Re: PHYSICS: Time to collapse of universe?

Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Thu, 2 Jan 1997 12:10:22 +0100 (MET)


On Thu, 2 Jan 1997, Mitchell Porter wrote:

> I recall Dyson saying in an interview (in OMNI?) that the ultimate
> constituents of an open universe with proton decay might be positron-electron
> pairs orbiting common centres of gravity. In that case, the basic
> processing operations might consist of breaking apart such pairs (through
> gravitational perturbation?) or causing them to form (through
> gravitational attraction).

This sounds reasonable, but quite unstable; the positronium will radiate
away its angular momentum and slowly spiral into anihilation in this
scenario, unless it could in some way be refreshed. Hmm, speaking of
refreshing things, maybe one could still use baryons (after all, they are
so much more versatile) if they were created out of spare leptons and
energy. Most of the universe would run on a very low-density baryon
hardware, which occasionally would have one small section collapse into a
black hole. It would then be replaced with fresh baryons, and the energy
of the black hole extracted. to create baryons again. Since black hole
formation would be far slower than black hole evaporation, this would
probably work (with some net energy losses).

> Vic Stenger (http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/vjs.html) once said on
> the omega-point-theory list that he couldn't see why this wouldn't be
> possible. There might be something about this in Hawking and Ellis's
> _Large-scale structure of space-time_.

I'll take a look at it. I have been trying to see what happens if you
patch together two Friedman universes with positive and negative
curvatures, but it doesn't seem to work (that may be due to my
regrettable lack of skills in practical GR).

Making black holes doesn't work for this, since the eventual singularity
is of the wrong kind. Irritating. But maybe one could create some odd
perturbation to get the right kind of "Bianchi IX-like" singularity to
get an OP.

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Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
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