Re: The Big Crunch may be a possibility

On 27-Mar-25 01:53, jillery wrote:

On Wed, 26 Mar 2025 09:31:10 -0400, Kestrel Clayton
<richZIG.e.clayZIGton@gmail.com> wrote:
 

Here's a source I found useful, as a first-pass primer:
>
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2025/03/19/new-desi-results-strengthen-hints-that-dark-energy-may-evolve/
>
It's still pop science, but at least it's pop science written by actual
scientists. The page is careful to state "the preference for an evolving
dark energy has not risen to '5 sigma,' the gold standard in physics
that represents the threshold for a discovery." Also it does not claim
that cosmic expansion is slowing; only that the *rate of increase* in
expansion due to dark energy may have slowed in the past (and is
presumably still slowing). In other words, the car isn't slowing down,
but dark energy is very slowly easing up on the throttle.

  IIUC you distinguish between "rate of increase" aka acceleration and
plain vanilla increase.  If dark energy is constant, then rate of
increase would be proportional to the distance between objects aka
Hubble's Law.  If distant objects accelerate more slowly than
expected, then some other factor besides dark energy or gravity is
involved (gravity weakens over distance).
 I have speculated in the past that dark energy might weaken over time
due to some quantum effect, which suggests that spacetime isn't doomed
to expand forever, and instead, some googolplexian years from now,
collapse cyclically back onto itself.

Could well be. We're far off the map from what I know — when I was a physics student, the phrase "dark energy" hadn't even been coined yet.
--
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Kestrel Clayton
"Every normal woman must be tempted, at times, to stoke the fire,
host the black mass, and begin eating hearts." — Rose Bailey