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novapsycheBlack Crunch jams Universal Cycle
The Universe is not as bouncy as some think, say two physicists. If a Big Crunch follows the Big Bang, it may get stuck that way for ever.
A fluid of black holes would bung up space. There would be nothing to drive another Big Bang, and nowhere else to go. The Universe would be, you might say, stuffed.
Thomas Banks of Rutgers University, New Jersey, and Willy Fischler of the University of Texas at Austin have considered a flat, infinite space in which particles get ever closer and ever denser.
In a space with such features, the smallest kinks in density are amplified into black holes, the densest objects in the Universe. So the whole of space-time would congeal into a very lumpy soup - a black crunch.
"We don't really know what this fluid is made out of," Fischler admits. But he and Banks argue that it may reach a pressure at which it cannot become any denser. At this point, the speed of sound equals the speed of light. Deadlock results.
[Aha! I have found the answer to my inarticulated question of the ultimate relationship between light and sound. Thank you, physics!]
The Universe is not as bouncy as some think, say two physicists. If a Big Crunch follows the Big Bang, it may get stuck that way for ever.
A fluid of black holes would bung up space. There would be nothing to drive another Big Bang, and nowhere else to go. The Universe would be, you might say, stuffed.
Thomas Banks of Rutgers University, New Jersey, and Willy Fischler of the University of Texas at Austin have considered a flat, infinite space in which particles get ever closer and ever denser.
In a space with such features, the smallest kinks in density are amplified into black holes, the densest objects in the Universe. So the whole of space-time would congeal into a very lumpy soup - a black crunch.
"We don't really know what this fluid is made out of," Fischler admits. But he and Banks argue that it may reach a pressure at which it cannot become any denser. At this point, the speed of sound equals the speed of light. Deadlock results.
[Aha! I have found the answer to my inarticulated question of the ultimate relationship between light and sound. Thank you, physics!]