Call it a follow-up question to a beyond-the-grave debate: Albert Einstein theorized that black holes can only grow. Stephen Hawking postulated that they can decay. After a group of scientists published a paper supporting Team Hawking, inquiring minds wanted to know how long before the Universe itself completely fades away.
The answer, according to an article in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, is a “1” followed by 78 zeroes and the word “years.” That is much faster than some earlier estimates of a 1 with 1,100 zeros and the word years, but still a very, very long time.
The process by which the smaller number was arrived at sounds like a punchline to a joke that begins “what happens when a black hole expert, a quantum physicist, and a mathematician all walk into a bar?”
Three such scientists from Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands initially sided with Hawking ...
