Quantum Resurrection

by : Aria Ratmandanu

            Even if we face a future in which the cosmological constant reduces us all to a set of isolated particles, there is some hope. Quantum mechanics tells us that there are always fluctuations in any system. Energy fields waver at random, and particles can appear out of the vacuum. Large fluctuations are very rare, and you'd have to wait an extraordinary length of time for something big to appear ---- a whole atom or molecule, say.

       But if our future is infinite, time is not a problem. Eventually, anything could spontaneously pop into existence. Most of these things will be senseless messes, but a vanishingly small proportion will be people, planets, galaxies, and five-mile-long models of your left arm made from gold. 'In an infinite amount of time, I will reappear. A crazy thought, but true,' says Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. 

          How about a whole new universe ? Sean Carroll, now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, thinks that random fluctuations could spark a new big bang. He's even worked out how long we might have to wait for it, something in the region of 10^{10 56} years.

           This dwarfs all the timescales we have met so far - it's even impossible to write down in conventional longhand notation. It is hard to imagine how any kind of life could survive long enough to take advantage of the new universe. Unless perhaps, it can find a technology that will trigger the new big bang, restarting the cycle of cosmic life and death.