According to recent pop science news,
Maybe it happens tomorrow. Maybe in a billion years. Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball. New calculations from physicists at the University of Southern Denmark now confirm this prediction — and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.
Sooner or later a radical shift in the forces of the universe will cause every little particle in it to become extremely heavy. Everything — every grain of sand on Earth, every planet in the solar system and every galaxy — will become millions of billions times heavier than it is now, and this will have disastrous consequences: The new weight will squeeze all material into a small, super hot and super heavy ball, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.
And every day brings us one day closer. They used to teach something like that in Sunday school, probably still do, with religious and moral overtones thrown in.
“Many theories and calculations predict such a phase transition- but there have been some uncertainties in the previous calculations. Now we have performed more precise calculations, and we see two things: Yes, the universe will probably collapse , and: A collapse is even more likely than the old calculations predicted,” says Jens Frederik Colding Krog, PhD student at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP ³ — Origins) at University of Southern Denmark and co-author of an article on the subject in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
How can it be even more certain than certain? But just when we were sorting that out, we learned,
Although the new calculations predict that a collapse is now more likely than ever before, it is actually also possible, that it will not happen at all. It is a prerequisite for the phase change that the universe consists of the elementary particles that we know today, including the Higgs particle. If the universe contains undiscovered particles, the whole basis for the prediction of phase change disappears.
“Then the collapse will be canceled,” says Jens Frederik Colding Krog.
That’s it! I’m sticking with the Sunday School version. They would never just cancel the apocalypse exactly when the dragon was supposed to appear and raise some cain.
This sort of “science news” prompts a question I’ve been asking often lately: What makes this stuff science? Don’t tell me that you don’t regard it as science. I don’t either. But that is how it is classed. Why? The answer is materialism, technically called methodological naturalism. Usually described as “science must ignore the supernatural,” it actually means that science must act as though intelligence derives from matter and the products of intelligence come about accidentally. Any explanation of any phenomenon, no matter how bizarre, is acceptable if the alternative is that matter derives from or is shaped by intelligence.
For example, the End-of-All-Things need only be an apocalypse that owes nothing to any kind of intelligence. Otherwise it need not make any sense.
In the same way, the multiverse appears all the more believable to the extent that it doesn’t make any sense at all.
– O’Leary for News