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Mankind 'shortening the universe's
life'
Roger Highfield
London
Telegraph
Friday November 23, 2007
Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the
Earth: our activities may be shortening the life of the universe
too.
The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists
investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory,
the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists
have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of
subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe,
since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang.
But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers
and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests
that we change things simply by looking at them and theorists
have puzzled over the implications for years.
They often illustrate their concerns about what the theory means
with boggling mind experiments, notably Schrodinger's cat in which,
thanks to a fancy experimental set up, the moggy is both alive
and dead until someone decides to look, when it either carries
on living, or dies. That is, by one interpetation (by another,
the universe splits into two, one with a live cat and one with
a dead one.)
(Article continues below)
New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists
claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe
closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti
gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion
of the cosmos.
The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James
Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by
making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos
to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end.
"Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy
may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe," Prof
Krauss tells New Scientist.
Full
article here.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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