The LONGEST time - Numberphile

A paper by Don Page claimed to use the longest finite time ever calculated by a physicist - it's the time it will take the Universe to reset itself!?!

Video featuring Tony Padilla from the University of Nottingham.

Read the paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9411193

Website: http://www.numberphile.com/
Numberphile on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/numberphile
Numberphile tweets: https://twitter.com/numberphile
Videos by Brady Haran

• Category

  Science & Technology

[DWillP2]

What I'm getting from this is that time is cyclical, and that we've all done this before.

[gingeas]

5:47 was genius!

[jiawhein]

10^10^10^10^10^1.1

[gingeas]

No...I meant what happens at that time in the video! They were talking about the Poincaré Recurrence time and they repeated the segment of the video. I honestly thought it was pretty funny.

[Jaybeat2k6]

That, or we're due to, I assume.

[AnimalKaiser389]

A time (5:47) is a genius? Seriously?

[David J]

cool, thanks

[sm4llbug]

You are right.

Exponentiation is evaluated from right to left (from top to bottom, when written as a tower).

So :

10^10^10^10 = 10^(10^(10^10))

It also gives a way bigger result than ((10^10)^10)^10 = 10^(10*10*10) = 10^1000

See Wikipedia about tetration.

[TheRobinL]

I saw what you did there !

[reNINTENDO]

Time is most certainly not linear. It may not reverse, but it's definitely not updating at a constant rate and location. For one thing, space and time are intertwined. For another, I'm surprised you've never heard of traveling near the speed of light or the effects gravity has on orbiting clocks.

[reNINTENDO]

If it's for our observable universe, than logically it would take much longer for the actual size of the universe. And if space itself is infinite (which is commonly stated), the "gas" that is all matter doesn't necessarily need to recombine into the state it initially started.

[BrassAxe]

˙ǝɹoɟǝq sıɥʇ ǝuop ןןɐ ǝʌ'ǝʍ ʇɐɥʇ dnɐ ,ןɐɔıןɔʎɔ sı ǝɯıʇ ʇɐɥʇ sı sıɥʇ ɯoɹɟ ƃnıʇʇǝƃ ɯ'ı ʇɐɥʍ