Solar Week - Ask a Question

I am just wondering some top scientist views upon the newley published problem of expansion of the universe. I have recently read in the latest article published by "Scientific American" about The End of Cosmology. The article states that the since the universe is expanding at a increased rate that later down the road people of the future won't be able to study the birth of the universe since the background microwave emissions and the background radiation will have decayed too much. So do you think that we will have formulated a permenant position on the birth and creation of the universe? Will we have discovered all the underlining elements in the known universe before it no longer can be studied? Lastely do you think that are knowledge will be able to survive the test of time? I'm just wondering some peoples views upon this... 

 I was just at a talk by Nobel Laureate George Smoot talking about cosmology.  The new found dark energy which dominates the Universe causes the Universe ot accelerate, effectively beating the slowing down due to gravity.  As the Universe expands the microwave background will cool even further and so not only would it be difficult to detect but harder still to get detailed information on it.  Current observations of the microwave background are helping pin down so key cosmological facts, how flat the universe is, when galxies formed, how much dark matter and dark energy there is.  The timescales we are talking of are in billions of years so I don't think our ability to learn more about cosmology will end very soon.

 

Cheers - David 

My understanding is that Dark Energy is causing the Universe to expand...and it caused a very rapid expansion very early. This early period of rapid expansion - called "inflation" - is needed to explain some astronomical observations. But we really have no idea what Dark Energy is! It is really the biggest mystery in physics today--and there are some pretty wild ideas about it! So NASA is considering a new mission to try to make measurements that will tell us more about the properties of this very weird stuff (if it is stuff. Ciao, Paulett