When Albert Einstein was starting out on his cosmological quest 100 years ago, the universe was apparently a pretty simple and static place. Common wisdom had it that all creation consisted of an island of stars and nebulae known as the Milky Way surrounded by infinite darkness.
We like to think we’re smarter than that now. We know space is sprinkled from now to forever with galaxies rushing away from one another under the impetus of the Big Bang.
Bask in your knowledge while you can. Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.
If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.
Unable to see any galaxies flying away, those astronomers will not know the universe is expanding and will think instead that they are back in the static island universe of Einstein. As the authors, who are physicists, write in a paper to be published in The Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, “observers in our ”˜island universe’ will be fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe.”
It is hard to count all the ways in which this is sad. Forget the implied mortality of our species and everything it has or has not accomplished. If you are of a certain science fiction age, like me, you might have grown up with a vague notion of the evolution of the universe as a form of growing self-awareness: the universe coming to know itself, getting smarter and smarter, culminating in some grand understanding, commanding the power to engineer galaxies and redesign local spacetime.
Instead, we have the prospect of a million separate Sisyphean efforts with one species after another pushing the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down and be forgotten.
Worse, it makes you wonder just how smug we should feel about our own knowledge.
“There may be fundamentally important things that determine the universe that we can’t see,” Dr. Krauss said in an interview.
“There may be fundamentally important things that determine the universe that we can’t see,†Dr. Krauss said in an interview.
Do tell.
Good of Kendall to post this. Few contemporary Christian theologians think about these matters but they should.
100 billion years from now, the kinetic motions of the Local Group will still be unexplainable by the currently known rules for grafitational attraction. The true nature of the universe, which consists of mainly unseen matter, will still be there to confound the wisdom of humanity.
I loved Einstein’s quote about God!
#3–if the human species is still around. The average lifetime of a species has been estimated at about 10 million years. It likely that the hominid species that may be around to contemplate the tiny universe of their sight will be an evolved descendent of ours.
George Ellis, the cosmologist quoted in the article, has written with philosophical theologian Nancey Murphy, _On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, cosmology and Ethics_(1996), which you might find of interest, Bro. Michael.
My web essay “Big Bang and the Universe Story,” covers the whole range of current cosmology, including dark matter and the expansion, accessible at http://community.berea.edu/scienceandfaith/essay04.asp.
“and I saw a new Heaven, and a new Earth”…
John, the Revelator..
Most interesting in demonstrating the limits of empiricism by empiricism.
Well, in less than 100 billion years, our sun will expand to become a red giant and incinerate the earth (talk about global warming!)
I like how the author assumes no increase in technology to “see” the retreating galaxies or to detect “dark matter” or to make more exact measurements of intersellar objects.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
This is of course largely a silly article, reaching its height of comedy in describing with sober certitude the kinds of “papers” which “astronomers” will be writing in 100 billion years. As though there is any way to predict what our descendents (if any exist, or the universe still exists) would be like even in such a comparatively tiny amount as 10,000 years from now, much less 100 billion. After all, try to imagine a man in 7000 BC explaining what life in 3000 A.D. would be like. (Apparently the one constant is university professors — like the poor, we will apparently always have them with us. Apparently they will also have forgotten all previous knowledge.)
If anyone wants to read some truly delightful astrophysical riffs on the future, he should tak a look at Calvino’s COSMICOMICS. Calvino’s short story “The Light Years” has everything in it that this article has and much more; and at least knows that it is funny. It also is a poignant reflection on the problem of guilt, sin, and our human attempts at self-justification.
100 billion years from now we will still be “listening” to the explain its “prophetic” view that God is doing a new thing, and waiting for Lambeth 100 billion and 10 for a definitive statement about human sexuality and the future of the AC.
…listening to TEC explain its….
Sorry
This article is pretty lame. Dr. Lee Smolin’s book “The Trouble With Physics” is much more interesting and includes a fascinating analysis of group think among string theory proponents.
“The Universe, Expanding Beyond All Understanding”, which explains why I keep having to punch extra holes in my belt.
“If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years…”
…the Chicago Cubs still wouldn’t have won a World Series.
Odd, the remark that we do not know wht we do not know. 2500 years ago,Confucius remarked that knowing what we know and knowing that we do not know what we do not know, that is the beginning of wisdom. Not bad for a beginner, is it? Perhaps if he were at Princeton with Elaine Pagels? WOuld that help, do you suppose? LM
What is empirical about this speculation?
!6: Please explain “God of the Gaps” to me.
It was because of cosmology that I changed my mind about the existence of a Deity and was then forced to conclude that intelligent design, rather than being a cant phrase of the weak-minded right,
was an inescapable conclusion. Simply, if we agree that the Big Bang was the explosion de luxe, then we must agree that there was a set of laws in place the made an explosion possible. Clearly, the law must precede the event, unless the event is perfect chaos. But we must conclude that the explosion was perfectly orderly because order cannot grow out of disorder unless there is a preceding ordering principle.
We can affirm little about God that will stand examination, but we can say something about intelligence for about that we know something. We know, for example, that intelligence always seeks pattern, order, or what is best called form. We know that the weaker the intelligence, the less able it is to grasp form. We know that the present universe, insofar as we can know it, is utterly orderly and we know that even matters which appear random, such as the swirling of running water over a stone, are at last orderly. Intelligence makes pattern precisely as it seeks pattern. The universe, therefore, appears to respond to our understanding of intelligence. Is this understanding applicable to God’s knowledge? Only in the sense that what we know, both of intelligence and of the universe we can grasp, appear to be children from the same egg, if I may put it that way.
Look where you will, all, all obey the same law, and the cause and effect that moves the sun and all the other stars, moves us. Even our minds, so often appearing disorderly and chaotic to us, are at last moved by the same principles. Does this mean that our will is not free? In some ways it is not, as we well know, and in many ways it is, for we have the power to choose what we will, not what we must.
And yet, what we wish to choose is always rightly called form, so that when a painter makes loud and raucous painting (whether good or bad as art) we know that we are looking at the form of a feeling.Even there, in all that noise, pattern rises and we grasp a form. And where we see art that lacks pattern, lacks form, we dismiss it as art and look elsewhere. Such is intelligence, and the universe, once again, responds to our understanding.
And will we understand the universe in its entirety, given enough time? Probably not. Empiricism may be insufficient; this is one answer. But it more correct to see the problem thus, that only the container can understand the thing contained. The reverse can never be true. LM
Matt: Welcome back! Your 19 is nicely reasoned, but I have two points.
The first is a curiosity (about which I would welcome the thoughts of others). Since our beloved host and elves have not deigned to provide us with a mechanism for correcting our own posts, should it be necessary to add a second one to correct something which any reasonable person would have understood anyway?
My second point is to question your last sentence. While I agree that we can make little inference concerning the nature of a Creator using Science and must indeed rely on Revelation for that, yet I would say that Science can and should tell us something about the importance of a creator of our material Universe. Whatever science may claim to the contrary, nobody ever saw the Big Bang. We may have seen evidence that lends support to the fact that it happened, but it is still an inference based on our reasoning. That being the case, science cannot tell me with any certainty what did or did not happen before it. An intelligent person might reasonably conclude that it is much more likely that something caused it to happen that it just happened for no reason at all.
In fact Larry’s points are not just metaphysical thought. He draws on well established Scientific theories when he claims that “only the container can understand the thing contained. The reverse can never be true”. That there was a creator seems to me to be irrefutable. Whether it was intelligent (and still exists in a living sense) is, I agree, in the magisterium of Theology and not Science.
And yet, Larry makes one other point (which was also made on another thread) and which should perhaps be considered. In a physical universe which appears to be subject to the laws of increasing entropy, order does yet appear to exist. And there is some evidence that it takes some form of intelligence to overcome entropy, so perhaps it is not unreasonable to conclude the universe does bear the evidence of intelligent design (if not an Intelligent Designer).
I do not dispute your point. But I was not making a scientific point – take “scientific” here literally. I was explaining the pathway my mind took when I concluded that Deity was real, present, and that it was intelligent. Of course, the study of intelligence is only marginally scientific, if the standard is the logically falsifiable. Nevertheless, what we know of intelligence by long experience is probably sound, and I emphasize probably, for in speaking of both the physical and the virtual world, we are largely speaking of probability.Did the Big Bang occur and do we know its nature? The answer appears to be yes, probably to the first part and we probably don’t know to the second. What preceded the Big Bang? All answers are of the lowest probability. Does intelligence always seek pattern, form? A very high probability. Is the universe form,pattern? Show me where it is not, and I will change my argument about this proposition’s very high probability.
Science can tell us much that the careful thinker who is not a scientist can use must profitably. But science cannot be “creative” – mind that word which I use hesitantly – because of its necessity to use necessary sequence. Science never makes. The making, the creating is hidden in the heart’s reasons which the mind cannot know. I submit to you therefore that the Pascalian declaration in the matter of the heart is as legitimately knowledge as in the mind’s certainties. And therefore, when I say “intelligent design” you must understand tht I give “intelligence” its broad definition – that is, ALL of Pascal – so that the word “design” can carry its full force of both form (the result) and forming (the cause). Of the one who left his footprints in the new -fallen snow, I can know nothing, but the footprints speak. Larry
I find it ironic that those who believe in chaos seek and find order.