Replacement for Oil or Space Travel

[Dude_Doc]

That's assuming the "crunch" isn't nearly instant.

Exactly.

[GUNWOUNDS]

....hmm omega point... thats pretty interesting... i can say i have never thought of such a scenario.... cool stuff.

[GUNWOUNDS]

That's assuming the "crunch" isn't nearly instant.

The crunch cant be instant.....  we already know that there is matter 15 billion lightyears away..... so that means even if that matter was converted to energy and started racing towards the center of the universe at the speed of light it would take...you guessed it... 15 billion years.  There is no way for all matter to become "one" instantly without defying the speed of light.

[Dude_Doc]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point    <--- There you have it, the Omega Point.

And about the Big Crunch. Apparently, most scientists agreed and concluded that the universe is getting bigger, at a faster pace (i.e. it will expand forever). And also:

More generally, the accelerating expansion is attributed to dark energy, which could be the cosmological constant, or a dynamical field with negative "pressure", leading to an effective cosmological constant that could be time-varying.

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_crunch

[GUNWOUNDS]

Not only do we have the Big Crunch to consider... but it has an opposite as well.. the Big Rip.

[gunner154]

Newtonian Physics or Special Relativity, who will win?

[nemafakei]

Gunner is right. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (let's call it 2TD, please) is a law when considering simple phenomena e.g. gases in the big, slow world. It is basically just some probability mathematics, and, as such, it describes a tendency which should, on avaerage, hold true. That it is a law does not mean that when you complicate the situation it still works the same way. It still works - just generates different results. If you add gravity, for example, *particles* react to that, by moving to the least energy level, as per 2TD. The usual consequences of 2TD (uniform distribution type stuff) does not apply, because gravity alters the *overall* result. Given the universe as a whole, we can see the reason there are pockets of what certain people term 'order' is because of complexities like gravity, and imperfections due to the randomness inherent in 2TD. Because the universe is composed of a vast quantity of seperate particles, each obeying 2TD, there may not seem to be the usual effects of 2TD when viewed at a universe level.

(please excuse rant)