Cosmological Constant & The End of the Universe - Sixty Symbols

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1. I feel like I'm missing something very basic here... apart from the fact that this is all just speculation... If we believe the rate of the expansion of the universe is continuing to accelerate and that potentially the driving force behind this is dark energy/vacuum energy, then how can vacuum energy be considered a cosmological constant? Shouldn't it be increasing with time?
2. Before watching this video I thought that I was starting to understand some bits of quantum mechanics.
   
   This field is definitely focked op
3. I prefer that to a heat death, or a big rip.
4. wow!
   I'm a subscriber.
5. Terence McKenna arrived at this same conclusion in 1971 by extracting the math behind the I Ching and constructing a calendrical fractal model of time at all levels. This guy in the interview talks about time being the journey from one singularity to the next--that we are essentially heading towards the non existence of space and time. This is why Terence named his Model of time Time Wave Zero: because, just based off the mathematics that the I Ching is rooted in, time will eventually end completely. And that was his most extravagant postulation as to what would happen. More often, he was more conservative with his hypotheses. Very weird. The field of physics has become a seriously weird place.. there is no room for stubborn linear thinking anymore.
6. I'm wondering, how does this relate to the Poincare recurrence time? Are they one and the same?
7. what propels a photon? why does it move at all?
8. Huh, that's interesting, I didn't know a big crunch was even still allowed in physics, I thought it was kinda settled that that doesn't work because the expansion of the universe is accelerating (Pretty sure I heard or read that somewhere, not just assuming it). But I guess it could stop accelerating as well and eventually collapse
9. I just want to ask, you said that the universe isn't getting any bigger, which tells me that the edge of the universe exists, is there a way to explain its existence?
10. Nice Video !! Hope to see more of these types.
11. matter is in the field of space. matter IS the weak spot. all the weak spots are taking the path of least resistance to a less dense area. basically space is trying to equalize itself back to zero. its kinda like a bubble under water. the weak air bubble gets pushed to the less dense surface. i could use a perferated piece of paper to show what i mean if i could draw on here. our earth would be a hole, and the moon would be a hole (both repelling because they have the same charge. because the repulsion is stronger than the space surrounding both objects they get pushed apart and space spills in behind the moon accelerating the process.) just scale it up to get bigger pictures :)
12. That's a nice dog drawing on that whiteboard.
13. from a mathematical point of view, the cosmological constant has always bothered me. It's like those trick problems where you end up showing that 1=0. You can't just add in a -1 on the left to make it work out. You have to find the error and fix it. Shoehorning a constant into the equation may produce useable results now, but somewhere down the line it will cause problems.
14. so fascinated that i'm getting a tattoo of lambda 
15. He assumes that particles have mass. what kind of mass? according to string theory, for example, the mass comes from vibration energy. Is that still considered mass?
16. Big crunch is the most aesthetic end to the Universe...
17. What if only the edges of the universe are being squeezed because unlike mass (kinetic/potential) energy like gravity or some other form of energy is biased like electromotive forces.   Lets say at the center of the universe there is a field of gravity from all surrounding mass but much of it is canceling out each other so even though there are incredible amounts of energy there its really is not doing much- maybe that would allow for the expansion of space time regardless of how much energy is there- and maybe the particles popping in and out are like a interference pattern created by gravity waves passing through a locale at different vectors and these fluctuations materialize as result of potential differences of energy levels.  The outskirts of the universe should (i think) have most of its gravity moving perpendicular to a rough approximation center of the universe as all of space time was warped prior to its emission.  Maybe space expands parallel to the motion of gravity but contracts perpendicularly- a field radiating outward would fight the constrictions but once the field is twisted towards a big crunch trajectory it can no longer maintain a equilibrium over the shape it influences.
    
    Well either way interesting video I prob need to get some sleep :)
18. just wandering, maybe because I'm not understanding this deeply enough, (would love to get an answer), can"t you just come up with a mass constant that allows for mass to exist in an infinite universe, exactly like the cosmological constant allows a universe bigger than the moon to exist despite vacuum energy?
19. OMG everything makes sence now, almost. Thank you, I have teories of my own but this one is great. lol.. xd
20. There is zero evidence that the expansion of the universe is "accelerating."  
    
    The forgotten factor is always time.  We have an idea how fast the farthest galaxies were moving billions of years ago, but not how fast they are moving today.  The reason for this is that light takes billions of years to cross that distance, and any changes in Doppler shift would also necessarily take that long.  If a galaxy on the edge was somehow stopped and hurled towards us, we wouldn't be able to see that change in direction for billions of years.  The only thing we can do is to look at the red shift in galaxies at various distances from us, include our knowledge that light takes time, and see whether the data fits our hypothesis.
    
    For example: if the expansion of the universe was, in fact, accelerating, what we would expect to see is that the galaxies closest to us would have the greatest red shift, because we would see the change from those objects much sooner than we would from objects at the far edge of the observable universe.  The galaxies furthest away would be far less red shifted, since it would take much longer for any change in the shift to reach us.
    
    The degree of red shift would be inversely proportional to the distance to the object.
    
    What we see in the universe is the complete opposite.  Our nearest neighbor is actually blue shifted, not red, and the galaxies furthest away are the furthest shifted into the red end of the spectrum.  The actual measurements of the objects in the universe directly contradict an accelerating expansion.  Our universe is slowing down, and all it takes to see it is to remember that light takes time to cross the distance between us and the objects we're observing.