New quantum simulation tries to explain the death of the universe

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

- T. S. Elliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.

Today I’m writing about death. Depressing, I know, but not your death or my death. Rather, I want to talk about the death of the universe.

Recently a group of scientists attempted to see what the death of the universe might look like using a 5564-qubit quantum computer, and it didn’t look at all like the mainstream predictions. Quantum mechanics, it turns out, might ensure the universe dies a far more violent death than the standard clock-winding-down arguments of thermodynamics.

The standard thermodynamic argument is a bit depressing honestly.

A young woman once called Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer. How she got his number, I’m not sure, but she was crying over the phone. He recounts in his autobiography how he asked her what the matter was, and she told him that she was crying about a book he wrote. He wondered what he could have written that got her so upset. While he had written a few tear-jerking short stories, his books, for the most part, were pretty unemotional. She explained to him that it was a non-fiction book he had written about the universe where he explained that the universe would eventually become cold and lifeless in a kind of heat death. All the stars would go out as it progressed to a state of maximal entropy. The fact that this would not happen for trillions upon trillions of years perhaps didn’t register with her.

Then again, for many people, the idea that the universe will continue after they die is a source of comfort. At least, there will be life for others after my death.

But according to our best understanding of the thermodynamics of the universe, that is not true. Entropy will relentlessly wind the universe down like a clock and there is no known mechanism for winding it back up again.

Asimov was preoccupied with heat death. One wonders if it didn’t bother him, perhaps not to tears but at least philosophically. In 1956 he wrote a short story titled The Last Question. He wrote that this was his favorite short story out of the thousands he had written. In it, humanity progresses through eons, gradually merging with Artificial Intelligence, until the universe becomes cold. At some point, when the suns were all dead or dying. This singular Being formed from the merged consciousness of humanity and computing technology becomes a kind of God who can, with a word, speak “Let there be light” and there was light as in the opening paragraphs of Genesis.

As an Atheist, Asimov had no hope of divine renewal for either the universe or the human race.

Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, may provide the mechanisms that classical physics lacks to not only destroy the universe in a violent and catastrophic way but also to restart it.

In other words, the promises of the Bible that heaven and Earth will be destroyed and re-made new could be perfectly natural.

One of the big differences between quantum and classical physics is that classical physics just assumes that stuff exists. Particles, planets, stars, and so on just are. Quantum physics, however, has shown that stuff is not fundamental. Particles, atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, and light are all excitations of fields that fill the void.

Fields and Particles

A field is sort of like a spring mattress but in 4 dimensions.

Imagine this mattress filling all of space and time. You can’t see it but you can measure its effects.

When the mattress is untouched, it is quiet, perhaps vibrating a little bit from air currents which are like quantum fluctuations, but nothing is happening.

Then Something, whoever is saying “Let there be light” makes the mattress start to jiggle. This jiggling causes parts of the mattress to develop a lot of concentrated energy, and this concentrated energy forms particles.

The jiggling is called a false vacuum because, until particles start to form, it is just an empty space that has more energy than nothing. In other words, it is vacuum that has enough energy to make things as opposed to True Vacuum, which has no energy to make anything. The unmoving mattress is like True Vacuum.

At the quantum level, the mattress never winds down. It never stops moving altogether. This means the universe can go on and on for a long time.