What if Time Stops Completely?

Last Updated on June 2, 2020 by

What would happen to the universe if suddenly time stopped?  Would it be exactly the way things were before time started?  And can an abstract concept like time actually stop?  Scientists Jose Senovilla, Marc Mars, and Raul Vera working from the University of Salamanca and University of Basque Country in Spain have proposed that there may be a day in our distant future where time will stop.

Imagine a world where all objects in motion simply froze with the landscape, thought was isolated, and everything was caught in a state of absolute stasis.  Generally when we think about time slowing down and stopping, it’s in the context of a universe where objects still exist, much like our own planet.  But in this interpretation, time itself is dependent largely on external objects and forces in order to exist.  It would essentially stop without anything to move it forward.  And so as energy eventually dissipates, it will no longer be able to sustain a concept like time.

The scientists are examining evidence gathered from exploded stars, which appear to move much faster out at the edge of the universe than they do at the universe’s center.  This isn’t groundbreaking when you take into account the theoretical form of matter known as “dark matter.”  With a name like dark matter, it has quite a bit to live up to in sci-fi spookiness and according to proponents of the existence of dark matter, it certainly does with forms of the matter actually making the existence of the universe possible according to many contemporary interpretations.

Without dark matter the universe wouldn’t simply stop, but there would be an incredibly large hole in our current understanding of gravity and mass.  For years there have been a number of gravitational distortions recorded suggesting there was more matter than could be readily observed within a given galaxy.

If all the matter in a galaxy were simply composed of the atoms and “star stuff” we see every clear night, then it would only account for 4.6% of the universe.  The remaining 93.4% of the universe would have to be made up of dark matter and dark energy.

And this isn’t the first time Dark Matter has been called into question.  While it hasn’t been conclusively disproved, recent findings at the University of Chile have made the task of proving dark matter much more tricky.

What would a universe where time stopped be like?  According to some interpretations of cosmological theory, the universe would simply die out.  While this is one of the interpretations of the universe, it may not actually be the end of everything.  Multiverse theories, such as Tegmark’s classification suggest that the universe that we know may be only one small part of a much greater multiverse filled with an indeterminate and potentially infinite number of universes within it.

While this may be a difficult concept for us to understand in the great scheme of things, it would essentially mean that universes would be going on in several parallels at any point in time and may never end.  Will time stop eventually?  Or will it go on in one form or another forever?  That is one of the key questions still being examined by cosmologists even today.