Brace yourselves for gravitational waves

[Aractus]

Aractus, I don't disagree in principle, except for three things, 5 billion years seems like  a hopeless underestimation for the situation you describe since there will still be stars and star formation going on for much much longer (more like 10^100 years); the directionality of time already arises in Newtonian physics as a statistical phenomenon if you have an extremely low entropy state at one point. There is currently no evidence that cosmic expansion will rip apart things at short length scales such as atoms. A constantly accelerated expansion  as it is caused by constant dark energy/cosmological constant does not do that

Okay sorry I should clarify what I said. General relativity doesn't know about an expiration date for the universe either, nor does it know about the Big Bang - but it allows for those events to take place, as well as for Black Holes to form. Under the laws of Quantum Mechanics the universe should stretch back and forward and infinite amount of time, never expire, and black holes can't form. Nor can the universe be expanding.

I feel that some scientists never got the recognition they deserved. The late Halton Arp maintained a different cosmological view to the conventional "big bang" cosmology for his entire academic career - for many decades in fact. Here's a video:

https://youtu.be/Mf5y6PJR5lE

Listening to Arp, I think that sums up how I feel about science in general. If you're studying down your own line of research which is outside of so-called "standard cosmology", they don't want you. They want to give preference to people with the same viewpoint. The result is biased science.