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Space

Will the universe end in a big snap?

Focusing on a logical but gruesome end for the universe could reveal elusive quantum gravity

By David Shiga

21 September 2011

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Will space-time blow apart?

(Image: Ashley Cooper/Visual Unlimited/Getty)

IMAGINE one day you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror only to find that something is terribly wrong. You look grainy and indistinct, like a low-quality image blown up so much that the features are barely recognisable. You scream, and the sound that comes out is distorted too, like hearing it over a bad phone line. Then everything goes blank.

Welcome to the big snap, a new and terrifying way for the universe to end that seems logically difficult to avoid.

Dreamed up by Massachusetts Institute of Technology cosmologist …

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