ULTIMATE FATE OF THE UNIVERSE

T.S. PUJITHA
19BSCHH010011

Department of English
IcfaiTech (Deemed to be University
HYDERABAD
April, 2021

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ULTIMATE FATE OF THE UNIVERSE

Report submitted for Professional Communication Course,

DR. SWATHI MULINTI

T.S. PUJITHA

19BSCHH010011

Department of English
IcfaiTech (Deemed to be University)
HYDERABAD
April , 2021

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 ABSTRACT

The Ultimate fate of the Universe is not a recently developed field, humans have been grappling with
the questions of how the world and the universe as we know would end like, seen in countless theologies
and the study of eschatology. This report answers these age old questions scientifically – first discussing
the present and past state of the universe ranging from the singularity to the expansion and then branches
out into various theories of the ways the universe could end in , ranging from initially theorized
explanations for the end of the universe like the Big Crunch , Vacuum Decay to the more recent theories
like the Heat death which considers the ever expanding state of the universe , the Big Rip which takes
into account the possibility of the existence of phantom dark energy and Bounce which encompasses the
quantum gravity theories that gravitational force could turn repulsive. This report also reviews the
existing literature in this domain before diving into the theories themselves separately in turn helping the
viewer to have both a bird’s eye view of the existing research as well as theoretical knowledge about
each of the theories individually. This report after analysis determines the heat death to be the most likely
theory keeping in mind the present observational constraints.

Keywords:

Eschatology , Big Bang theory , Big rip , Big Crunch , Bounce , Vacuum decay , Heat death ,
Cosmological constant , Phantom dark energy , cosmic expansion . dark energy , CMB .

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the people who contributed their precious time and labor to assist me in writing in
a style I have never attempted before – report writing and all the physicists and academic scholars in this
domain without which this report couldn’t have been done.

I thank the faculty of Professional communication for assigning this task to me sans which I would have
never discovered the wonderful research works in this field that have further increased my curiosity and
love for the subject.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………..1

2. LITERATURE REVIEW……………………………………………3

2.1 REVIEW OF EXISTING LITERATURE………………………………………3

2.2 OBSERVATIONS………………………………………………………………...4

2.3 CONCLUSION AND METHODOLOGY………………………………………4

3. PRESENT AND PAST STATE OF THE UNIVERSE………..5

3.1 THE BIG BANG…………………………………………………………………..5

3.2 OBSERVATIONS CONFIRMING THIS THEORY ON THE PAST STATE OF THE

UNIVERSE (CMB)……………………………………………………………………7

4. THE BIG CRUNCH…………………………………………………...9

5. HEAT DEATH……………………………………………………12

5.1 COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT…………………………………………………12

5.2 DARK ENERGY……………………………………………………………………12

5.3 THE PHENOMENA OF HEAT DEATH…………………………………………13

6. BIG RIP…………………………………………………………….15

6.1 EQUATION OF STATE PARAMETER (w)……………………………………...15

6.2 THE PHENOMENON OF BIG RIP……………………………………………….15

6.3 STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN………………………………………………………… 16

7. VACUUM DECAY………………………………………………...17
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7.1 THE PHENOMENON OF VACUUM DECAY…………………………………...18

8. BOUNCE (ALSO KNOWN AS THE BIG BOUNCE……………19

9. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………..20

References…………………………………………………………...21

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TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 1…………………………………………………………….5

Figure 2…………………………………………………………….7

Figure 3…………………………………………………………….8

Figure 4…………………………………………………………….9

Figure 5…………………………………………………………….13

Figure 6…………………………………………………………….15

Figure 7……………………………………………………………17

Figure 8……………………………………………………………18

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 CHAPTER – 1 INTRODUCTION

‘Every happy universe is the same, every unhappy universe is unhappy in its own way’

-Tolstoy

Ever since the beginning of human civilization we have been trying to figure out how exactly the universe
that we live in works like which is evident in the various philosophical literatures and religious theologies
that explore the concepts of anthropological cosmologies and eschatology – perception of how the world
works and the end of everything.

The most common vision obtained when various religious theologies are compared is the redemptive
idea of the end of the world which structuralizes the existence into a black and white world where the
good triumphs the evil and those favored by God are rewarded helping them to contextualize the lessons
of theology and drive them home to even the ordinary human.

Of course, this is not a singular common narrative throughout the world’s various theologies, some of
them say the world’s destiny is cyclic (like the Mayan and Hindu view of the universe) being eternally
repetitive and some of them (which I’m personally inclined to) consist of the nihilist view that nothing
matters at all (and that nothingness ultimately prevails) which again runs the gamut from optimistic
nihilism to absurdism - now a discussion on these theories would lead to questions about existence and
it’s corresponding meaning that Nietzsche , Aristotle , Lao-Tzu and de Beauvoir had grappled with and
quite unsurprisingly very far from the scope of this report.

The fixation with the sky has been considered a significant aspect of human life and history since the
dawn of time. The recurring patterns of celestial body motions allowed people across the world to
develop information systems, and generations of stargazers meticulously monitored their positions.

However, this section is just to throw some light on the impact of cosmology on philosophy and culture
before we dive into the scientific deep end of the pool – modern physical cosmology and its subsequent
subset – the ultimate fate of the universe

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Over the times since humanity's first reflections of its mortality, the philosophical associations of the
question haven't changed, but the means we have to answer it have. Today, the question of the future
and ultimate fate of all reality is a solidly scientific one, with reachable answers.

This was definitely not the norm historically - we still had our doubts whether the universe was in a
steady state, that is it is stable, remains unchanged for eternity without expansion, which was in turn
debunked by the big bang theory which confirmed that the universe had expanded in the past. Recent
theories have further clarified that the universe is still and ever expanding. So, the existence and the
relevant changes and growth of the universe has been eternally existent, it’s just that we as humans are
embarking upon the journey of developing theories and making observations to understand the same,
sifting through this scientific marvel that is the present and past state of our universe helps us to figure
out working of the physical cosmologies at the cutting edge and enables us to view the human civilization
through a new lens and context. From our point of view, we as a species are perched on the border
between a complete conscious awareness of our ultimate insignificance and our competence to reach out
to a scientific understanding that is very far from our mundane (in contrast) lives into the huge void of
the universe to answer the most fundamental yet far from trivial mysteries of the cosmological universe.

In this report we shall explore how a minute change to our present partial knowledge about the
cosmological universe can result in extremely polar theories of how the universe would end.

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 2. LITERATURE REVIEW

The realm of physical cosmology is very huge with its scope encompassing everything from the birth of
the universe till it’s impending doom, from planetary studies of planets like our earth - a speck (the blue
dot) in the observational universe to the massive celestial bodies like galaxies and even abstract concepts
like dark matter and dark energy. Quite understandably the range of literature available in this domain is
exhaustingly extensive, some of them even marry fields together – reports like ‘Classical Marxism and
the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Marx/Engels, the Heat Death of the Universe Hypothesis, and the
Origins of Ecological Economics’ by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Brackett which explains the political
and economical stances of the named with their view on the cosmological theories.

With such a vast field to work with I found it useful to focus the scope of my report to the ultimate fate
of the universe – a subset of physical cosmology and have chosen a few works which are relevant to the
topic of my report.

2.1 REVIEW OF EXISTING LITERATURE

Fisher in his report [1] directly designs a mathematical model that defines the birth, big bang and death
of the universe in one go, he modelled the standard ΛCDM model of the cosmos, extended the time from
negative to positive infinity with the singularity also represented in the model (time should be taken as
t=0). In his report he claims that the universe was not created at the big bang and that it existed even
before that and that the cosmological singularities were ruled out from being the compulsory end to
spacetime. He concludes the report by stating that the universe was created at t=- ∞ and dies at t= ∞ and
that it was created out of nothing and would die to nothing. The model is as follows:

In another research work [2] the end of the universe is taken quite physically and using the concepts of
special relativity and the twin paradox a trip to the end of the universe is visualized. The principle of the
twin paradox allows us to travel to the end of the universe within our lifetime and this paper is quite a
illustrative view into how the voyaging would look like when the twin would accelerate with earth’s
gravity. The time signals and the light coming through the surrounding sky can be measured by the twin
too which are again visualised by a few applications designed in this paper.

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2.2 OBSERVATIONS

As we can see , most of the literature available in this context tries to define the whole timeline in one
go considering only one possible scenario , Fisher does it by assuming the existence of the singularity
before big bang and after big bang to be same and Muller , King and Adis in their report explore the
possibility of the twin paradox to reach the end of the universe. They have extensive scientific work done
with respect to the mathematical models and computational applications in their papers but lack the
theoretical considerations of other possibilities

2.3 CONCLUSION AND METHODOLOGY

The above reports and articles are really uselful to understand the more complex nuances of a certain
theory once the reader has the prerequsite surface knowledge about the said theories.

This report on the other hand will be focused on theoretically exploring all the possible ways to answer
the research question of the report (which can be circled back to its name itself) , each chapter will be an
exploration of each theory and at the ending the most probable theory would be unveiled after analysis

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 3. PRESENT AND PAST STATE OF THE UNIVERSE

Primordial Stelliferous Degenerate Black hole

Dark era
era era era era

Figure -1 Timeline of the Universe

In order to understand the ultimate fate of the universe in the best way possible it is judicial to first
understand the present and past state of the universe and observe to draw patterns on how the universe
has been changing and evolving with time from the beginning till now and subsequently draw parallels
to find out how the future and ultimately the end of the universe might be like. We can almost refer to
this section as the needed dose of scientific prerequisite knowledge to embark upon the journey of
discussing the various theories of the end of the universe.

3.1 THE BIG BANG

Contrary to the popularized notion that the Big Bang was a sort of explosion with unforeseen
conflagration/inferno of matter and light from one point in space that spread throughout, it was more of
an expansion of the cosmic universe from not one but every point which means that every point in the
observable universe that we see today was once at the birth of the Universe so close in proximity that we
could touch it and also parallelly moving away from us expeditiously.

The Big Bang was based on a relatively trivial principle – one that says the universe kept expanding
subsequently meaning the distances between the celestial bodies kept increasing. Reverse engineering
this very concept would mean in the past the distances between these very celestial bodies (galaxies,
stars and such) must have been shorter which means if we kept going back in time, we would reach one
such point when is distance would fall down to zero. This definitely means that the present observable
universe must have been smaller and denser back in the day. Now because the observable universe draws
borders on what we can see for ourselves and what we cannot, there is a strong probability that the
universe is infinite which would lead us to the conclusion that the universe at the beginning was also
infinite but just much denser and hotter than it is now and yes – a smaller infinity than now.

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Understandably it is quite daunting to picturise infinities and their nuances in our brain that can only
comprehend and visualise finite things so we turn to infinities in sciences (like mathematics and physics)
that lie in our present realm of understanding and wont break any of our fundamental thinking processes
and render them useless.

Now applying the same concepts of mathematics to this principle we have concluded that the universe
has been in this extremely hot and dense stage somewhere from 0 to 380,000 year of our universe and
the exact state of it has been made measurable as well.

Table -1 from The Early Universe and the Cosmic Microwave Background: Theory and Observations

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3.2 OBSERVATIONS CONFIRMING THIS THEORY ON THE PAST STATE OF THE
UNIVERSE (CMB)

If one were to go back theoretically to the big bang explosion and it’s resulting expansion of the
universe with scientific calculations it is possible to predict the expected frequency and intensity of the
radiation from the big bang in the present universe. This was fortunately detectable and Jim Peebles a
physicist at Princeton was able to calculate the same with help of Robert Dicke and David Wilkinson
who built the needed experimental equipment to do so. Parallelly two other astronomers in bell labs –
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found a weird humming in their feed of their microwave detector which
at the beginning was assumed to be telescope interference (initially the duo thought this was something
they had to get fixed - this “fault” was assumed to be left unattended to as it didn’t affect its previous
purpose as a commercial communication signals detector little did they know they would be awarded
the Nobel prize for the same later in the year 1978) and this was the first observation of the cosmic
microwave background or the CMB which is one of the most useful aid in understanding the history of
the cosmos.

Later in 1997 Max Tegmark [3] crafted a way in which the CMB experiments could measure the needed
experimental parameters with remarkable precision and accuracy using data analysis so that large data
sets could be reduced by COBE method which was numerically and computationally feasible.

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Figure -2 The most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background acquired by ESA’s
Planck space telescope (from the European Space Agency)

Using this we have successfully been able to confirm the big bang theory by collecting, analysing and
mapping these CMBs we have been able to get a peek into the finest moments of the cosmos, track its
evolution over time and also as stated at the beginning of this chapter – gives hints about how the future
of the cosmos might be.

However, there are parts of the past that the CMB has been unable to map out due to the too much / too
little light at the very beginning (first few hundred thousand years) and after (half million years after)
and these will be briefly pointed out in the below chronological diagram.

Singularity

The Gut Era

Cosmic Inflation

The Quark Era

Big Bang
Nucleosynthesis

The Surface of
the Last
scattering

Cosmic Dawn

The Era of
Galaxies

Figure-3 Various Stages of the Cosmic Expansion

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 4. THE BIG CRUNCH

Now that we know through the previous chapter that the universe is ever expanding, it leads us to the
following questions – Is this expansion of the cosmos a process that would not cease and would carry on
for eternity or will it at some point change its course and shrink back?

We know that we are the centre of our observable universe and we have clearly observed all the celestial
bodies moving away from us , so yes , it is confirmed the universe is indeed expanding (even though
determining this was not easy as it sounds given that the motions of the galaxies in the observable
universe are very slow relative to our human scale – it took us couple of centuries and even till date the
most modern of telescopes don’t detect the motion of the galaxies but determine the same by their colour
by taking into consideration the frequency change that corresponds to the colour shift , shift up being
blueshift and shift down being redshift [4]) This concept is used to determine how a galaxy moves
relative to us and to observe exoplanets and their stars (their gravitational wobble effect).

The principle that a galaxy’s speed (apparent) would be directly proportional to its distance (from us)
was observed by Edward Hubble in 1929 (when he noted that the longer the distance of the celestial
bodies – here galaxies, more was the red shifts and, on an average, the red-shifts for the farther galaxies
were higher. Translating these redshifts to speeds has subsequently drove this point home that the more
distant the galaxy the faster it would be moving away from us). This very proportionality was also
theoretically predicted by Georges Lemaitre from Belgium hence this principle/law is called the the
Hubble – Lemaitre Law with Hubble’s constant being the constant of proportionality

Figure-4 Illustration of the Hubble – Lemaitre Law (taken from PNAS)

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As illustrated above – lower the redshift the younger the celestial body and vice versa.

For example: Redshift 0 – Local, present day cosmos; Redshift 6 – about a Billion years into existence;
Redshift infinity – the very beginning of the universe.

The possibility of the Big crunch to occur depends on whether the initial ‘push’ provided by the
expansion of the universe is enough to counteract the gravity or not. Assuming that the Big crunch does
take place, this is how it would look like.

Right now, the more farther an object is, the faster it moves away. and therefore the higher its redshift
(the Hubble-Lemaître Law). In a collapse-fated universe, this will continue right up until the expansion
stops. But since the speed of light stops us from seeing the whole universe at once, we will still observe
distant objects retreating long after they jolt turning around in reality. Even though in some sense the
most distant objects are approaching us more swiftly than nearby ones, at first we see the opposite
behaviour. Every galaxy nearby. out to just beyond our cosmic neighbourhood, will appear to slowly
come toward us. As with the Andromeda Galaxy, its light will be blue shifted. Just outside those, there
will be a distance at which everything seems be static, while more distant things are redshifted, seeming
to recede. Over time, the blue shifted neighbouring galaxies reach out to us faster and faster, and the
standstill radius moves out . We all stop thinking about what's happening to far away objects as the haste
of adjacent galaxies into our area of space becomes impossible, or at least highly imprudent, to disregard.
We might be somewhat (if ingenuously) comforted by the fact that we will have had some experience
with such things by then: in this situation, the first signs of collapse come long after our collision with
Andromeda. Even with the most cynical estimates, any Big Crunch event can only happen many billions
of years in the future-our cosmos has been around for 13.8 billion years and with respect to the likelihood
of future collapse, it is certainly no further than middle-aged.

As we now discoursed, the Andromeda-Milky Way collision is improbable to affect the Solar System
directly. But the commencement of universal collapse is one more story completely. At first, it might
look fairly alike: galaxies colliding and repositioning, new stars and black holes kindling, some stellar
systems thrown off into space. Over time, though, it will become progressively and petrifyingly clear
that something very unalike is going on.

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As galaxies get nearer together and unite more frequently, galaxies across the sky will spurt with the
blue light of new stars, and massive jets of particles and radiation will tear through the intergalactic gas.
New planets could be born with those new stars, and perchance some will have time to grow life, though
the frightening frequency of supernovae in this chaotic, collapsing universe might expose the new planets
clean. The ferocity of the gravitational interactions amongst galaxies and between central supermassive
black holes will surge, hurling stars out of their own galaxies to end up trapped in the gravity of others.
But even at this point, collisions of individual stars will be infrequent, and they will keep on so until very
late in the game. The demolition of stars comes about through another progression, one that also
warrants, with great conclusiveness, the annihilation of any planetary life that might still be enduring on.

This is because the radiation formed by stars and black holes is much hotter than the ending stages of
the Big Bang, and when the universe collapses all over again, all that energy gets condensed too. So
instead of being an agreeably symmetric process of expansion and cooling trailed by coalescence and
heating, the collapse is truly much more devastating.

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 5. HEAT DEATH

There's no plan, there's no hand on the rein

As Mack explained, there will be darkness again

- Hozier (from ‘No Plan’)

Just like we had a set of questions that led us to the theory of Big Crunch, we shall try to emulate the
same process for the theory of heat death too, the question here being how fast is the expansion of the
cosmological universe slowing down? Measuring this very quantity called the deceleration parameter
will let us determine which path the universe will take (a higher number would result in the Big crunch
and a lower one would suggest the expansion is slowing and it would be eternal).

5.1 COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT

It had been determined scientifically that instead of slowing down the universe in in fact undergoing an
accelerating expansion. So, to explain this phenomena scientists introduced the concept of the
cosmological constant which warrants the existence of a huge universal cosmic energy field that would
male the empty void of space itself have an inbuilt outward force in all directions that would make the
cosmos expand forever. It’s been coined by Einstein (although he gravely assumed in his first theory that
the universe was not accelerating, he assumed the space to be static and introduced the concept of the
cosmological constant to explain why the celestial bodies wouldn’t give in to the gravitational forces of
each other and collapse which of course couldn’t have been farther from the truth and this was fixed in
the next theory – the General Theory of Relativity) .

5.2 DARK ENERGY

Because we don't know if it's indeed a cosmological constant or perhaps not, we call any theorized
phenomenon that could make the universe accelerate in its expansion dark energy. To throw some more
jargon into the melt pot, a developing (i.e., nonconstant) dark energy is often called quintessence [5],
after the "fifth element,".

A plus point about the quintessence hypothesis is that it could possibly lead us to a theory with some
parallels to the cosmic inflation at the beginning of time. We know that whatever it was that triggered
cosmic inflation ultimately turned off, so perhaps an alike accelerated-expansion-causing field could
have turned on since then, causing the acceleration we see today.

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(One disadvantage of the quintessence hypothesis is that it's theoretically possible for a dark energy that
changes over time to violently destroy the universe. For example. if whatever is accelerating the
expansion now turns around; it could root the universe to stop and collapse, bringing us back to a Big
Crunch after all. Luckily, that looks very doubtful, though we can't completely rule it out.)

In any case, grounded on observations at the moment, it really looks most of the like dark energy is a
cosmological constant; an invariable property of spacetime that has only of late (in the last few billion
years) come to control the evolution of the universe. At early times, when the cosmos was more
condensed, there just was no enough space for the cosmological constant to do so.

Figure 5 – The percentage of dark energy (sourced from apa.org)

5.3 THE PHENOMENA OF HEAT DEATH

According to the second law of thermodynamics (entropy associated with it) the phenomenon of heat
death would take place with surprisingly no heat in the process (heat here is the energy rather).
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Distant galaxies being pulled out of the Hubble radius by cosmic expansion will become misplaced to
us. Galaxies whose detached past we can see now will gradually fade into darkness like olden decaying
photographs. In our own cosmic region, after the Milky Way and Andromeda amalgamate, our tiny Local
Group of galaxies will become more and more secluded, enclosed by darkness and the dying primordial
light. All across the universe, invisible to us, other groups and clusters of galaxies will fuse to form giant
elliptical clumps of stars, burning brightly in the initial ferocity of the collisions but fading ultimately to
embers, whose glow will never reach yonder their own pool of expanding, evacuating space.

Sooner or later, each new, dying supergalaxy will be absolutely alone. Nothing will again approach to
bring in a renewed supply of gas to fuel new stars. The stars already shining will burn out, exploding as
supernovae or, more often, shedding off outer layers to become slow-burning relies, progressively
cooling for billions or trillions of years. Black holes will grow, for a time. Some will swamp galaxies'
worth of dead stellar remnants; some will stall in their growth, with no new matter forthcoming close
enough to be engulfed.

The quantum effects on a black hole's horizon are the basis for it to glow, faintly. The radiance carries
away energy-or, equivalently, mass-and the black hole shrinks. This process goes leisurely at first, and
then faster and brighter and hotter until a last explosion and an evaporation at the end. Even the
supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies, with masses millions or billions of times that of the
Sun, are fated to in the end fade and disappear. Ordinary matter the one that makes up stars and planets
and gas and dust-suffers the same fate.

This slow fading of the universe into darkness, isolation, emptiness and decay as described above is
called the heat death.

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 6. BIG RIP

6.1 EQUATION OF STATE PARAMETER (w)

In order to define a cosmological non constant we need this equation of state parameter (w) which is
nothing but the pressure divided by energy density of dark energy. If the value of w is not -1 but less
than that Cadwell coined it the phantom dark energy which is illustrated below.

Figure 6 – Graphical representation of Dark energy

6.2 THE PHENOMENON OF BIG RIP

The first things to go are the colossal, most weakly bound. Massive clusters of galaxies, in which groups
of hundreds or thousands of galaxies flow idly around each other in long entangled paths, begin to find
that those trails are growing lengthier. The extensive spaces navigated by the galaxies over millions or
billions of years widen even more, instigating the galaxies at the fringes to slowly drift away into the
increasing cosmic voids. Soon, even the evenest galaxy clusters find themselves inescapably dissipated,
their constituent galaxies no longer feeling any central pull.

From a vantage point inside our own galaxy, the forfeiture of the clusters should be the first threatening
sign that the Big Rip is in progress. But the speed of light postpones this clue until we are already feeling
the effects much closer to home. As our local cluster, Virgo, begins to dispel, its formerly languid motion
away from the Milky Way activates to pick up speed. This effect is elusive, though.

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As the Big Rip approaches, we start to observe that the stars on the edges of the galaxy are not coming
around in their predictable orbits, but instead wandering away. Soon after, our night sky begins to dim,
as the great Milky Way band across the sky fades. The galaxy is fading.

From this point, the demolition picks up its stride. We begin to find that the orbits of the planets are not
what they should be, but are in its place slowly spiraling outward. Just months before the end, after we've
lost the outer planets to the boundless and increasing blackness, the Earth drifts away from the Sun, and
the Moon from the Earth.

At this point, any edifice still intact is draining under the push of the ever-expanding space within it. The
Earth's atmosphere thins, from the top. Tectonic motions inside the Earth retort chaotically to the
everchanging gravitational forces. With only hours to go, the Earth cannot hold together: our planet
explodes.

Past that point, there is no likelihood of watching the annihilation, but it carries on nevertheless. Nuclei
themselves, the ultra-dense matter in the centers of atoms, are the succeeding to go. The impossibly
dense cores of black holes are embowelled. And at the concluding instant, the fabric of space itself is
tattered apart.

6.3 STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

In her book [6] Katie Mack refers to this as the ladder to heaven (and I refer to it as the stairway to
heaven in my report as I won’t owe royalties), this refers to the strategy coined as the distance ladder
used to measure large distances in the cosmos also called the cosmic distance ladder. To summarize the
concept for the space bodies in our solar system we take the help of lasers, radars and the relations
between orbital times and their relative distances to measure distances, parallax for the stars which are
near and cepheid variable stars for distances in the Milky way and nearby galaxies. Sometimes type a
supernovae are also used for objects that are even farther

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Figure 7 Cosmic distance ladder (from apa.org)

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 7. VACUUM DECAY

This theory is based on the fact that the Higgs field although now in it’s potential has provided us with
a stable universe, the Higgs vacuum is metastable. This means that the vacuum decay could occur at any
moment in time right now and our days in this false vacuum are definitely numbered how long or short
that span might be, and once this happens it will be like pulling the plug on the universe, it would be a
painless quick death that would absolutely destroy everything in the blink of an eye.

7.1 THE PHENOMENON OF VACUUM DECAY

Assuming that we are in the true vacuum bubble in this scenario , the boundaries of the vacuum bubbles
would undergo expansion in all the directions in space very quickly – in the speed of light , the bubble
wall would destroy everything in it’s path and after the matter will be put through it , the fundamental
rules and laws we have in physics and chemistry for matter would be rendered useless as they would be
seriously altered.

Figure 8 Vacuum decay for a potential with a metastable vacuum at the origin [7]

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 8. BOUNCE (ALSO KNOWN AS THE BIG BOUNCE)

This chapter shall briefly explain the theory of the big bounce, one of the more pragmatic approaches
out here in the realm of the cosmological universe and the daunting theories predicting it’s death.

This is based of the concept extracted from quantum gravity theories that conclude that the Big crunch
(refer to chapter 4) can be avoided, here the universe instead of collapsing into a singular point it would
instead turn into a small – finite sized space with understandably high density (the Planck density). For
the sake of visualization, imagine the mass of the milky way compressed into the size of a quark, that
would be the order of the Planck density our universe would be then found in.

Then subsequently the gravitational force would become repulsive instead of attractive and the universe
would quite literally ‘bounce’ into a fit of rapid expansion, maybe another daughter of the big bang
theory might take place and everything might start anew in our universe.

Now this would fall under the second category of the possible theories proposed by various theologies
in the human civilizations across times discussed in the introduction (refer to chapter 1) where the
universe is assumed to be eternally cyclic although not scientific, the observation of the resemblance is
quite uncanny.

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 9. CONCLUSION

Taking the current experimental evidence into consideration many of the researchers and physicists agree
that heat death is the most probable theory for the ultimate fate of the universe, the universe keeps
expanding and the entropy will keep on increasing and the chaos will even out until a point when the
universe dies a slow thermodynamic heat death which is backed up by the second law of
thermodynamics.

In conclusion we can tie the ends together with where we started our exploration of this topic with the
impact of cosmology on philosophy and culture, we have seen that there are many ways the universe
could die the most probable being the heat death. We don’t know much about how the weather tomorrow
would be like exactly but we can talk and predict the death of the universe and I think that is quite
beautiful.

References

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[1] A. E. Fischer, "A simple all-time model for the birth, big bang,and death of the universe," International
Journal of Modern Physics D, 2017.

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