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From: Alfke.PASA@Xerox.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: And another thing...
Message-ID: <3166@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Wed, 7-Aug-85 13:39:59 EDT
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Posted: Wed Aug  7 13:39:59 1985
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From: Peter Alfke 

Jon Pugh writes:
>It is my firm belief that all the energy expended in the Big Bang
>has been stored away as gravitational potential and it will all be
>converted back into kinetic energy just before the next Big Bang.
>There is no other way, if the universe is a closed system like
>Albert says.

Not necessarily.  Remember "escape velocity"?  If the mass of the
universe isn't great enough, it may still have too much kinetic energy
to collapse again; in other words, everything has escape velocity from
the center of mass of the universe (the big bang point).

The universe is a closed system, an idea far older than Einstein, but
that doesn't mean that it has to repeat itself.  Indeed, such a
repetition has disturbing thermodynamic consequences (where'd all the
entropy go?).

There are no easy answers to the question of what will happen to the
universe.  Astronomers are still fairly divided in their opinions.

						--Peter Alfke