Is the end near?

I think this is good question to follow the last essay on branes. As you know, there have been umpteen predictions of the end of the world. Now, I have to assume that many of these end-of-the-world predictions are talking about the end of the Earth and not the universe because the universe is too large to fail. Or, is that what the United States government tried to say about the largest financial institutions? That's a joke!

Many different scenarios could destroy the Earth. 1. Collision by a large asteroid or planetoid. 2. Eaten by a rogue black hole 3. Hit by a Gamma Ray Burst from a nearby supernova. 4. Bombarded by a comet knocked out of the Oort cloud by a dark star. 5. The core of the Earth stops rotating. 6. Shift of the magnetic poles. 7. Absorbed by the sun when it dies and becomes a red giant. 8. Attack by a hostile alien species. 9. A giant coronal mass ejection from the sun destroys all electrical power. 10. We get stupid and destroy ourselves.

I think that the last destruction is probably the best possibility for the end-time.

None of these has anything to do with the end of the world as depicted or suggested in the Book of Revelations. As far as I am concerned God is not going to destroy us just because we're bad. We're all sinners but God realizes this and will forgive us if we ask Him. In the end, God is merciful, much more merciful than we are. God isn't our enemy; we are our own enemies.

Okay, now that we got that out our system, let's go to the next possibility: the end of the universe.

There is only two ways that the universe could end. One is that it will expand so much that even atoms will tear apart. The other is a strange idea that quantum matter will collapse.
Let's deal with the first idea. This is the ultimate fate of the expansion theory. Some say that the universe will stop expanding, begin to contract, and end up in the big Crunch. Others say that the universe will expand into the Big Freeze. Still others say that it will settle down and just burn out. All of these possibilities will take trillions of years to happen. So, take your pick. I sort of like the idea that the universe will just poop out, so to speak. All of the stars will burn out and only white dwarfs and neutron stars will hang around for the eventual slow death.

All of that is nice, but what I'm about to discuss is downright crazy. It seems that there is a possibility that the universe will just up and disappear with everything in it. Yeah, that's what I thought! You've got to be kidding? Nope, I'm not!

Here is what Wikipedia says about this: In quantum field theory, a false vacuum is a metastable sector of space that appears to be a perturbative vacuum but is unstable due to instantion effects that may tunnel to a lower energy state. This tunneling can be quantum fluctuations or the creation of high-energy particles. Ouch!

Okay, let's try to make sense out of this. A quantum vacuum is a state in which a particle is at its lowest possible energy state. Perturbative vacuum means a complicated quantum vacuum that's explained by simplification mathematically. Instantion is a math procedure that calculates the transition probability for a quantum particle tunneling through a potential barrier, the barrier being that to a lower energy state.

So, what does this mean? Well, it means that our universe may lie within a false vacuum and it could cease to exist if a true false vacuum effect happens. In other words all of the quantum particles that make up the matter in the universe could tunnel to the lowest possible energy state and result in the universe decomposing or loosing all of its structure. This is known as a Vacuum Metastability Event. I'll bet most of you have never heard of this doomsday idea. It has been used in some science fiction works, but I wouldn't put my money on this ever happening. It hasn't happened in over thirteen billion years, so what's the chance?

Thanks for reading.