In 1998, a team at NASA, and leading astrophysicists from
around the world, made a startling discovery for science entering
the new millennium, when they found that the expansion rate for
the local universe, compared to the very distant universe, is not slowing
as expected, but rather speeding up. Since that summer, the
data has been further verified by multiple teams
and studies. Science is presently coming to
terms with something totally unexpected,
the fact that the overall expansion rate of the
universe is not slowing but instead is
accelerating, which in essence means that the direction
of time is set on a crash course with zero.
There is a common point of absolute zero for literally
all measures in physics, including mass, energy, density, gravity, and
temperature. This zero is not what existed
before the dense heat of the big bang, it is the
bottom end of physics. It is where energy waves
fade and disappear as entropy reaches its maximum.
It is where even matter, as the universe cools near to zero,
at first smears together into a liquid like plasma, becoming
a single quantum wave, and then is further stretched by expansion
until it disappears.