The Importance of a Baby Universe

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I feel like that's kind of cold comfort because we're still dead. There was this old paper by Freeman Dyson where he claimed that you could live forever in an eternal universe. And I think it kind of gave him some sense of hope, and now it's like, well, no. It doesn't work for a linearly expanding universe. Yeah. If you can bubble off a completely separate universe, a baby universe, then those could continue to be created toward the future. Maybe we're even the baby of somebody else's universe.

Cosmologists are always talking excitedly about the Big Bang and all the cool stuff that happened in the 14 billion years between then and now. But what about the future? We don't know for sure, but we know enough about the laws of physics to sketch out several plausible scenarios for what the future of our universe will hold. Katie Mack is a cosmologist who is writing a book about the end of the universe. We talk about the possibilities of a Big Crunch (and potential Big Bounce), a gentle cooling off where the universe gradually grows silent, and of course the prospect of a dramatic phase transition, otherwise known as the "bubble of quantum death." Which would make a great name for a band, I think we can all agree.

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Katherine (Katie) Mack received her Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. She is currently an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, where her research centers on theoretical cosmology, including dark matter and black holes. She is also a member of NCSU’s Leadership in Public Science Cluster. Her upcoming book, The End of Everything, will be published in 2020.

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