Factors Affecting the Lifespan of the Universe

THE EMERGENCE OF THE UNIVERSE OUT OF INFINITY

  Infinity

Infinity is nothingness, and yet it is everything. It has no dimensions, no corporeal essence, no smells. It's the stuff of energy and information. It encompasses all voids. It has no limits, no end, no beginning. It just is. Infinity doesn't depend on the human brain for visualization. It is beyond the human brain's comprehension. It is a "heavy" religious idea, synonymous with God-like characteristics.

It is useful to ask, how did it all begin, but then we realize Infinity didn't begin. Asking the question demonstrates the limitations of our human brains, which require a beginning, a middle, and an end.

It is useless to ask, what is it, because Infinity isn't related to anything we can know. Infinity simply is.

It is useless to ask, what is beyond Infinity, because there is nothing beyond Infinity.

It is useless to ask, what are the coordinates of Infinity, because Infinity is beyond coordinates.

It is useless to ask, whether God controls Infinity, because in actuality, Infinity transcends God.

It is useless to ask, who is in Infinity, because the answer is yes.

It is in Infinity that entropy controls. Entropy is Infinity's currency, its energy, its raw material. A critical accumulation of entropy (maximum entropy) causes things to happen in Infinity.

Infinity is everything we know, or can ever know, or can never know.

Infinity is here, there, everywhere.

Infinity is wherever we dream, wherever we can dream, wherever we can never dream.

Infinity is hot and cold, hotter and colder, hottest and coldest, upper and lower, uppest and lowest, beyond what we imagine, beyond what we can imagine, beyond what we can never imagine.

Infinity is the colors of the rainbow, and colors beyond our ability to see them, beyond what we can never see.  

Entropy  

We are born, live for a few years, and die. We are born, grow through the juvenile phase, stop growing and mature, evolve through adulthood and become old, older, aged, and die. We are born organized, age with increasing disorder, and die in maximum disorder, unable to control or reduce the disorder. We are born with low entropy, mature with increasing entropy, and die with maximum entropy. We are born far from maximum entropy, and by aging we get closer to maximum entropy, and die in the vicinity of maximum entropy. The game of life, then, is to keep our distance from maximum entropy. The driving force for life, then, is the entropy distance from maximum entropy. The requirement for long life is to eat and work properly, to keep a healthy gulf between us and maximum entropy, as deep as possible, for as long as possible.

Death is the ultimate disorder, maximum entropy. Have you recently walked behind very old persons? Observe how stiffly they amble. It's a body out of control. A simple cold, so easily overcome by the young, becomes a killing stress in the old. Athletes cannot maintain their skills forever. Sooner or later reaction time erodes, strength diminishes and energy subsides.  Entropy increases. It's all about entropy.

Achieving maximum entropy is a randomizing process. It means landing in the most probable state, the universal attractor, with the most probable distribution of energy, atoms, molecules, beings, things, worlds, universes. It means being in Infinity.

Entropy characterizes symmetry. More symmetry, higher entropy. More randomization.  Entropy characterizes concepts. An expanding universe proceeds with increasing entropy.

The origins of life, the evolution of life, began as a self-organizing lurch to low entropy.  Setting off a ticking clock of life and existence. When we achieve maximum entropy, it ends.

Infinity. Information, and Entropy 

Infinity is total potential information, like the pages of a book cut up into individual lines, and the lines cut up into individual words, and the words cut up into individual letters, all piled in a heap on the floor. That pile of individual letters on the floor is total potential information.  From this we can theoretically reconstruct the original book of stored information, or other books. There is an almost infinite availability of information in the pile of letters on the floor.  Infinity is like this, only in Infinity there is an infinite availability of information: everything we can know, or never know.

With the pile of individual letters on the floor, suppose a wind arises and stirs this pile of letters. It is theoretically possible that this forcing wind can cause the formation of an organized assemblage of the letters, which may be an intelligible book.

Similarly, in Infinity, there could arise an organizing force which acts like the wind effect on the pile of letters. In Infinity, this self-organizing force might generate from the Infinity of potential information available, a dense nuclear fluid. (Somewhat like the formation of a cloud in the sky.)

The infinite potential information of Infinity could then have yielded a dense nuclear fluid of stored information. Potential information is associated with high entropy while stored information is a low entropy state. Infinity, then, is infinite total potential information at high entropy while the dense nuclear fluid, the precursor to the universe, which formed out of lnfinity, is stored information with low entropy.

The Universe and Beyond

The essence of Infinity is entropy.

Entropy is the ether of Infinity.

The universe is expanding, in gaseous form, much like, in a thermodynamic sense, an ideal gas expands.

Our expanding, gaseous universe is increasing in entropy content, in the same way an ideal gas increases in entropy as its volume increases.

The entropy of our universe will approach its maximum entropy, which is also the ambient entropy level of Infinity.

When the entropy of our universe achieves its maximum, our universe will "dissolve" into Infinity and cease to exist.

Our universe will return to the infinitude of Infinity and disappear.

The end of our universe, if it continues to expand, will mean the return to Infinity, from whence we came.

Daniel Hershey Ph.D.
Professor of Chemical Engineering

Mail Location # 0171

University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0171, USA

e-mail:  Daniel.Hershey@uc.edu

web site:  www.basaltech.com