The Great Tragedy of Armageddon

Let's see... it was the year 1999 CE when I believed I had discovered the fundamental truth of the human existence: Tragedy is at the core of everything, and to search for anything else (while it might make you feel better temporarily) is futile.

Why the hell did I think this? I watched Shakespeare in Love.

Now, the surprising thing is that I wasn't wrong. (No, I'm not experiencing a major depressive episode, I just happen to be an educated scientist.)

See, eventually the universe is going to burn out. New stars are not being created at the rate that old stars are dying. That means that eventually, we will run out of stars to light and heat our earth. What happens then? A whole bunch of crazy sh*t. Like the (dead) stars in the galaxies flying apart. Like the universe approaching absolute zero, where everything happens in slow motion because it's so damned cold. Then, at some point, only black holes exist, but when black holes run out of fuel, they explode. What comes out of them? A huge mess of particles. Particles that we can't even imagine. "Chaos" reigns, which I suppose if you take the Greek view, means that women are in charge. :)

And then quantum mechanics takes over, and with an eternity of probabilities to roll through, who knows what arrangements of things might appear?

So, my view is that the fate of the universe, which is basically the Second Law of Thermodynamics, isn't all that different from an Oscar-winning chick flick. Tragedy is the end result of everything after all.

The Universe : Cosmic Apocalypse. The Universe as we know it is condemned to death. Space, matter and even time will one day cease to exist and there's nothing we can do about it. Harsh realities are revealed about the future of our Universe; it may collapse and burn or it might be gripped by a galactic ice age. Either of these scenarios might be a long way off. However, our Universe could suddenly be destroyed by a "random quantum fluctuation", a bubble of destruction that can obliterate the entire cosmos in the blink of an eye. No matter how it ends, life in our Universe is doomed.

Large Hadron Collider Rap

One of my students sent this to me. Hysterical.

Large Hadron Collider Rap