New evidence suggests that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. It seems that the “time” part of the space-time continuum is literally running out.
Scientists have previously measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force “dark energy”.
However, no one really knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from.
Professor Jose Senovilla and colleagues at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla suggests that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down.
At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, it could easily be measured.
The team’s proposal, which will be published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Prof Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.
The theory bases its idea on a variant of superstring theory, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the “bulk”. In billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether.
“Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever,” Senovilla told New Scientist magazine.
SOURCE: Daily Galaxy
This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.