Surprising Science — October 18, 2010

Universe May End in 3.7 Billion Years

There is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years, according to a new model of the universe put forward by physicists at U.C. Berkeley.

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“The laws of physics only work in a finite universe, but we likely live in an infinite multiverse. Resolving this discrepancy could mean a 50-50 chance time will end in 3.7 billion years. … According to UC Berkeley physicist Raphael Bousso and his team, the statistical cut-off introduced by physicists to get manageable probabilities behaves like an actual structure of the multiverse. So what does that mean? Basically, it means that the universe must end for the laws of physics to have any meaning, and since the statistical cut-off to the size of space-time already allows us to get the right values for our universe, then that cut-off might actually be a very real boundary to the universe, beyond which further expansion is impossible.”

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