Thursday, September 4, 2014

some recent news in cosmology

Nick Land's Outside in blog has provided a link HERE describing a great forthcoming "cosmic concealment."  As the universe expands ever-outward, propelled by dark energy and dark matter, the initial light of the big bang and from every other galaxy will move beyond our own visible light-cone leaving the Milky Way in a cold darkness.

So, the universe will be getting "darker" as any visible trace of any other diminishes and then disappears.  Lawrence Krauss gives the details in his talk "Our Miserable Future," link HERE.

My first thought was that an ultimate form of flat-line generality, say the Absolute fulfilled and completed where any particular details have become generalized, would be a final state of information so complete that any interaction and communication would cease.  In other words, a state of final completion for the universe would be indistinguishable from death, or "nothing," an absolute zero point.  But those states, we are often told by science, are actually among the most creative.  As Peirce put it, the universe that we know "leapt" from the possibility afforded by the logic of pure zero.

In other news, NASA's Hubble space telescope shows that the Milky Way is on a collision course with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.  Read details HERE.