The End of the Universe - with Geraint Lewis 

Thanks to the generous support of our Patreon friends, we now have English language subtitles for this video! If you too appreciate what we do and have the means, please consider joining our community of supporters: www.patreon.com/TheRoyalInstitution

Oh, and Ri, since my kids were little, we've been listening to all these wonderful Ri talks, and now they are teenagers, and still like them, as do I

I was asleep and this video appeared on my list and I gave it a Play ... I enjoyed every second and now I can't sleep. I think of everything Mr. Geraint Lewis said ! I learned a lot tonight. Thank you very much !

To everyone who enjoyed this lecture and doesn't know about Geraint Lewis' and Luke Barnes' youtube channel Alas Lewis & Barnes, I'd highly recommend it for anyone interested in cosmology, good stuff!

Being an enthusiast since the age of 6 and now watching this, makes me want to leave my digital marketing job and study cosmology full-time. I wish life were that easy.

I wasn't worried about what I'm what I was going to do ten billion years from now till I watched this show.

not just gorgeous ( a real silver fox!), not just gorgeous AND intelligent, not just gorgeous, intelligent AND a superb communicator - but gorgeous, intelligent, a superb communicator, AND Welsh! A quadruple whammy....what a joy to find this series.

It hurt me each time they didn’t laugh at his little jokes lol

Why haven't I heard of Lewis before?! This was beautifully clear, nicely constructed and delivered with just the right amount of dry humour. Oh, and I read Black Cloud 50 years ago and hadn't thought about it until last week. Now here it is again. Miraculous.

So glad the audience wasn't interrupting Mr. Lewis' presentation. They were actually listening to him and the concepts he presented. The Douglas Adams line was a great thought provoking ending. I loved this presentation and the speaker.

This was so encouraging. Finally I got the assurance that I needed that eventually all my enemies will be dead and I won’t have to ever pay taxes again or listen to politicians give non-answers to the people that they were hired to represent. Ahhhh! Peace at last.

I'm reminded of the Peter Cook line. "Still, there is hope. I hope this will not happen."

Never tire of these talks, Thank you.

I can't get enough of these intellectual conversations, it's the one thing that actually stimulates my mind and gets my neurotransmitters pumping. Thank you guys.

beautifully communicated, I enjoyed this lecture very much!! Thanks to the RI for putting on these lectures, and thank you to Geraint Lewis for a great talk!

This one is so good, my favorite so far. I will actually watch this one more than once.

outstanding lecture. I have learnt so much from this guy in the last hour than I did all the way through school. wow I actually feel more clever than I did an hour ago :)

I wish my college astronomy class was this informative.

“ It’s tough to see intelligent life here, but there is life”…… That sentence is the most accurate thing he said the entire talk.

Great thing about the end of time is that you can never be late again.

Thank you Geraint Lewis for expressing ideas that I have had myself, & you express them with such clarity & give me so much by doing that. The final theme suggesting that it could be that the big bang has all happened before & could be a recurring moment in an overall universal "tiem-line" going on forever is one that I have been going on about to my friends for decades. They go "whatever". But it makes a lot of sense to me, although many will expect any expression relating to it to be accompanied by the scientific opt-out "we just don't know". Recently I have been listening to other addresses in this TRI series & in doing so a thought crossed my mind (mainly when listening to David Tong on field theory, which is given more definition by Harry Cliff's address on the Higgs boson) that there may well be, in this new strong acceptable/accepted definition of fields, an underlying explanation of Hubble's continuous expansion of the universe that you refer to that might just bring it all together. I am not a scientist & so not in a position to express this idea in any acceptable scientific form, & it may make little sense to those working in physics but 'll express it anyway. Who knows, there may be some benefit in doing that. It goes like this: There is only one independent force in the universe, the force of gravity. The rest are dependent forces, dependent upon the big bang. The energy available to be played out in the "life" of the universe that you describe, all exists at the moment of the big bang. Tong & Cliff give us the Standard Model. This is suggesting that the cosmic energy field is what exists after the whole thing settles down, and what you are left with, what is left over after matter versus antimatter has annihilated itself, the subsequent electromagnetic forces, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the Higgs field that gives rise to mass, electrons, protons, etc. energy itself is there as a temporary adjustment to the failure of matter to completely be annihilated by antimatter. Harry Cliff showed us a picture of "what the universe should look like" applying the Standard Model and it looks extremely similar if not identical to the "end of the universe" you describe, the only difference being space and time. If it were possible to have a "clean annihilation" in the first few hundred thousand years after the big bang, he says, that's what it would look like. So the clouds, the galaxies, the suns, the planets, etc. are simply an expression of the uncertainty principle, proven to be correct by elements making up the background radiation in Tong's talk, not long after the big bang, that such a clean annihilation is never gunna happen. The universe is simply an expression of that; what is left over is fundamentally unstable; energy is the movement from "unstable" in the present to "stable" in the end of time that you describe. The process you describe, which is a picture of the "life" of the universe along the way, gives Cliff what he is hanging out for, "in the end". The "fields" described by Tong & Cliff are created by that process of movement from unstable to nothing. The uncertainty, the instability, the energy, "creating the fields", is responsible for everything in the universe, except for the force of gravity. It is responsible for the gas, the particles, their separation, the clustering you describe, their creation of suns, of galaxies, their burning, hydrogen, helium, their emission, photons, for their turning into red giants, into dwarfs, for dark matter, for the expansion of the universe, everything, You describe clearly the "end of life". But when the "life" of the universe has ended, what are we left with? You seem to be describing everything moving away from everything else at the speed of light, dark energy, the force of repulsion, is now everything, and it is also nothing because there is nothing to repulse. Because the big bang exists, the universe only exists because of the expansion of the universe. Take that away and everything is turning in on itself. When dark energy is universal, the expansion is ended, the only force available is the force of gravity. This means that the disarray within the repulsion caused by the history of the universe leads to clusterfuck, the clustering of dead/dark matter. The force of gravity may be weak, but it is the only force in the end. It brings all this matter back together again, setting up the ideal conditions for another big bang. Because we see no evidence for the creation of the universe, & because the universe exists at all, we know that the big bangs have been happening forever. And because of this, we know that the idea that a big bang at some "tiem" in the future will lead to complete annihilation is a nonsensical idea. It could happen, but because uncertainty has reigned supreme, forever, up until the present, it is highly unlikely in the future.

Brilliant lecture. Thank you RI!

So well-spoken and a pleasant conveyance of complicated information, with great graphics.

The timescales here are unimaginable. His last slide depicting 10^100 years is far greater than the number of atoms in the entire universe. The universe is currently only 14 billion years old, which is far less than the number of atoms in a single drop of water.

Great stuff. Loved every minute of this!

the audience is like a cold, dead universe.

Fascinating lecture - thoroughly enjoyed listening to it. Geraint really held my attention from beginning to end.

I learned something today.All what he says may happen or ...not. Conclusion? Don't worry, be happy.

PLEASE, give the viewer enough time to view the graphics! We don't need to watch every single gesticulation of the speaker. All we need is to clearly hear each and every word they utter. We accomplish this with our ears, not with our eyes. If we must watch every single second of the speaker waving their arms about, then place them in a small window, while the graphic takes up the vast majority of the screen. Thank. You.

Thank you for posting this, an excellent presentation! This is one of my favourite subjects as it really resonates with the human condition and wonder, what are we supposed to do with our time here? I think it is quite safe to say that either one accepts that whatever we do "here" doesn't really matter that much because of what was presented here, or one states that the only meaningful thing to aim for is to at least try to go as far as we can in this puzzle that is the Universe. Which would basically mean going forward on Kardashev scale and just try work out the physics until we truly understand everything there is. Whichever way we go, i think most of the stuff we humans spend our time and effort currently on which is basically more or less tribal warfare and squabbles regarding who gets what back from somebody else who took the stuff back in the day and eventually will lose it again is something we should just stop. We are acting like a spoiled brat and we should grow up, because there is the heat death of the Universe that awaits us.

Cheers to RU-vid for directing me back to this video after I accidentally pressed Jimmy Carr video on my screen 15minutes in. Phew!!!this is riveting stuff

Fantastica,this by far the most priceless video about the universe ,explicit and greatly widened my scope of the heavens. Well done.

Beautiful presentations and so educational so thought provoking. So easy to accept that we are wasteful organic stuff and we need to learn that there is an end to us, like the dinosaurs, extinction is a cue and we are in that line up. We aren't doing nearly enough if at all, to sustain life today, what makes us think the current excelleration of devastation and climate change isn't pointing to a much earlier end than presented here ?

What a cruel way to find out the Douglas Adams has passed on. I have always had the impression the all people will cary on living with their friends, family and loved ones, somewhere and sometime, forever another place another time.

One of the most fascinating and stimulating presentations I have seen. It will be survival of the fittest for sure in the end.

Thank you so much for your information. I agree with you on all topics. And to not panic we will get through this together.

TL; TD; we’re doooomed! Doooomed I say!!! Wonderful presentation.

Very very interesting! Thank you for sharing this. Truly enjoyed.

it's hypnotic listening to this lecture and also imagining what's being described. awesome lecture.

It can get kind of repetitive that all of these kinds of talks have to go through the very basics of cosmology for the first half an hour or so once you have watched enough of them, but in the end, this is a very fascinating talk and some very interesting ideas to think about! (I make science videos too if anyone is interested!)

Outstanding ability to simplify hard concepts to laymen and superb flow of ideas to maintain the interest of the audience. I very much enjoyed the talk and will watch it again to understand "a brief history of time". Many thanks and appreciation. I hope many young children watch these videos to have more great scientist like you.

This very interesting! I loved it!

I love these enlightened educational master pieces!

Glad to find this treasure. I often listen to Prof. Lewis on Aussie podcast Shirtloads of Science with Dr. Karl. Always informative and always fun too.

Though I know we are limited as human beings, I've always cooled my head with thinking to space exploration as a way to indefinitely extend our life as specie. Admitting we are a fainting pixel of a screen that is slowly turning black is a though one. At least I hope the electronic beings following us will read this post and pay a microsecond of silence to their creators.

I think the universe is full of life and hopefully, there are planets with smarter beings

This is an awesome video. One of the very best

Thank you for a very clear presentation, Dr. Lewis. What i find most fascinating about this lecture - and humans in general - is this incessant fascination with propagation of life. If all life-forms were to end at some point in the future, there's nothing bad with that. Whatever is there is always there.

What an amazing lecture that really puts everything into perspective I appreciate this presenter

46:45 "The scale of a cathedral" is even a gross underestimate. An Atom has about 10^-10) m, the core has about 10^(-15) m. A fly is about 1cm, so compared to the scale of a fly the atom would be about 1 km. The scale of a cathedral is about 100 m.

came upon this channel by accident! omg im so lucky i DID! im addicted to these

"We are stardust, we are golden. And we have got to get ourselves back to the garden" Woodstock by Joni Mitchell. I just think I want to attempt to stay in the present. 10^34 years is overwhelmingly beyond my comprehension. Having wrote that I enjoyed to lecture.

A generally interesting talk. It would have been much stronger however if some uncertainty (or more, actually) was expressed. To fill that missing 'talk matter' I include this quote from the Wikipedia article on the "Ultimate fate of the universe": "Cosmic uncertainty[edit] Each possibility described so far is based on a very simple form for the dark energy equation of state. But as the name is meant to imply, very little is currently known about the physics of dark energy. If the theory of inflation is true, the universe went through an episode dominated by a different form of dark energy in the first moments of the Big Bang; but inflation ended, indicating an equation of state far more complex than those assumed so far for present-day dark energy. It is possible that the dark energy equation of state could change again resulting in an event that would have consequences which are extremely difficult to predict or parametrize. As the nature of dark energy and dark matter remain enigmatic, even hypothetical, the possibilities surrounding their coming role in the universe are currently unknown."

Every time they 51:30 when they talk about the end of the universe puts in in a good mood. LoL (not really)

If anyone is interested in fiction built around the potential futures of life Geraint discussed halfway through this (brilliant!) presentation, I’d thoroughly recommend reading Iain M Banks’ novels, particularly those based around The Culture. Incredible stories and fascinating future projections, and he also uses them to very subtly reflect on terrestrial life today and how we should perhaps take our societies forward.

It's completely irrational, but for some reason, I'm saddened by the fact there are galaxies moving away from us at the speed of light! I mean it might have something to do with knowing of their [galaxies] existence, yet them being forever out of our reach or even vision, and the knowledge we will never have access to; and yes I'm fully aware that even getting [certain] knowledge from the next nearest galaxy is an improbability, or even knowledge from elsewhere in our own, but still!

Great lecture. Brings Isaac Asimov's The Last Question to mind

Yeah, in the long run, we'll all be dead. I guess I would have figured that one out by myself. In the meantime, let's try to keep humanity going for another 100 years. That's 1 * 10E2. Cheers!

Thank you Dr. Lewis.

Amazing -- great presentation

Now 74, I am at the ends days. I'm going to miss life.

Incredible lecture professor, thank you!

Never stop learning, these lectures are so incredible

Simple but informative thank u professor.

The part at the end with the earth in 7 billion years scorched followed by the clapping was quite comical.

I feel like my student loans will go on for much longer after the death of the universe

Time can't end if it never existed..only reason we have time is bc we are here to take measurements and add meaning to it.

Wonderful story Mr. Lewis and especially as you wind up in quotes from Douglas Adams. Cheers and see you in the next Universe.

Humans: Yay have trillions of years to evolve into something awesome. Nothing can stop us now! Conronavirus: Hold my crown.

the 20 minute introduction was unnecessary

One of the best channels I ever discovered..

Thanks for the update

I knew this story already. I heard it many times. I always need some drug after it. It is so depressing.

I too woke up here after passing out watching space videos

Isn't it amazing we as a species started nomads wandering through the planet surviving and then developed enough to create cities and further advance our knowledge of the universe to the point where we realized we need to go nomad again but on a galactic scale in order to stay alive.

The end of the universe is when i wake up

#3767 I remember commenting on this in 2029 (pre-singularity)

That was an amazing journey!

I enjoyed watching this presentation, very interesting and very exciting. Loved the statements of Douglas Adams at the end. (read his "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", if you have not already done so; you maybe recognize one of the main characters).

Could not agree more, "Milkomeda" has to be the worst name in all physics.

"Yes yes, eureka !!! I found the future of the universe with my many long hours of imaginative calculations and years of study and experiments. I'm just absolutely thrilled !!! " - "That's amazing what do you call it? " "The MILKOMETER"

You should make your lectures live for people who want to ask questions but can’t come , btw love your lectures👍🏻

Question for everyone, but what if by the time of the heat death of the universe the lifeforms have learnt to manipulate dark matter in a way where they pull energy out the very fabric of space time? Seeing as there are virtual particles in the vacuum of space, wouldn't that interaction be usable to provide a minuscule (admittedly per interaction) amount of energy to power its internal structure?

There is only one question left to ask: is his audience a form of living matter?

The 1-st law of thermodynamics states something to the effect... Energy can not be created or destroyed. (only exchanged). where did all the energy go? Converted.

One of my favourite channels. Ty Ri. And G.Lewis. Nice..and feel like I need to shout out my man Issac.N. His work on gravity, imho, and genius was years ahead of anything. I mean, he basically invented physics! Then we wait for hundreds of years for someone to take on the baton. Just next level. I try, but some channels just, well they're speaking a next language. And I'm above average intelligence, I'm not afraid to say.

Let's sing for the universe a verse that never stops !

We just need to find a way to eat entropy then life can go on forever.

But, what's beyond the "END OF THE UNIVERSE"?

Crystal clear and informative. Loved it! 🍺

i just feel privileged i lived in an era where earth despite its problems was still habitable. Cant imagine how future generations will cope when they know the end is near, harrowing stuff

You can skip half of this if you already read cosmology.

Saw this title in my recommended feed and thought this was a Coronavirus video 🙃

Wonderful talk. Thanks Geraint Lewis and thanks TRI

Great stuff, very interesting....Thumbs up.

We know there are several 'generations' of elementary particles like tauons, myons and electrons and top/bottom, charm/strange and up/down quarks. This leads me to the speculation whether our universe's history might be *fractal.* What we call inflation might have been Big Chill for a previous universe existing on much smaller spacetime and higher energy scales, and our accelerating expansion and Big Chill might be the inflation epoch of some other universe on larger spacetime but smaller energy scales, especially if there 'are' - actually will be - 'generations' of particles the now universe is still by far too hot for...

So are his predictions going to come true, pity no one will ever know the answer.

Great talk. Thank you.

We'll never see it but we can all have fun thinking about it. Thank you very much.

"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov is a possible answer?