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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 2696029" data-attributes="member: 177">Well, the "Big Crunch" and the "Heat Death" universes are not really separate theories.  They are merely different possibilities from the same model.  If there's enough mass in the Universe, it'll crunch.  If there isn't enough mass, it never stops expanding, and eventually every bit of potential energy in the Universe gets ground down into waste heat, and nothing can ever happen again..  The Big Crunch is out of favor because we dcan't find evidence of enough mass for it.Not at all strange - because buried in the Big Crunch is the possibility of the Oscillating universe: another Bang that follows the Crunch.  That gives at least the possibility that something might come after, and the possibility of something is usually less depressing than the surety of nothing."Holes" really is a better description, to my eye.  You can drop a thing into a hole, and expect to never get it back again.  It isn't just a star that is dark.Yes, the extreme you mention is recognized - eventually, all the black holes would emit their mass as Hawking radiation.  And all the particles that could decay will eventually do so.  And you're left with a Universe of elementary particles spread infinitely thin, all at just that minute smidge above absolute zero temperature required by the uncertainty principle.Well, in many ways, there isn't much to tell.There are a number of different String Theories.  They all have in common the idea that the universe isn't made up of point particles, so much as little knots of "string".  And the different ways they are twisted up and vibrate tell you about the particles the strings are.The there's three things about string theories:1)They are, mathematically speaking, horrendously complicated.  In some ways they have elegant design, but actually squeezing real-world results out of them for all but the simplest things is quite a chore.  2)None of them have made any testable predictions yet. Either the things they do predict are outside the energy range we can easily reach, or they just don't predict anything different at all.  Perhaps, with time, we will get solid tests of some of them.  Until then, though, they're more methemtical curiosities.3)Rather quickly out of quantum mechanics we got useful things - like modern electronics, and nuclear power.  The energy ranges required to see String Theory effects are quite high, far above what's seen in the normal home.  It may be a while before we see any impact of these in our everyday lives, if ever.</blockquote>

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