What if your understanding of the universe was completely wrong?

So you know that our universe is constantly expanding outward, right? This could be true and this is why the most widely accepted Theory involves the universe doing just that - it's called the Big Freeze. And what's really cool about this is a mysterious and invisible force that makes the universe expand - it's called Dark Energy. If all this material originated from one point and just kept expanding, eventually all this heat and energy would be very spread out at a certain point. Everything would be so far away from each other that the entire universe would reach a ridiculously frigid temperature, Absolute Zero. But don't worry; that would take billions of years. There's also a chance that the death of the universe will be the exact opposite of this, instead of expanding forever, the universe could shrink back together. Time for the Big Crunch! All of the matter in the universe taken as a whole has an unimaginable amount of gravity. If this big crunch were to happen, the universe would start to contract in on itself. Galaxy clusters far away would merge eventually stars and planets in our own Galactic neighborhood would Clump together too. And this increasing density would heat up the whole universe all that Cosmic microwave background radiation from The Big Bang would get so heated that it would be hotter than Stars we're talking 5 000 degrees Celsius hot! The universe would become a scorching chaotic mess as temperatures continued to rise and more mass got crashed into a teeny tiny region atoms would start to break apart the universe would be turning into the densest black hole possible while that would certainly be the end of the universe as we know it might just be the beginning of a new one and that would be proof that our universe is much older than we thought.

Some scientists debate that everything we know about our universe is wrong, based on what we can see and study in our Galactic neighborhood. Then, we assume that it works like that everywhere else in the universe. The idea is old and it's called the cosmological principle. But, we may have been wrong all along. It could be that the way our Milky Way galaxy moves through the universe is distorting our data. I mean, we've never had any hard evidence to confirm our theories. So, there's no way of seeing the bigger picture from where we stand.

This is where you could be starting to doubt whether any of this is real. Surely, our universe - the one we can see - must exist right? Well, not so fast: you have quantum mechanics to thank for what I'm going to tell you next. Scientists who study quantum mechanics theorize about the nature of the universe on an atomic level and according to some scholars in this field, the universe must be one of two things: real or local. Bear with me here; I know this can be mind-numbing if the universe is real…

But, if the universe is real then that would mean it has specific properties like color and mass that exist even when you're not looking at them for example take a red ball if it's real - without anyone around to look at it - then theoretically, it could have any color or no color at all! Only when you look at it and see that it's red does it actually become red . This is quantum physics 101….. BUT there's a catch: philosophers argue that although the universe appears to obey certain rules ('real'), ultimately these laws are nothing more than constructs or constructs of constructs ('local'). In other words, they're nothing more than made up concepts imposed on reality by humans... and as soon as humans stop observing something (like a ball), it might break free from these concepts altogether and undergo some unforeseen – and possibly miraculous - transformations.

So far, though, we haven't been able to verify whether or not the universe exists beyond physical parameters; only through telescope technology can we observe anything beyond our own Solar System. So, even though scientists conjecture whether or not reality resides outside of space-time altogether (cryogenesis), or if reality exists within a single self-contained time-frame locally - within 'our' Milky Way galaxy for example – either theory remains unproven due to insurmountable technological barriers at this point in time . If nothing else, this provides us with plenty of fascinating intellectual stimulation!