From Eternity to Here

by Sean Carroll

Think carefully about what would have to happen for this scenario to work. The universe, for whatever reason, finds itself in a randomly chosen high-entropy state, which looks like empty de Sitter space. Now our postulated irreversible laws of physics act on that state to decrease the entropy. The result—if all this is to have any chance of working out—should be the history of our actual universe, just reversed in time compared to how we traditionally think about it. In other words: Out of the initial emptiness, some photons miraculously focus on a point in space to create a white hole. That white hole gradually grows in mass through the accretion of additional photons (Hawking radiation in reverse). Gradually a collection of additional white holes come into view from far away, arrayed almost uniformly through space. All of these white holes start belching out gas into the universe, which implodes to make stars, which spiral gently away from the white holes to form galaxies. These stars absorb more radiation from the outside world, and use the energy to break down heavy elements into lighter ones. As the galaxies continue to move toward one another in an increasingly rapid contraction of space, the stars disperse into a uniform distribution of gas. Ultimately the universe collapses to a Big Crunch, as matter and radiation form an extremely smooth and uniform distribution near the end of time.