Tick…tick…and time runs out

I’m giving away a thriller writer’s trick of the trade here, but one sure way to increase the tension in a story is to include a ticking clock. One that’s running out.

E.g., the timer on a bomb is counting down. Lava is pouring down a mountain and the town at the bottom has only minutes to evacuate. An asteroid is hurtling toward earth and Bruce Willis has mere seconds to destroy it. Writers have plenty of other techniques to increase tension in a plot, but this is a classic. Pick up a great thriller or suspense novel, and see if you can spot it.

But two physicists are taking this idea way, way farther than any novelist: Time is running out - literally, say scientists.

Scientists have come up with the radical suggestion that the universe’s end may come not with a bang but a standstill - that time could be literally running out and could, one day, stop altogether.

…The motivation for this radical end to time itself is to provide an alternative explanation for “dark energy”* - the mysterious antigravitational force that has been suggested to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists.

A decade ago, astronomers noticed that distant supernovae - exploding stars on the very fringes of the universe - seemed to be moving faster than those nearer to the centre, suggesting that they were accelerating as they shot through space.

Dark energy was suggested as a possible means of powering this acceleration of the expansion of the cosmos.

But if time is instead slowing to a stop, “Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever,” Prof Senovilla tells New Scientist magazine. Fortunately, this wouldn’t happen for billions of years to come, and the professor adds helpfully, “Our planet will be long gone by then.”

Not much of a thriller twist, then.

On the other hand, the Telegraph also declares in its science pages, “Death star ‘could be wiping out alien life’.”

Death star. Could be another classic thriller idea.

(*For what’s certain to be a lively and entertaining discussion of dark energy, you can catch a talk by my old Santa Barbara buddy, astrophysicist Alex Filippenko, later this month on UCTV.)