Cosmology - The End of the Universe

OPENING QUESTIONS:  Cosmologists are astrophysicists who study the birth, life and death of the *entire* Universe. In keeping with the "BIG" term used to describe the birth of the Universe, cosmologists have adopted the following terms for scenarios to describe the END of the Universe:

  • Big Crunch
  • Big Freeze
  • Big Rip

Pick two of those terms and suggest a meaning for it in terms of the end of our Universe.

OBJECTIVE:  I will be able to relate three "Big Freeze" timeline milestones of the very distant future after today's class.

WORDS FOR TODAY:

SUB: Please have students write down the NEW words and definitions from the list below

  • Planck Time ("10-43 sec after the Big Bang")
  • Dark Matter ("Invisible matter")
  • Dark Energy ("The force accelerating the Universe outwards")
  • Red shift ("objects move apart")
  • Blue shift ("objects move together")
  • Big Crunch ("The Universe collapses")
  • Big Freeze ("The Universe explains forever")
  • Big Rip ("The Universe accelerates so fast it shreds itself out of existence")

WORK O' THE DAY: 

We didn't *quite* get to reviewing our Big Bang formative. Let's get to that now.

Let's review yesterdays pop quiz..

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Are there any issues/questions that you'd like me to revisit?

I have a VERY cool reading that compares and contrasts three (BIG) theories of how the Universe may end.

That reading can be a bit dense, which is to say kind of hard to take in one big gulp. Let's talk about how to *skim* an article so that we can gain the good bits without being overwhelmed:

The Wolgemuthian Skim Method:

  • Read the first paragraph of the article

  • Then read the first sentence of the next paragraph.

    • If that sentence makes sense and more importantly if that sentence is interesting:

      • read on in that paragraph until it quits making sense or gets too boring

    • If that sentence is confusing or tedious:

      • skip the paragraph and move to the first sentence of the next paragraph and repeat the process.

  • PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE! Keep in mind that you need to be pretty disciplined if you use this approach. It's easy to just 'skim' and give up. You need to skim and search for the good stuff!

Let's do a quick 'pop corn' jump from table to table to hear items that our colleagues found interesting.

Now let's summarize.

One of my student's last year shared THIS absolutely incredible video that helps visualize some of what that article discusses. It's a bit long but well worth the time. What we don't finish now we'll view tomorrow.