Time is dead

Will the hypothetical death of the universe lead to the cessation of time? Will time cease to exist under the conditions of such a scenario?

Here’s my thought. According to Roger Penrose’s theory of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, all real matter in the world will transform into black holes. After some time, if we can talk about time at that moment, they will evaporate and disappear forever.

And when the last black hole leaves the last elementary particle, then matter… only photons will exist. This means that empty space will be filled with absolute, “pure” light. An observer from a parallel universe will not see emptiness, Nothing. For him, an entire “white” universe will unfold.

It is not excluded that it will be absolutely transparent: “our” light does not go beyond its own light cone. In other words, a black hole will appear before him, which will hide relative to that time, in the space where the external observer will be located.

The death of the Universe exists only objectively, through the “eyes” of another universe.

Conformal time and space

According to Penrose, photons do not function as a clock - they do not “feel” time. For them, there is no past, present, future, although they are constantly moving.

For an observer-researcher capable of measuring a certain distance, time also disappears. But from the point of view of a photon, its life - from radiation to absorption - happens instantly. Which does not mean the disappearance of time.

Although space and time will no longer exist. More precisely, time will fall out of the Einsteinian model of space-time. The hypothesis of black holes arises because we do not know whether space exists separately from time.

Penrose insists that the Universe will simply return to the situation “on the eve” of the Big Bang. Which will lead to a new ultra-fast expansion: the universal cycle will repeat itself. Another question: what is space? And when can we talk about space without time? Too complex a question for modern physics.

Theoretically, we can assume the emergence of separate space and time. But here arise methodological problems, and they do not have a clear solution. Imagine a Universe where there are no particles at all. In this case, there would be neither space nor time. Why? Because we won’t be able to measure it.

This also does not mean non-existence, - at least in the form of potentially possible “quantum fluctuations”. Theoretically, a Universe with one particle does not have space and time, - because movement and changes can be determined only against something. And again the problem of measurements: if we have only one element, we will not be able to determine whether it is moving or not.

When two particles arise from the conditional Nothing, we say that they are at a certain distance from each other. Thus, space arises, - albeit after the quanta begin to interact with time. The history of time, according to Hawking, - is the history of quantum interaction or distance between particles. The Universe naturally constructs space and time. That is, it, the universe, exists before space-time.

And we are only able to somehow interpret it, - with the help of numbers, lines, formulas. By this analogy, the “full-fledged” space-time is the space of four coordinated particles. If we separated two pairs of particles so that they could not interact with each other, then separate universes would arise from each pair, with their own space and time...