David Tinapple

The universe will end with a bang — and not a whimper — reports The New York Post, citing a new study by Harvard Researchers predicting exactly when (and how) the universe will end. But Gizmodo’s science writer takes issue with the media coverage:

That paper predicts that the universe’s lifetime would be between 10**88 and 10**241 years, but probably probably around 10**139 years. “I think people don’t have a sense as to how big these numbers are,” study author and physicist Matthew Schwartz from Harvard told Gizmodo. “It’s such an enormous out of time. But they think 10**139 years is 139.” The universe is around 10 billion, or 10**10 years old. 10**139 is a completely unfathomable number of years… It’s more than the amount of time it would take to count every atom in the universe, if you had to wait from the Big Bang until now in between counting each atom. That number of years eludes any rational attempt to understand it (Which is probably why it sounds so close — our heads just short circuit and say, threat!!!). It is forever.

via Slashdot https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/04/07/1856202/did-harvard-scientists-predict-the-end-of-the-universe?