Fate of the universe

Here's something to make you wish you never bothered getting out of bed.

BBC News: Fate of Universe revealed by galactic lens

I heard this theory years ago, that the universe seemed to be not only expanding, but accelerating as it did so, and that this would eventually distribute matter so widely that gravity would no longer be able to collapse it into stars and galaxies: the so-called Big Freeze. I remember asking Big Bruvva about it and he said frankly, "This is what will happen."

Now it seems that a Nasa-led team at JPL has got final confirmation by measuring the distortion of light from a distant galaxy through the gravitational lens of an intermediate galaxy cluster. While I doubt many cosmologists were surprised, the BBC presents it as easily the most depressing result ever produced by a scientific experiment: "[The Universe] will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say."

The media being the media, however, this has nothing to do with the original research article published in the latest issue of Science. Here's a more prosaic account of the Nasa project from the ESA Hubble site, and another from the JPL's own site. The scientists were cheerfully "exploiting a beautiful phenomenon in nature" to tackle the great riddle of dark energy and its role in the development of the universe.

The end result, as reported in the Science article, was that they were able to reduce "the current 2σ contours on the dark energy equation of state parameter wx by about 30%," which admittedly doesn't make for a grabbing headline, but neither does it say anything directly about the fate of the universe, because that wasn't what the scientists were primarily interested in. I suspect the BBC science reporter went angling for some dramatic quotes and made up the phase "cold, dead wasteland" himself, since that is what journalists do. They do it all the time with archaeological news stories.

Ultimately, what depressed me most about this news story is not the scientific research it supposedly reported - for if we can be sure of anything, we can be sure that the fate of the universe will have absolutely zero impact on the life of any human being who ever lived or ever will live. Rather, it was the the media will do almost anything to put an emotional, negative spin on what should be an inspiring and significant scientific accomplishment.