A familiar knock on my office door. “C’mon in, Jeremy, the door’s open.”

“Got a few minutes, Mr Moire?”

The second serious-sounding visitor today. I push my keyboard aside again. “Sure, what’s up?”

“I read your ‘Tops of Time‘ post and then I watched one of Katie Mack’s ‘End of Everything‘ YouTube videos and now I’m confused. And worried.”

“I can understand that. Clearing up the confusion should be easy. Then I’ll do what I can about the worry part, okay?”

“That’d be great, sir.”

“So, imagine an enormous sheet of graph paper, and then imagine Puerto Rico laid down on top of that. You could use the graph paper to describe the latitude and longitude of any place on the island, right?”

“Sure, probably.”

“I happen to know that Playa Jobos is the northernmost point of the island. Does north stop there?”

“Nosir. The island stops there, but north keeps going.”

“Well, there you are.”

“Wait … oh, you’re saying that time by itself keeps going forever but what’s in the Universe might not and that’s what Dr Mack is talking about?”

“That’s the idea. More precisely, the ‘tops‘ I wrote about are different ways that spacetime’s time coordinate could play out in the future, or maybe not. Mack’s ‘end of everything‘ is about the future history of physical stuff laid on top of our mathematical spacetime constructs. Does that clarify things?”

“Mmm, yessir, but what about the ‘maybe not‘ you said?”

“This gets metaphysical, but cosmology often skates on that edge. Descartes and others maintained that space has meaning only when there are separate objects. If there was only one thing in the Universe you’d have nothing to compare sizes against and there’d be no point in measuring distances away from it. That’d be even more the case if there’s nothing. Same thing for time and events. From that perspective, if somehow the Universe emptied out then space and time sort of stop.”

“Just sort‑of stop, like Puerto Rico stops at that Playa place. Really they keep on going, I think, even if no‑one’s there to measure anything.”

“A perfectly reasonable position when there’s no evidence either way. Anyhow, a few of Mack’s scenarios wind up in that situation, right?”

“Umm… there’s the Big Crunch that reverses the Big Bang.”

“That one was popular before we got good data. The idea was that the Big Bang pushed everything apart but eventually gravity will slow outward momentum and pull everything back together again. The notion probably came from humanity’s experience with dirt falling back down after an explosion. The problems with that scheme are that the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion, outward momentum isn’t a thing and besides, we’ve got increasingly good data showing that between‑galaxy distances are getting wider, not shrinking. The last five billion years that’s sped up.”

“Wait, not an explosion? All the videos show it that way.”

“Chalk it up to artistic license. It’s hard to show everything moving away from everything else without making it look like the viewpoint’s simply diving into a static arrangement. No, an explosion comes out of a center and that’s not the Bang. Remember that huge piece of graph paper? Make it a balloon, tack Puerto Ricos all over it, then pump in some air. There’s no center, but every islander thinks their island is the center and every other island is running away from them. Really, all that’s happening is that the stretching rubber is creating new inter‑island space everywhere.”

“And that’s Universe expansion?”

“Mm-hm. Also known as Hubble Flow. We’ve looked very hard for a center of motion, haven’t found one.”

“If everything’s moving, why isn’t that momentum?”

“It is momentum, but only pairwise. For any two galaxies you can calculate mass times speed same as always. For really distant objects you’ve got to use a relativistic version. Anyway, in the cosmological context you’ve got to ask, momentum relative to what? Everyone has this picture that things came from a common center and will fall back there. The way Hubble expansion works, though, there’s no particular go‑back place.”

“Everything’s speeding up and going everywhere so no Big Crunch then.”

“Not on the original model, anyway.”

~~ Rich Olcott