I find this quote fascinating:
"What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium; de Sitter space, as we call it—there will be no sense of time anymore. There will nothing you can do to determine whether time is going one way or the other. Time will then have un-emerged again. It will be like the poem, This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."
I am not a cosmologist, but if all of space reached thermal equilibrium, if space does have any mass (perhaps a tiny amount from the dark energy it contains?), and the entire universe is essentially one uniform mass, wouldn't that mass then collapse upon itself, in a kind of big bounce?
If that is true, then time never really ends, it just "slows down" a lot (not much can happen, and not terribly quickly) until the next sparkup, whereupon time speeds up dramatically (inflationary theory).
"What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium; de Sitter space, as we call it—there will be no sense of time anymore. There will nothing you can do to determine whether time is going one way or the other. Time will then have un-emerged again. It will be like the poem, This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."
I am not a cosmologist, but if all of space reached thermal equilibrium, if space does have any mass (perhaps a tiny amount from the dark energy it contains?), and the entire universe is essentially one uniform mass, wouldn't that mass then collapse upon itself, in a kind of big bounce?
If that is true, then time never really ends, it just "slows down" a lot (not much can happen, and not terribly quickly) until the next sparkup, whereupon time speeds up dramatically (inflationary theory).