A tad speculative

New Scientist explains that there’s a new idea about the end of the universe around – it just runs out of time:

"We could run into the end of time," Ben Freivogel tells a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Several colleagues seem nonplussed, and one Nobel laureate looks downright exasperated. "I'm aware that this sounds like a crazy conclusion," Freivogel admits, generating a round of what sounds like relieved laughter. But perhaps their relief is short-lived.

The nature of time, our perception of it and even whether it exists at all are hot topics for both physicists and philosophers. But Freivogel isn't pushing a strange new concept of time.

His idea is arguably even more baffling. He thinks that time, as described by Einstein's theory of general relativity, could simply end in our universe, taking us with it. He gives us another 5 billion years or so before the axe falls (see "Five billion years to go", below).

However, the article goes on to explain that this is all very speculative, and it seems not so many are convinced that it makes sense. Good. Although, I must say, if cosmologists came up with a theory in which time and the universe could end at any minute, it would probably be adopted by Christians as the justification for the Gospel expectation that the end of the world could sneak up on us at any minute, in the same way that Genesis is seen to be reflected in the Big Bang. (In fact, the idea that the universe is a giant simulation being run on someone else's computer already gives us that possibility, I suppose; but theologians probably don't want to run with that idea because it might mean that God is a pimply alien teenager.)