Author: Doctor TOC (---.rcn.com)
Date: 04-14-2003 11:04
First off, great column. Really nice to see modern physics being applied to RPGs. Looking forward to more.
The current work being done on Dark Energy actually has a few more possibilities. For example, far from destroying the "Big Crunch" theory, Dark Energy might actually support it. The paper "Supergravity, Dark Energy and the Fate of the Universe", by Renata Kallosh, Andrei Linde, Sergey Prokushkin and Marina Shmakova of Standford, postulates a point were the "anti-gravitic" force of Dark Energy reverses, resulting in a "Big Crunch" type contraction of the universe. Linde et al suggest that such a contraction could occur as soon as 15 billion years in the future, meaning we're about a quarter through the life cycle of the universe already.
Paul Steinhart of Princeton and Neil Tork of Cambridge go a step further and believe that Dark Energy might provide a mechanism for the old idea of the "cyclic" universe, in which the universe undergoes a continual cycle of big bangs followed by big crunches, repeatedly expanding then contracting before expanding again.
Another possibility has been put forward by Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in which Dark Energy acclerates universal expansion to the point where it literally rips everything in the universe apart, right down to atomic nuclei. Caldwell suggests such an event taking place about 20 billion years from now. To add to the RPG uses of such an event, perhaps the Dark Energy is the result of a "Very Slow Bomb", a weapon designed to kill the universe it is activated in over the course of billions of years. Who would activate such a weapon, and who exists on a timescale where it becomes practical? That's for the PCs to discover, in a sort of cosmological whodunnit where the victim isn't going to die for a long, long time...
Doctor TOC
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