Heat death of the universe

This article is about the entropic exhaustion of the universe. For other uses, see Heat Death of the Universe (disambiguation).

For Heat related illness or death, see Hyperthermia.

"Big Freeze" redirects here. For other uses, see Big Freeze (disambiguation).

The heat death of the universe (also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze) is a hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe, which suggests the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and will, therefore, be unable to sustain processes that increase entropy. Heat death does not imply any particular absolute temperature; it only requires that temperature differences or other processes may no longer be exploited to perform work. In the language of physics, this is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium. The Heat Death theory has become the leading theory in the modern age with the fewest unpredictable factors.

If the topology of the universe is open or flat, or if dark energy is a positive cosmological constant (both of which are consistent with current data), the universe will continue expanding forever, and a heat death is expected to occur, with the universe cooling to approach equilibrium at a very low temperature after a very long time period.

The hypothesis of heat death stems from the ideas of Lord Kelvin, who in the 1850s took the theory of heat as mechanical energy loss in nature (as embodied in the first two laws of thermodynamics) and extrapolated it to larger processes on a universal scale. This also allowed Kelvin to formulate the heat death paradox, which disproves an infinitely old universe.

Concept

Our black-hole universe undergoes a 13.8-billion-year-long self-accelerating spaghettification (implosion, impansion, in-formation) towards its central wormhole, whose suction becomes ever stronger:

"With implosions a molecular ordering takes places in a radial → axial direction and therefore a suctional effect takes place in the axis, where the most vigorous decrease in heat and pressure occurs."
—Schauberger, Viktor. Explosion and Implosion (Expansion and Impansion) from a Scientific and Biological Viewpoint Implosion Magazine, no. 113, 16 January 1956, p. 63

Heat is mass:

"If internal energy is mass, then heat is mass."
—Engineering and Contracting Vol. 65, 1926, p. 113

The more heat the wormhole swallows, the more cold and heat-hungry it becomes:

"Self-gravitating systems have negative specific heats, thus if heat is allowed to flow between two of them, the hotter one loses heat and gets yet hotter while the colder gains heat and gets yet colder. Evolution is thus away from equilibrium."
—Lynden-Bell, D.; Wood, Roger. The Gravo-thermal Catastrophe in Isothermal Spheres 1967

Having become ultrathin and embedded in the most molecularly ordered structure—the brain of the most intuitive man—the wormhole will swallow the remaining half of the universe's initial heat:

"The latest theory on how the universe will end involves everything being swallowed by a giant wormhole—a scenario dubbed the ‘Big Trip’."
—Phantom energy may fuel universe-eating wormhole New Scientist, 2005 11 11

William Thomson adopted in 1854 the view that the universe is dominated by gravitation, so that initially, the universe's potential energy was maximal (i.e., zero), while the universe's actual energy was minimal (i.e., zero):

Thomson had adopted in 1854 the view that "the potential energy of gravitation may be in reality the ultimate created antecedent of all the motion, heat, and light at present in the universe". In other words, it was "the original form of all the energy in the universe". Such a speculation conformed to his theology of nature in which God had created energy ex nihilo in the beginning by His absolute power and had sustained its quantity by His ordained power.

—Smith, Crosbie; Wise, M. Norton. Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin CUP, 1989, p. 533

The universe's potential energy is rest mass, which, in its turn, is zero-temperature heat:

The quantity factor of potential energy is space or volume which however is equivalent to mass.

—Mathews, Albert P. The Nature of Matter, Gravitation, and Light W. Wood and Company, 1927, p. 106

If internal energy is mass, then heat is mass.

—Engineering and Contracting Vol. 65, 1926, p. 113

Our universe is dominated by gravity and because of that has a negative heat capacity:

Gravity rules. The moon orbiting Earth, matter falling into black holes, and the overall structure of the universe are dominated by gravity.

—Seeds, Michael A.; Backman, Dana. Foundations of Astronomy Cengage Learning, 2010, p. 75

Extract heat from the solar system—and the temperature of the system is raised. In brief, the heat capacity ⁠ΔQ/ΔT⁠ of the solar system is negative. This startling conclusion applies not only to the solar system but to all systems maintained by gravitation: the thermal capacity of all self-gravitating systems is negative. It can easily be shown that, as long as self-gravitating systems are present, a stable thermal equilibrium cannot exist because the existence of systems with negative thermal capacity is thermodynamically destabilizing.

—Ben-Menahem, Ari. Historical Encyclopedia of Natural and Mathematical Sciences Springer, 2009, p. 4932

Therefore by losing heat, our black-hole universe becomes more positive-temperatured:

The universe is getting hotter, a new study has found. The study probed the thermal history of the universe over the last 10 billion years. It found that the mean temperature of gas across the universe has increased more than 10 times over that time period and reached about 2 million degrees Kelvin today—approximately 4 million degrees Fahrenheit.

—Arenschield, Laura. The universe is getting hot, hot, hot, a new study suggests ScienceDaily, 2020 11 10

Conversely, by sucking the black-hole universe's heat, its central wormhole becomes more negative‑temperatured:

The conclusion is, then, that negative mass can only exist at negative temperature, and must be adiabatically separate from positive mass.

—Pollard, D.; Dunning-Davies, J. A consideration of the possibility of negative mass Il Nuovo Cimento B (1971–96), July 1995, vol. 110, no. 7, pp. 857–64

Thus, our black-hole universe goes down its central drainhole with an exponential acceleration, undergoing a gravothermal catastrophe:

Self-gravitating systems have negative specific heats, thus if heat is allowed to flow between two of them, the hotter one loses heat and gets yet hotter while the colder gains heat and gets yet colder. Evolution is thus away from equilibrium.

—Lynden-Bell, D.; Wood, Roger. The Gravo-thermal Catastrophe in Isothermal Spheres and the Onset of Red-giant Structure for Stellar Systems Received 1967 August 1, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (1968) 138, 495–525

By doing so, the universe undergoes an exponentially accelerating resurrection from its initial state of heat death, noninformedness, entropy (no temperature gradients) towards its final state of heat life, informedness, negentropy (steepest temperature gradients). Therefore the universe is most alive and informed about itself just before the remaining half of its initial heat becomes swallowed by the central wormhole:

The latest theory on how the universe will end involves everything being swallowed by a giant wormhole—a scenario dubbed the ‘Big Trip’.

—Swarup, Amarendra. Phantom energy may fuel universe-eating wormhole New Scientist, 2005 11 11

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovered exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

—Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Fit the Seventh. Broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 24 December 1978

File:H. K. Wimmer's rendition of a black hole.png

The first-ever picture of a black hole, painted for Physics Today (January 1971) under the supervision of Remo Ruffini.

An external observer would see our black-hole universe as a shrinking sphere that is being sucked into its central wormhole. Consequently, the sphere spins ever faster and has an ever deeper funnel-shaped vortex at its north pole:

To us, embedded in the ever-more-stretched funnel's bottom, where molecular ordering is greatest and thus life is possible, distances to remote galaxies seem to increase over time.

The concept of heat death in history

Based on the principle of the world's heat death, Oswald Spengler's model of history postulates that any culture is a supraorganism that begins its life cycle as a "low-temperature gas" of loosely interconnected vital-heat-rich rural individuals pulled together by self-gravitation, which condenses their vital heat to ever higher temperatures and thus causes its radiative loss, so that the individuals are forced to use their dwindling vital heat ever more synergetically by undergoing a series of phase transitions towards a civilization, which is a "high-temperature crystal" of densely interconnected vital‑heat‑deficient urban individuals.

Discussions of entropy and the world's final fate in a heat death can be found in many places outside the scientific literature. It played an important role in the German cultural pessimist Oswald Spengler's book, Der Untergang des Abenlandes, an enormously influential work which predicted the decline of Western civilization.

—Kragh, Helge. Matter and Spirit in the Universe: Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology World Scientific, 2004, p. 94

What the myth of Götterdämmerung signified of old, the irreligious form of it, the theory of Entropy, signifies to-day—world's end as completion of an inwardly necessary evolution.

—Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West Vol. I, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, pp. 423–24

The role of a heat-rich black hole is played by the countryside, while the role of the heat-sucking central wormhole is played by the city:

Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

—Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, p. 102

Oswald Spengler viewed the city as a nest of ever‑more‑hungry vampires, sucking vital heat from the country.

Timeframe

The universe's remaining life is the universe's remaining potential energy:

The future energy contemplated by us as probable, is, in fact, our potential energy.

—Tyndall on Heat Blackwood's Magazine, December 1863, p. 691

The universe's potential or psychic energy is qualitative (synergetic, unpredictable by scientific methods):

Jung, however, understands by psychic energy not a shadowy abstraction but an objective principle as real as the physical energy itself. For, "there are indications that psychic processes stand in some sort of energy relation to the physiological substrate. It is well known that energy ${=}{\tfrac {mv^{2}}{2}}$, where ${m}$ stands for mass and ${v}$ for velocity. But how to apply this formula to the psychic energy which apparently has no mass and probably no velocity?" Jung tries to solve this problem by defining the difference by converting it into sameness. In his view, while the physical energy is quantitative, the psychic energy is qualitative.

—Singh, Satya Prakash. Sri Aurobindo and Jung Madhucchandas Publications, 1986, p. 121

It is thus obvious that according to the ordinary conception we can assert no more than that the potential energy belongs to the system, that this conception therefore involves no localization of the energy in the system, and consequently no erroneous localization.

—The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science Vol. XXXVI, Taylor & Francis, 1893, p. 24

We must conclude that the potential energy belongs not to one body, but to the whole system of interacting bodies involved! This is evident in the fact that the potential energy gained is available to any one or to all of these interacting bodies.

—Cassidy, David C.; Holton, Gerald; Rutherford, F. James. Understanding Physics Springer, 2002, p. 239

I have at last fixed upon the word synergy as the term best adapted to express its twofold character of energy and mutuality, or the systematic and organic working together of the antithetical forces of nature. <…> Synergy is a synthesis of work, or synthetic work, and this is what is everywhere taking place. <…>

It further seems probable that vortex motion is based on this principle, or is the same principle, and it is through this that some expect the problem of the nature of gravitation to find its solution.

—Ward, Lester Frank. Pure Sociology. A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society 1903, p. 171

The universe's potential/psychic energy is a radial gradient of potential/psychic energy. The nonlocality of potential/psychic energy implies that the universe has only one potential/psychic field, existing as a dendritic wormhole converging towards a single centre:

In any case, the peculiarities of the quantum mechanics of highly entangled particle pairs seem much less mysterious in this picture, once one swallows the very large pill of the odd metric, essentially a one-dimensional universal wormhole.

—Coyne, D. G. A Scenario for Strong Gravity without Extra Dimensions 2006, p. 31

The vacuum is really an expression of the continuous or noncountable nature of mass‑energy ("mass", as the source of gravity). Continuity, as we will see, automatically makes mass-energy unidimensional and unipolar. <...> It is also responsible for quantum-mechanical nonlocality and the instantaneous transmission of the static gravitational force—though not the acceleration-dependent inertial or GTR component, or the inertial reaction force that we actually measure in systems with localised mass (and with which gravity is often confused). Significantly, gravitational potential energy is often represented as negative.

—Rowlands, Peter. The Nilpotent Dirac Equation and its Applications in Particle Physics 2003, p. 10

It is also known that the universe's negative potential energy is the universe's information:

The negative energy of the gravitational field is what allows negative entropy, equivalent to information, to grow, making the Universe a more complicated and interesting place.

—Gribbin, John. In Search of the Multiverse Penguin, 2009, p. 131

Szilard's explanation was accepted by the physics community, and information was accepted as a scientific concept, defined by its statistical‑mechanical properties as a kind of negative energy that introduced order into a system.

—Aspray, William. The Origins of John von Neumann's Theory of Automata In "Proceedings of the Summer Research Institute on the legacy of John von Neumann held at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, May 29–June 4, 1988". American Mathematical Society, 1990, p. 291

Therefore the centre of the universe's potential field is the most intuitive man of the planet Earth, whose informational progress is the most reliable indicator of the exhaustion of the universe's potential energy:

File:Information is negative potential energy, so the universe's atoms are falling towards forming the most informed configuration like marbles rolling towards the bottom of a bowl.gif

Attractor

Yet the more persistently we try to avoid man in our theories, the more tightly drawn become the circles we describe around him, as though we were caught up in his vortex. <...>

We are not dealing with an immutably fixed focus but with a vortex which grows deeper as it sucks up the fluid at the heart of which it was born. The ego only persists by becoming ever more itself, in the measure in which it makes everything else itself.

—Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de. The Phenomenon of Man Harper Perennial, 1955, pp. 281, 172

Opposing views

Max Planck wrote that the phrase "entropy of the universe" has no meaning because it admits of no accurate definition. In 2008, Walter Grandy wrote: "It is rather presumptuous to speak of the entropy of a universe about which we still understand so little, and we wonder how one might define thermodynamic entropy for a universe and its major constituents that have never been in equilibrium in their entire existence." According to Tisza: "If an isolated system is not in equilibrium, we cannot associate an entropy with it." Buchdahl writes of "the entirely unjustifiable assumption that the universe can be treated as a closed thermodynamic system". According to Gallavotti: "... there is no universally accepted notion of entropy for systems out of equilibrium, even when in a stationary state." Discussing the question of entropy for non-equilibrium states in general, Lieb and Yngvason express their opinion as follows: "Despite the fact that most physicists believe in such a nonequilibrium entropy, it has so far proved impossible to define it in a clearly satisfactory way." In Landsberg's opinion: "The third misconception is that thermodynamics, and in particular, the concept of entropy, can without further enquiry be applied to the whole universe. ... These questions have a certain fascination, but the answers are speculations."

A 2010 analysis of entropy states, "The entropy of a general gravitational field is still not known", and "gravitational entropy is difficult to quantify." The analysis considers several possible assumptions that would be needed for estimates and suggests that the observable universe has more entropy than previously thought. This is because the analysis concludes that supermassive black holes are the largest contributor. Lee Smolin goes further: "It has long been known that gravity is important for keeping the universe out of thermal equilibrium. Gravitationally bound systems have negative specific heat—that is, the velocities of their components increase when energy is removed. ... Such a system does not evolve toward a homogeneous equilibrium state. Instead it becomes increasingly structured and heterogeneous as it fragments into subsystems." This point of view is also supported by the fact of a recent experimental discovery of a stable non-equilibrium steady state in a relatively simple closed system. It should be expected that an isolated system fragmented into subsystems does not necessarily come to thermodynamic equilibrium and remain in non-equilibrium steady state. Entropy will be transmitted from one subsystem to another, but its production will be zero, which does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics.

Popular culture

In Isaac Asimov's 1956 short story The Last Question, humans repeatedly wonder how can the heat death of the universe be avoided.

In the 1995 computer game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, based on the Harlan Ellison short story of the same name, it is stated that AM, the malevolent supercomputer, will survive the heat death of the universe and continue torturing its immortal victims to eternity.

In the 2011 anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the antagonist Kyubey reveals he is a member of an alien race who has been creating magical girls for millennia in order to harvest their energy to combat entropy and stave off the heat death of the universe.

In the last act of Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, the player encounters an alien race known as the Ea who have lost all hope in the future and any desire to live further, all because they have learned of the eventual heat death of the universe and see everything else as pointless due to its probable inevitability.

See also

• Arrow of time
• Big Bang
• Big Bounce
• Big Crunch
• Big Rip
• Chronology of the universe
• Cyclic model
• Entropy (arrow of time)
• Fluctuation theorem
• Graphical timeline from Big Bang to Heat Death
• Heat death paradox
• The Last Question
• Timeline of the far future
• Orders of magnitude (time)
• Thermodynamic temperature