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Originally Posted by Neeper
I think it will implode back and then start all over again. I think it's a cycle. How long the cycle runs, I don't know. All the energy will collapse on itself and explode. If the universe is believed to be 13.7 billion years, then it's quite possible 14 billion years ago we might have had this same conversation. Which opens another can of worms. Is the universe just on a repeat cycle? Far-fetched, I know, but interesting to imagine.
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It's kind of funny. I was discussing this in a poker room chat window last night. A guy was asking me about exactly this.
We just don't have enough information at the moment to determine if our universe is steady state (will continue to expand forever) or oscillatory (bang/crunch). The parameter involved in the calculation, the critical density, Ω,of the universe is just known too roughly to know.
Astronomy is a very macroscopic science. A lot of approximations are done. And I mean A LOT. "Fudge factors" are everywhere. You hear "first order" a lot, meaning they only take into account most of the information available. As a past astronomy professor told the class (not as a joke), "The data matched that of the team in Chile to within a factor of 80, and that's pretty much equal to 1, so it worked out fine". That is an extreme example, but is indicative of just how rough astronomy can be. So when we need to know something pretty exactly in (specifically) cosmology, it's very difficult to accomplish and with modern day technology/science/maths etc, finding an accurate value for Ω is virtually impossible.