The expansion of the universe may not be speeding up

[Fred Derf Veteran]

To the end of time?

"It can drag or it can race, but what if time stopped altogether?" Zeeya Merali writes in New Scientist magazine. "It now seems that time could disappear from our universe - and we may already have found evidence of its forthcoming demise." A decade ago, astronomers observed that something is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up, but nobody has been able to explain this. Now, Jose Senovilla and colleagues at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, have a radical answer - we are fooled into thinking that the expansion is accelerating, because time itself is slowing down. Their explanation, which will appear in Physical Review D, is based on speculative string theory. If they are correct, things will seem to get faster and faster. "Then everything will get frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever." On a positive note, this won't happen for billions of years and Earth will be long gone by then.

from:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/socialstudies (link changes daily)

[Lant]

This is what I love about space, its either too far away from us (by distance/time) but still very destructive- so we can go on studying it without thinking "Lets build nukes so we can reignite the sun or blow away asteroids" which wouldn't really work anyway.

[guru]

whoa! time is one those quirky things that we are conditioned to think it 's constant. what effect does slowing of time have on space? after all time is another dimension of space right?

found this on google on te topic. has little more detail to it. http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12...tists-time.html

Edited January 15, 2008 by guru

[dacris2000]

Funny thing is, I was randomly thinking about this possibility today.

This idea fits nicely with Terrence McKenna's Timewave Zero idea.