No because that state refers to bosons only.
Once the universe has expanded sufficiently, there will be no more reactions at all. Protons and electrons will be too far apart to interact. There maybe a few remnant pairs of neutrons and protons, but eventually even those will separate to distances where they won't interact.
Even with the universe expanding on a cosmological scale, I have a hard time seeing how or why that expansion should overcome the electromagnetic force locally, or the strong force for that matter.
Planets, solar systems,and galaxies are held together by gravity today, despite the space between galaxies expanding. The expansion of the universe doesn't appear to be tearing things apart locally, why should it in the future?
To be clear: This is an honest question, I'm not an astrophysicist. My impression was that the expansion of the universe has no locally measurable effect, due to the forces holding things together being much stronger on a local scale than "whatever" is driving the space between things to expand.
Yes that's my understanding as well. Although expansion is accelerating, so maybe some time very far in the future, expansion will in fact happen faster than the forces can compensate, and the universe will just be a very, very thin cloud of subatomic particles that can't find another to form an atom with.
I may be off the deep end here, but I seem to remember reading that the acceleration can be explained by the fact that more space is created due to the expansion.
As an example: If space is expanding at 0.1 s^-1^, and we have 1 m^3^ of space, then the initial expansion rate is 0.1 m^3^s^-1^, after 1 s we have 1.1 m^3^ of space, which is expanding at 0.11 m^3^s^-1^, etc.
To reiterate: This is something I seem to remember reading some time, I'm not sure. However, if it's correct, it would mean that the acceleration is happening between bits of matter that are moving apart, not within bits of matter that are already held together. In that case, the acceleration will never be able to pull apart matter. Please correct if I've gotten this wrong, as mentioned I'm not an astrophysicist.
Huh, that makes sense. (Though per H. L. Mencken, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.")
But space is between the nucleus and electrons too. There's no difference between the space between atoms and the space between subatomic particles.
Absolutely, there is space between the electrons and nucleus (insomuch as the position of both is well defined). However, what I'm suggesting is that as long as there is an electromagnetic force holding the two together, such that there is a constant (time-averaged) distance between them, that space is not expanding at an accelerating rate. At least that's my understanding of it.
Why would space there not be expanding like space everywhere else?
It is, but if the rate of expansion is constant (e.g. 0.1 m m^-1^s^-1^), then the acceleration in the speed of expansion that we observe is a result of the distance increasing.
So the space between two things that are 1 m apart will be expanding at 0.1 m s^-1^, while the space between two things that are 5 m apart will be expanding at 0.5 m s^-1^. As long as the force acting between two things is large enough to overcome the expansion rate right now, the distance between them will remain constant, because the acceleration is not a local effect but a result of the distance increasing.
As far as I understand, this is why we see other galaxies accelerating away from us, but don't see any individual galaxy "ballooning". Because locally (on the scale of a galaxy), gravitational forces overcome the rate of expansion. On large scales (to distant galaxies), there is effectively no gravitational pull, so the distance increases due to the expansion. When the distance increases, so does the observed speed of expansion, etc.
To reiterate: I'm in no way sure about this, it's just my coarse understanding of our current explanation for what we observe.
You’re going to want to read about the heat death of the universe. Basically if the cosmological constant is positive we’re going to end up in a cold dead universe a googolplex or more years from now. We don’t see the expansion locally or within galaxies yet because the universe is still young.
Isn't the heat death of the universe essentially just the statement that because of the second law of thermodynamics all energy will eventually end up as heat? In other words: Entropy always wins in the end.
That is a bit different from stating that everything will be torn infinitely far apart, isn't it?
Direct from the wiki on the heat death of the universe:
If the curvature of the universe is hyperbolic or flat, or if dark energy is a positive cosmological constant, the universe will continue expanding forever, and a heat death is expected to occur,[3] with the universe cooling to approach equilibrium at a very low temperature after a long time period.
I'm under the impression that if the proton does not decay - and there is still no evidence that it does - whatever matter is left in cold, dead stars that didn't fall into a black hole, will slowly quantum tunnel their way into becoming spheres of iron.
Also, I thought that B-E Condensates have been created in the lab, by freezing lithium atoms to a fraction above 0K, their electrons slow down, to compensate and still satisfy the Uncertainty Principle, their orbitals swell and overlap, becoming the condensate. Then when they fire up the photon gun and shoot bosons at this gel or whatever it is, they've been able to slow them down, to freeze them inside the Condensate.
So fast forward to cold stars supposedly working their through the quantum tunnel towards iron... won't the orbitals of these atoms also swell, essentially turning the stellar remnant into a one massive sphere of B-E Condensate?
If the answer is YES, there's gotta be some emergent properties in systems such as this.
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