{"id":431,"date":"2003-03-18T04:34:20","date_gmt":"2003-03-18T04:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=431"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:35:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:35:04","slug":"yet-another-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=431","title":{"rendered":"yet another end of the world as we know it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Most people find it depressing to contemplate the  ultimate fate of the universe. Will it recollapse in a Big Crunch, or  expand forever, becoming cold and dark? Robert Caldwell  of Dartmouth  College in New Hampshire and his colleagues have come up with an even  more horrific theory, where the universe ends in a violent, accelerating  expansion that rips everything from galaxies to atomic nuclei apart.  The universe was born in a Big Bang billions of years ago and has been  expanding ever since, driven by a force known as dark energy. Most  scientists think the acceleration will stay constant or get weaker over  time. But the &#8220;Big Rip&#8221; theory supposes that the dark energy fueling the  acceleration is growing more powerful, creating an expansion so fast  that it literally rips apart all matter. Sixty million years before the  very end, dark energy will rip apart the Milky Way. A half-hour before  the Big Rip, the Earth would fall apart. Finally, molecules and atoms  would break apart and time as we know it would end. But buck up: Even if  the Big Rip is true, it&#8217;s more than 20 billion years away. <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 3\/18\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most people find it depressing to contemplate the ultimate fate of the universe. Will it recollapse in a Big Crunch, or expand forever, becoming cold and dark? Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and his colleagues have come &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=431\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1221,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions\/1221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}