Our universe has a beginning. And someday, it will have an end too — but which one? As the cosmos expands and the stars and galaxies grow dim, will everything slowly become colder and more isolated? Could the dark energy that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe eventually rend apart spacetime? Would it be possible for our world and the rest of the universe to one day just cease to exist without warning? In this episode, Steven Strogatz discusses the ultimate grand finale with Katie Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Mack is also the author of The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), published in August 2020, in which she described the five scenarios that scientists have identified for how the universe might end.
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