Cosmologists calculate the curve and complete the figure by employing a potent arsenal of instruments and methodologies. The eye of astrophysics reaches a great deal farther now. Our destiny, if only we could know it, might provide some reason for why we’re here. Apocalypse, doomsday, Judgment Day - all this, for theologians, provides a way of thinking about the meaning or purpose of existence. Eliot: “not with a bang but a whimper.” Traditional speculation about the end times, the end of days, comes from religion, where it is called eschatology. “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.” She gives Robert Frost his due. How does it all end? For that matter, does it all end, or can we keep on in our merry way indefinitely? In “The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking),” Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University, attempts to answer what might seem the most remote of scientific questions. The denouement, presumably tens of billions of years away, remains comparatively mysterious. Many books have been written about our cosmic origins: the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago the Big Bang and all that followed. Not to give anything away, but “in about five billion years, the sun will swell to its red giant phase, engulf the orbit of Mercury and perhaps Venus, and leave the Earth a charred, lifeless, magma-covered rock.” That’s how Katie Mack starts her story. THE END OF EVERYTHING (Astrophysically Speaking) By Katie Mack
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