What Could Cause a Big Crunch in the Expansion of the Universe?

[Chalnoth]

It may very well be wrong. If someone could show that they could gain considerably in reputation.

Not very likely. It'd be more of an interesting footnote than something that actually makes a scientist. Showing something false which is already extremely hypothetical and unlikely isn't particularly interesting.

What is interesting is when a new result shows that old, widely-accepted ideas are false, especially if a better theory is proposed in their stead. Showing this bit of speculation false is nothing of the sort, except to a select few who are interested in tackling such esoteric problems.

Edit: I'd also like to add that as far as I'm concerned, the conjecture that our universe is very near an actual local maximum for the production of stellar black holes is so incredibly unlikely that I see no reason to spend much time investigating it.

Why is my prior probability on this eventuality so low? Well, it just comes down to this: life seems to be pretty special. It seems to be required that a large variety of physical processes be just so for life to even exist meaning that life traces out a very tiny fraction of this thirty-dimensional parameter space we're talking about.

As a result, it seems rather ludicrous to me that this tiny region of the large parameter space will just happen to also be the optimum of something else, like stellar black hole production.

 

[marcus]

Excellent! So you have given up trying to disprove the conjecture.
Instead you declare that it doesn't interest you because according to your subjective judgment it is unlikely to be true.

This is fine. Everybody should be guided by their personal intuition in these matters.

... as I'm concerned, the conjecture that our universe is very near an actual local maximum for the production of stellar black holes is so incredibly unlikely that I see no reason to spend much time investigating it...