How certain are we of the Universe’s ‘Big Freeze’ fate?
Dark energy tells us what the Universe is doing right now, and it’s disconcerting. But its fate has some incredible possibilities.
“Even if I stumble on to the absolute truth of any aspect of the universe, I will not realise my luck and instead will spend my life trying to find flaws in this understanding — such is the role of a scientist.” -Brian Schmidt
Ever since the expanding Universe was first discovered by Hubble himself, one of the greatest existential questions of all — what will the fate of the Universe be? — suddenly leaped from the realm of poets, philosophers and theologians into the realm of science. Rather than an unknown mystery for human mental gymnastics, it became a question that the acquisition of data and a knowledge of what existed and was observable could answer. The discovery that the Universe was full of galaxies, that it was expanding and that the expansion rate could be measured, both today and in the past, meant that we could use our best scientific theories to accurately predict how the Universe would behave in the future. And for decades, we weren’t sure what the answer would be.
