Can Science Survive the Death of the Universe?

Humanity has gotten wealthier, healthier, freer, more peaceful and smarter. We know more than our ancestors did, and we’re learning more all the time. These trends, any reasonable person must acknowledge, constitute progress. The question is, how long can the quest for knowledge continue?

If you are speculating about our long-term cosmic future, you must confront the second law of thermodynamics, science’s most depressing insight into nature. It claims that closed systems, which don’t get infusions of energy from an outside source, tend over time to become more disordered.

The second law implies that the universe will inevitably lapse into heat death, in which everything, everywhere, is exactly the same temperature, near absolute zero, and nothing ever happens. John Horgan, the author of the End of Science, argues that particle physics, cosmology, neuroscience and other fields are bumping into fundamental limits.

The discovery in the late 1990s that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate implies that we are approaching heat death, also known as the big chill, at an increasing rate. As the universe keeps ballooning, stars, including our own sun, and even black holes will eventually radiate away all their energy, and the universe will go dark, forever. Cosmologists have calculated that we will reach this cosmic dead end—in which time itself ceases, as physics writer George Musser points out—in one googol years. A googol is 10100.

Disturbed by the prospect of cosmic extinction, scientists have imagined ways in which we can avoid it. A pioneer in such speculation was Freeman Dyson. In a 1979 paper, “Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe,” Dyson asserts that the universe has a point, a purpose, as long as it harbors intelligence. Eons from now, he suggests, our descendants may occupy other star systems and galaxies, perhaps after shedding their flesh-and-blood bodies and becoming clouds of sentient gas. Dyson presents mathematical arguments that these beings can, through shrewd conservation of energy, maintain the resources needed to survive, contemplate and communicate in an eternally expanding cosmos.

Roger Penrose, who won a Nobel Prize last year, has carried on Dyson’s project of imagining our cosmic future. Penrose invented a new model of the universe, conformal cyclic cosmology. The theory holds that our increasingly vacuous cosmos will eventually produce a singularity, a rupture in spacetime similar to the big bang. In this way, an expanding universe can generate new universes, one after the other.

According to Penrose, each new universe can pass on its accumulated information to the next in the form of the cosmic microwave radiation left over from its big bang. That means the knowledge we accumulate may be passed on to inhabitants of future universes.

David Deutsch opens his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity by asking: “Must progress come to an end—either in catastrophe or in some sort of completion—or is it unbounded?” Deutsch’s book is one long argument for unboundedness.

He suggests that “knowledge-creation” can “continue forever.” Deutsch dislikes all human futures concerned with finality. He once said, “the world will never be perfected, even when everything we think of as problematic today has been eliminated. We shall always be at the beginning of infinity. Never satisfied.”

The prophesies of Dyson, Penrose and Deutsch contradict the claim that science is finite. But they share convictions, too, namely that human will never entirely solve the riddle of reality, and that knowledge-seeking, more than any other endeavor, makes human existence meaningful.

[A] points out that time stands still when the end of the universe comes.

[B] believes that knowledge-creation is endless and the future of mankind is infinite.

[C] says that the body of human descendants will be made up of clouds of sentient gas.

[D] argues that the exploration of some scientific subjects will reach their fundamental limits.

[E] assumes that the universe is infinite and that human knowledge will be passed on to future inhabitants.

[F] remarks that closed systems tend over time to become more disordered.

[G] holds that the universe has a point when it possesses human intelligence.

Roger Penrose