A pre-print from yesterday, submitted by Branislav Vlahovic:
Vlahovic, a Professor at NCCU, discusses the possibility that our Universe is Closed and has already passed its maximum radius, at 15 billion years of age. He explains that the observed red-shift would be observed even in a collapsing space-time and the Universe might be ~24 billion years old, with 6 billion years before re-collapse in an Anti-Big-Bang. The reverse of the Big Bang, typically called a “Big Crunch”, is when all the (negative) gravitational potential energy of the Cosmos will be returned to (positive) heat energy and the contents reduced to “pure-energy”. Not healthy for Intelligent Life like us.
To have a present day Hubble parameter of ~70 km/s/Mpc the Universe would need to have a mass-energy density about 4.4 times the critical density, Omega-Naught. That means a Cosmic census of about 50 billion Galaxies as massive as the Milky-Way and a Universe that’s presently 7.5 billion light-years hyper-radius, with the opposite side some ~11.8 billion light-years away. An interesting consequence of such a claustrophobic cosmos is that we might be seeing double images of quasars – one image being their hyper-luminous form billions of years before their current more sedate Galaxy form. If peculiar velocities (non-cosmological motions) off-set the most recent image from the position of their past form, then we’ll see a Quasar with a high red-shift near a “closer” Galaxy with a lower red-shift. This would answer the puzzle of why some Quasars appear to be springing from regular Galaxies.
This web-site isn’t afraid of exploring impending Cosmic Dooms – a Sudden Singularity a few million years from now has been discussed previously – but this one is interesting. It’s not far enough away for the Cosmos to be reconfigured for a controlled collapse, as per the Omega Point Theory, but it does invite exploring ways to break-out of our Cosmos. One option, also mentioned here, is to learn how to live in black-holes, which – if sufficiently large – can survive a Big-Crunch to spring-forth in the next Big-Bang. Alternatively we might learn how to harness the worm-hole created by the Ring-Singularity of rotating black-holes – in theory this will allow access to other Universes.
Can we survive the transition to other Universes, potentially with totally different laws?