros years, in which it has "run down" to a state of no thermodynamic free energy to sustain motion. In physical terms, it has reached maximum entropy, in which, over even more billions of years, all condence to a single point of mass that ultimately goes "bang", starting all over again.
To investigate this theory, look for topics of Big Freeze and of Heat Death which add detail to the earlier Big Crunch idea, which is encompased in an unfathonable , when?
URL : http://www.manorweb.com/creative/2014/universe.html
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