 tabsey says: And, they believe, a strange, yet-to-be-detected form of energy called dark energy pervades the Universe, which would explain why the sum of all the visible sources of energy fall way short of what should be out there. Dark energy, goes the thinking, is a result of the Big Bang and is accelerating the Universe's expansion. If so, the Universe is not in a nice, stable zero-vacuum state but simply another "false vacuum" state that may abruptly decay again - and with cataclysmic consequences. The energy shift from the decay would destroy everything in the Universe, "wiping the slate clean," says Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The good news is: the longer the Universe survives, the better the chance that it will mature into a stable state. We are just beyond the crucial switching point, believes Krauss. The bad news is: the quantum effect, a truly weird aspect of physics that says whenever we observe or measure something, we reset its clock. Krauss and colleague James Dent point to measurements of light from supernovae in 1998 that provided the first evidence of dark energy. These measurements may have reset the decay clock of the "false vacuum" back to zero, back before the switching point and to a time when the risk of catastrophic decay was greater than now, say Dent and Krauss. "Incredible as it seems, our... "We may have snatched away the possibility of long-term survival for our Universe and made it more likely it will decay." The report appears in next Saturday's issue of the London-published science weekly. It says the claim is contested by other astrophysicists and adds reassuringly: "The fact that we are still here means this can't have happened yet." We are just being bombarded with doomsday scenarios. Is this a message? ooops forgot to say - great clip, great picture |
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