The Qur'an & The Physics of Judgment Day

When I was a teenager I used to have a reoccuring nightmare where I had discovered that the universe was contracting and I knew it was the beginning of the end. This was in the 70's. I have not thought about it for a long time, but this thread reminded me of it. I wish the powers that be would write their religious revelations so that the person who is reading it would understand it in their own language. One cannot be sure what an ancient document says once it has been translated several times. For a person to have a true understanding of the Quoran or the Bible they would have to read it in the language that it was written in.

That is a great article though and a site that is now bookmarked.

As I mentioned, current data indicates that not only will the current universal expansion continue, it is accelerating.

Why do we think that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating?
The evidence for an accelerating expansion comes from observations of the brightness of distant supernovae. We observe the redshift of a supernova which tells us by what the factor the Universe has expanded since the supernova exploded. This factor is (1+z), where z is the redshift. But in order to determine the expected brightness of the supernova, we need to know its distance now. If the expansion of the Universe is accelerating due to a cosmological constant, then the expansion was slower in the past, and thus the time required to expand by a given factor is longer, and the distance NOW is larger. But if the expansion is decelerating, it was faster in the past and the distance NOW is smaller. Thus for an accelerating expansion the supernovae at high redshifts will appear to be fainter than they would for a decelerating expansion because their current distances are larger. Note that these distances are all proportional to the age of the Universe [or 1/Ho], but this dependence cancels out when the brightness of a nearby supernova at z close to 0.1 is compared to a distant supernova with z close to 1

www.astro.ucla.edu...



This means that the end of the universe will come with what is called the "cold death", IE, as the universe expands infinitely, it will continue to cool to the point of zero kelvin, at which point there will be no further motion at the atomic level across the entire universe.

Essentially, the universe will only get more tenuous and die freezing.

This concept is quite different from what is commonly referred to as 'cold death.' 'Cold death' is when the universe continues to expand forever. Because of this expansion, the universe continues to cool down. Eventually, the universe will be too cold to support any life, it will end in a whimper. The opposite of 'cold death,' as you can see, is NOT 'heat death,' but actually the 'big crunch.' The 'big crunch' occurs when the universe has enough matter density to contract back on itself, eventually shrinking to a point. This shrinking will cause the temperature to rise, resulting in a very hot end of the universe.

www.physlink.com...

Originally posted by dragonrider
The "big crunch" is indeed a valid theory, however, latest data suggests that there is not enough "dark matter" in the universe to trigger the "rubber band effect" and go back into a universal contraction.

Not necessarily, could it be possible that Blackholes represent "universal contracion"? Thus makeing it possible to have both "universal extraction"? We as a race have only just brushed the location known as outerspace. And have learned we have perhaps the largest blackhole in our very own galaxy. So while everything hurries up to get away, its kept in check.

Not exactly.

Black holes are essentially local events (some act on a somewhat large scale, but basically still local events). The universe as a whole is rapidly expanding and cooling.

We actually have very little evidence for the existence of black holes, and only a handfull have been actually identified as suspect black holes (none have actually been confirmed to be such).

Of course observing a black hole is rather difficult, because it is impossible to directly observe one. You have to interpret its presence by gravitational effects on objects around it, and also from massive X Ray emissions from the accretion disk around it (caused by tidal forces pulling all matter in the accretion disk apart and it colliding at near light speed).

Also, as the link I posted previously indicated, the expansion of the universe has been observed to be accelerating. If black holes, or any other mechanism existed to regulate this expansion, it would be slowing to some degree or other. That isnt happening.

I'll just ditto DragonRider (I can't believe we're agreeing, either!) The effect of the black holes might help hold individual galaxies together, but they're too weak to do more than that over galactic distances.

(I can't believe we're agreeing, either!) Posted by Byrd

The world must really be about to end...