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Asked by Dragoscience to Jonathan, Kellie, Kevin, Melissa, Stephanie on 27 Apr 2016.
Question: Do you think time could end?
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Melissa Wilson Sayres answered on 27 Apr 2016:
I don’t know about time ending, but I do know that we estimate more than 99.9% of the species that have ever existed have gone extinct (http://paleobiology.si.edu/geotime/main/foundation_life4.html), so for each of those species, time has certainly ended. Will humans ever go extinct? I don’t know. I hope we don’t do anything to expedite the process!
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Kellie Jaremko answered on 27 Apr 2016:
Time as we think of it in hours, days, and years etc. is a concept that humans created so our idea of it could change. If humans weren’t around to use those ways of measuring time then who’s to say. If you are referring to the end of everything then I hope not but I don’t know.
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Jonathan Jackson answered on 27 Apr 2016:
I’m totally geeking out – I think this is my favorite question of all time!…um, no pun intended.
Probably Albert Einstein’s greatest achievement was his equation of general relativity (Not the E=MC^2 one – that’s special relativity). It was so difficult that it took him ten years to figure it out. But the bottom line is that time is the same thing as space. That’s why physicists call it “spacetime” rather than “space and time.” Space and time are all woven together like trampoline fabric, and massive objects like stars and planets bend that fabric. They bend space, they bend time, they bend spacetime. So when you’re near a very massive object, like a black hole, spacetime starts doing some funny things. Time will move at the same speed for you, but for someone who’s watching you, suddenly you’ll be moving in extra slow-motion. So time moves at different rates depending on where you are in the universe.
So to answer the question: Do you think time could end? It’s literally the same question as “Do you think space could end?” And the answer, technically, is yes, it can. Some scientists think that if everything in the universe burns out and cools down, then spacetime as we know it could end. (Don’t worry, that won’t happen for thousands of trillions of years.) Other scientists think that if we could move outside of the bounds of our universe, we give up notions of space and time.
It’s like the old riddle – if our universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? Or the other one – what happened before the Big Bang? These questions are not technically correct to ask, because spacetime only exists inside of our universe. If we leave our universe, there’s no such thing as space or time, and if our universe fundamentally changes, then space and time may change along with it, or fade away.
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