Big Crunch

We often hear and read about the ayah where the Qur'an describes the beginning of the universe, in Surah 21 verse 30, where Allah poses the question:

Have not the unbelievers seen that the heavens and the earth were joined together (as one unit) and We broke them asunder? And We made from water every living thing, will they not then believe?

This verse predates the theory of the Big Bang by hundred of years, and have been known by Muslims way before the invention of any of the modern astronomic devices.

However, our subject here is what scientists call the Big Crunch. Paradoxically, in the same chapter (The prophets) where, as we have seen, Allah talks about the creations of the universe out of a single unit, we find another verse talking about the end of the universe.

In verse 104, Allah (swt) says: "The day that We roll up the heaven like a scroll rolled up for books. Just as We created the first creation, so shall We produce a new one. A promise We have undertaken, truly shall We fulfill it."

Here Allah (swt) foretells the end of the universe, just as most scientists say it is most likely to happen.

 

"The Universe might yet collapse in a devastating "big crunch". Physicists have shown that even though its growth is speeding up, it could still start to implode by the time it is only twice its current age.

"A few years ago, nobody would even think seriously about the end of the world within the next 10 to 20 billion years, especially since we learned that the Universe's expansion is accelerating," says Andrei Linde of Stanford University. "Now we see it is a real possibility."

 

In 1998, astronomers studying distant supernovae found evidence that the expansion of the Universe is getting faster. This suggests that some kind of "dark energy" is pushing space apart.

Most theories of dark energy propose that the Universe's accelerating expansion is driven by a cosmos-wide repulsive "scalar field" that has a uniform magnitude right across space. A similar energy field is thought to have made the Universe expand incredibly quickly just after the big bang, a period known as inflation. In August, Linde won the Dirac medal for his role in developing this theory.
 

Scientists have assumed that the repulsion of the field will drop as the Universe grows, eventually falling to zero. Though this would slow the rate of expansion of the Universe, it would never actually stop expanding. But Linde says this assumption could be wrong." [1]

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2759-universe-might-yet-collapse-in-big-crunch.htm