But superconductivity provides a philosophical way out. *The note that the whole "heat death" is asymptotic means it never happens.
The age of the universe is actually quite young, if my impression of the numbers is correct, it is a long ways off.
Dark matter and dark energy are a huge hole in our understanding. *All we know is there is something there that we can measure only indirectly. *And, curiously, dark energy seems to be created out of nothingness as space is created out of nothingness.
I remain a bit unconvinced that the whole expanding universe is actually correct. *My lack of conviction may be ignorance or, in fact, well founded. *I can't say for sure because, I am, unfortunately, really a bit ignorant.
Still, the basis for the changing size of the universe is that as we look back into time, across the great expanse of space, we use certain objects of standard brightness. *We also know the wavelength of certain emmisions, like hydrogen atoms. *We also know that light disperses with distance.
As we know that the speed of light is constant, then we can determine the distance to these objects based on their brightness. As we can determine the initial frequency of the emited light, we can determine that it has been red shifted. *This is accounted for by the objects velocity, away from us, being greater at greater distances. *And, if I am to understand this correctly, refined measurements have determined that the rate of change of the velocity (acceleration) varies with distance.
In the balance of all this, the interpretation is that space has expanded at different rates since the beginning of the initial acceleration.
Still, the entire thing is grounded in how we measure distance amd frequency of an electromagnetic wave, a huge mass of photons, as they pass by.
If we place two detectors, at some distance D, and then adjust that distance until they both peak at the exact same time, the distance between them is the wavelength. *We use some standard clock, a repeating cycle of something, that ticks of seconds, and the number of ticks between peaks of the wave is its frequency. *We would use, fundamentally, another electromagnetic wave like that emited from our local hydrogen atom transition.
This whole process of comparing things in nature to each other then yields the result that, no matter what we do, the speed of light is invarient regardless of how fast we are moving relative to it.*
c=dx/dt.
Here is the the thing. *dx/dt is constant. *But, fundamentally, dt is, in fact, a measurement of distance. *We are setting up a devise that is dependent upon a standard wave of "known" distance and time between peaks.
So all you have, really, in standard units, is that dx/dt=1. When we are "flying" our contraption, for measuring an electromagnetic wave, along the longitudinal direction of the wave, all we are really saying is that we cannot fundamentally distinguish between time and length. *Time and length are changing simultaneously to get dx/dt to work out. *In our measurement, as the change in x goes, so goes the change in time. *
If I'm to understand it correctly, Einstein had a paradigm shift that changed our concept of time and space, based on Maxwell's proof that that the speed of electromagnetic waves in free space is constant. *Measurements of light matched this speed and we correctly concluded, along with the body of other scientific evidence, that light is an electromagnetic wave. Einstien leveraged this to the invariance of light in all reference frames, proved special relativity, and moved on to general relativity.
Others took the special relativity results, along with the constant speed of light, and used it to work out the expanding universe. *There is, though, some additional stuff in the hypothesis which is more than just doppler shifting. Remember, not only are far away galaxies doppler shifted due to difference in speed, but actual space itself is being created between them. Not only is the distance changing because of the velocity, but also because there is actually more distance being created.
But there is this additional issue that, in fact, the presence of mass and energy also affects the shift in wavelength. *
dx/dt is constant, wavelength is shifted, dx, this allows time to be held constant, as wavelength is the reciprocal of frequency, so frequency changes without changing time, except for as accounted by relativity and new space. *In order to get everything to balance out appropriately, additional dark energy and dark matter is inferred. *
Now we have time, space, energy, and mass all this variability in frequency and wavelength to adjust dx with respect to dt in order to hold dx/dt constant.
It may very well be that, in fact, when all is said and done, that the current rate of expansion and acceleration of the universe are not what they are interpreted to be. *Rather, when this whole dark matter and energy thing gets sorted out, another paradigm shift occurs and it turns out that light is being stretched and compressed in some other fashion as it traverses time and space.
The last paradigm shift was the result of a patent clerk, a quiet genius, working in some nondescript but technical position, and studying physics at some nondescript state university. *He was, in fact, unaware of much of the most recent developments in physics simply because the library was not open when his time was free. He was independently building his own theories of physics with no one to tell him differently. *Had he been more embedded with the main stream, working out the details of string theory, under the watchful eye of his graduate adviser, he may have never devised relativity. *In fact, Einstein resubmitted his thesis a couple of times because his graduate adviser kept rejecting them. Of his four landmark papers of 1905, his thesis was the least controversial of his papers, the brownian motion paper.
It may take another such, marginally attached, but sufficiently immersed individual. *Perhaps next time, it will be some guy, or gall, studying at a nondescript university, sequestered all night in some lone observatory.
