Papers The Big Rip (NewScientist.com) "Stand by for a nightmare end to the Universe - a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies, planets and even atomic nuclei are literally ripped apart. The scenario could play out as soon as 22 billion years from now." " 'Until now we thought the Universe would either re-collapse to a big crunch or expand forever to a state of infinite dilution,' says Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. 'Now we've come up with a third possibility - the "big rip".' " "Most physicists probably will not be rooting for phantom energy. That is because if it exists, it will cause them all kinds of theoretical headaches. For example, Einstein's theory of gravity predicts the existence of minuscule wormholes - short cuts through space-time." "Normally they snap shut so fast we never notice them. But phantom energy's repulsive gravity would be powerful enough to hold wormholes open, and perhaps even push them wide enough apart for spacecraft to use them for faster-than-light travel. 'This raises the spectre of time machines and all their paradoxes, which physicists find very uncomfortable,' says Caldwell." 10-07 The Big Rip (Space.com) "A rather harrowing new theory about the death of the universe paints a picture of 'phantom energy' ripping apart galaxies, stars, planets and eventually every speck of matter in a fantastical end to time." 10-07 The Big Rip (Wikipedia.org) "The Big Rip is a cosmological hypothesis about the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, are progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future. Theoretically, the scale factor of the universe becomes infinite at a finite time in the future." 10-07 Universe Not as Constant as We Thought (Discovery.com) "There are some things in life that we just expect to be the same. The fundamental constants of physics, such as the speed of light, the strength of gravity, the mass of a certain particle, are just some things we've learned to accept as given. However, there is tantalizing evidence that favors the hypothesis that these so-called constants change with time, thanks to some clever techniques used by radio astronomers." 05-10

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