I learned about the energy only changes form recently and was wondering how heat death in the end of the universe would work because “all energy is lost from the universe”
In: Physics
It’s not lost, it’s just so widely dissipated that it’s spread out nearly perfectly evenly throughout an expanse that just gets bigger and bigger (due to eternal inflation from dark energy). Eventually, the uniform temperature of the universe is hovering some infinitesimal amount above absolute zero. Nothing can survive. And since it’s spread uniformly, there’s no way to do “work” – energy cannot be transferred from one part to another. Work requires an energy differential, and there would simply be none anywhere (except for quantum fluctuations, but the larger the quantum “burst” of energy, the shorter the duration of its existence. Here again, anything that could yield “work” won’t exist for long enough to do so.
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