The idea that time itself could cease to be in billions of years - and everything will grind to a halt - has been set out by Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and Univerisity of Salamanca, Spain.
These scientists propose this theory as an explanation for a known phenomenon: distant stars seem to be moving faster. Since images from distant stars come from further back in time these scientists suggest that in the past time ran more rapidly. So things moved more rapidly.
A decade ago, astronomers noticed that distant supernovae - exploding stars on the very fringes of the universe - seemed to be moving faster than those nearer to the centre, suggesting that they were accelerating as they shot through space.
They think their idea makes more sense than hidden dark matter that is at the center of an alternative explanation for how the distant stars appear in telescopes.
My guess is that we are not in the only universe. We need to find a way travel to other universes so we can escape each universe as time in it slows down or all the matter converts to diffuse energy or the universe otherwise gets used up.
Of course, first we need to development rejuvenation treatments that will reverse aging. Once once we accomplish that goal can we have the luxury of worrying about our slowing down or running down universe.
By Randall Parker at 2007 December 19 10:42 PM Dangers Natural General | TrackBackWell, physics has many counterintuitive ideas. Conventionally, speed is distance moved per unit time. Of course time doesn't move in a physical dimension so they don't mean that. They must mean less duration per unit time - no wait, less time per unit time, no wait, that makes no sense. Whatever they are speculating, I'm not sure translating it into every day English as time slowing down means anything, unless there is some other time outside our universe we can measure to use as a yardstick. If there is, not mentioning it sucks all the content out. My intuition is to blame the reporter, although I may have misunderstood.
How about time stopping? I suppose one can coherently say time will end at a certain time - denoting the endpoint of a timeline. Our mental image of the universe frozen into place may be flawed, it seems to imply some outside time as well.
i dont think that you guys understand that time is fragil i mean time is the epitimy of this demonstration you know the remedy ya feelin me so why you hatin on my anatomy yea its bird like girl im the king which means i'm flyyyy
"My guess is that we are not in the only universe."
Fermi's Paradox...
Given the size and age of the universe, the likelihood that life has arisen many times, the evidence that life evolves intelligence at an exponential rate, and the recent indications that technological advances will allow colonization of distant stars an important question is "Where are the missing aliens?"
Perhaps when a civilization is capable of colonizing another star system it is also capable of leaving this universe. We live in a shabby, backwards universe from which civilizations escape as soon as technology permits. The missing aliens have all moved to the big city.
"there is some other time outside our universe we can measure to use as a yardstick"
Time can also be measured locally based on radioactive decay rates. Imagine that you compare the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun to the time it takes an element to decay and find your "clocks" are diverging.
If distant galaxies seem to have moved more rapidly in the distant past, would time have been slower, not faster, so that they would cover a unit distance in less time?
Could this also explain how 'inflation' happened within what appears to be an implausibly small about of time compared to the speed things happen since then.
Yeah, Fermi's Paradox is a real thorn in statistical certainty that life has to exist elsewhere.
So, perhaps Ascension to other planes of existence (universes) may be the real route to immortality beyond biologic immortality. And it would explain Fermi's Paradox.
As to time slowing I wonder if we are not seeing a f(t) effect in the universes laws. Ie. perhaps G (gravitational constant) is really G(t) where t is the age of the universe. This would definitely impact star velocity etc. Same for the other constants perhaps...
Could this also explain how 'inflation' happened within what appears to be an implausibly small about of time compared to the speed things happen since then.
Alan Greenspan would like to note that it didn't happen on his watch.
More likely materials are all getting smaller or more compact here,so that our measuring sticks are a little smaller than they were some years ago. No cosmic expansion, no need for hyper-mystified physics.
I quote this theory:
Age is relative too
The age of the universe also depends on where you're standing, as Wiltshire discovered in calculations published in the New Journal of Physics.
The universe is 14.7 billion years old, a billion years older than the currently accepted age, from our galactic observation point.
But it is more than 18 billion years old from an average location in a void.
In a third paper, published this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters, Wiltshire and colleagues examine independent observational tests that confirm these ages.
Although the research completely changes our view of the universe, it doesn't alter standard physics.
"Einstein's revolution is still continuing," says Wiltshire. "This is a radically conservative solution to how the universe works."
As stated more fully here:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/12/21/2124258.htm?site=science&topic=latest
This theory would mean the universe is really 18 billion years old and there was no rapid expansion in the early universe
Seems to me that everyone is missing the point including the scientists that it is not time that is slowing down; time is just mans way of putting things in order of sequence or a when factor, time is man made to tell others when something happened. No what we are seeing through telescopes is distant light moving faster the further out it is since at the very beginning of our universe entropy was not a factor and so the speed of light could have been much faster than 186,000 miles per second, the speed of the the atoms vibrations was much faster and age was relative. But over time speed like everything else slows down through entropy, which means our measurements of the universe are way off, it means we cannot count on the measurements of our atomic clocks because they are a product of entropy at the same rate light is and therefore cannot be used to help measure the speed of light, and so the slower the speed becomes the older the universe seems including the earth and all things on it called apparent age. At the beginning when age, speed, and atoms where created we could say they equaled 1, but over time speed of light, and rate of vibrations became slower, making age seem older over time, an inverse reaction to entropy. Since speed of light and rate of vibration of atoms are relative to one another then it would make sense that measuring vibrations of atoms for time would stay at the rate relative to speed of light therefor not giving us the ability to see either speed of light slowing down nor the rate of vibration slowing down since we use a set number of vibrations to equal one second. So back to the point of time, because the speed of the universe is slowing down the rate of time becomes longer as an inverse to rate of speed.