Can the universe actually reach absolute zero?
During the past four years astrophysicists have discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. We know that expansion slowed after the Big Bang. Expansion slowed for many billions of years. But about six billion years ago the rate of cosmological expansion began to increase. Scientists are still grappling with what this increasing expansion rate means in regards to the future, but the discovery does greatly support the proposal made here that the universe can indeed stretch to become a perfectly flat space, which would be a physical state of absolute zero. It is sort of like imagining a rubber band that is twisted and curled up into a ball. If you pull the end of the rubber band it stretches into a straight line. In the case of space, when stretched fully it becomes flat, meaning that there is no spatial curvature or gravity. But the universe must expand very fast, virtually at the speed of light, in order for time to end at absolute zero where space would be flat.
