Brace yourselves for gravitational waves

[Brian37]

Alex, in classical mechanics time is linear, gravity is a force (that moves at infinite speed), and the laws of motion work equally in both directions (forward and backward in time). But, time is unidirectional and relative, and gravity is not a force.

Take what happens at a black hole. As you approach the event horizon your time slows down compared to an outside observer. In fact, if I were watching you fly towards the event horizon of a black hole, time would slow so much that I would never see you reach it - you would essentially appear frozen as you approach it. But as far as you're concerned, time is flowing normally, and it's everything away from the event horizon that's now moving at crazy-fast speeds.

5 Billion years from now the universe will have expanded to the point that all matter will be the same temperature: just a fraction above absolute zero. The universe will essentially be dead. It'll still be here, but there'll be no one to observe it. It will just continue to expand, and eventually even protons and electrons will be torn apart. No one actually knows what will happen at that point, it's entirely possible that a new set of chemical physics will take over, but more than likely it'll just be that instead of frozen atoms scattered about space there'll be frozen quarks leptons and bosons scattered about space with no heat to do anything interesting.

I can't speak about QM that far in the future, but in laypersons terms, I would guess "all this" is no different than the cycle of a the seasons changing over and over. 

You can correct me if I am wrong, but currently QM hasn't said either way finite vs infinite. Is that right as far as we know now? What we do know is that a cognition is not required either way.

If there was something prior, it would stand to reason, once all this breaks down, you'd have another quantum twitch leading to another big bang. 

I think the simplistic idea of on an off forever don't suffer the problem of infinite regress, because you aren't attempting to fill the starting point with something more complex. If my layperson's understanding is correct, this is simply going from off to on back to off. 

How far off am I?