End of the Universe

Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire has postulated that the two prevailing theories for how the universe will end may not be the only possibilities.

Based on early observations that every point in the universe was moving away from every other point in the universe (expansion), theorists surmised that the universe would either go on expanding forever into total entropy, or it would one day reverse itself under the force of gravity and collapse into something roughly the size of nothing, perhaps to begin again. Hence the wild race to measure the mass in the universe to see if there was enough 'there' there to reverse the expansion. In the mean time, string and membrane theorists added their own multidimensional twists, dark matter theories were added to the accounting, and even then it appeared that the forever-expansionists had the upper hand. It was more recently realized that the universe was not only expanding, it was accelerating its expansion. Dark energy entered the equations.

And according to Caldwell, the force of dark energy could actually be growing stronger. This may result in an ever more violent expansion, leading to the disappearance of stars in the sky, galaxies ripped apart, and eventually tearing apart atomic nuclei. According to a paper submitted to the Physical Review by Caldwell and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as the dark energy force continues to grow, its repulsive force becomes strong enough to rip all bound systems apart, starting with galaxy clusters and rapidly moving down the scale to galaxies, stars, planets and atoms. An incredibly violent end, and much sooner than the multi-trillion year entropic death of the constant-rate expansion theories.

Although they can't rule it out, most scientists don't like dark energy. If it exists, it will cause them all kinds of theoretical headaches -- like wormholes. Predicted by the theory of relativity, wormholes are miniscule tunnels through space and time. Under current gravitational theory, they're incredibly unstable, and collapse so quickly that we don't notice them. But dark energy's repulsive gravity would be enough to keep wormholes from collapsing, perhaps even pushing them wide enough to allow faster than light travel. Which leads to all sorts of time travel paradoxes, explored in sci-fi for the past century or so.

On the bright side, if the Big Rip (as it's being called) is in our future, it's still about 22 billion years away. We will all be very, very old.