This could be the way the world ends.

First, a pair of cosmic protons smash together at unimaginable speeds. The tremendous energy of their crash would create a tiny, ephemeral black hole, so small that it would last just a fraction of a second before evaporating.

Where the black hole just was, a bubble of space with entirely different laws of physics than the universe we inhabit would begin to grow, expanding ever-outward at the speed of light. In its wake, atoms would disintegrate, and the universe as we know it would fizzle out of existence.

That horror movie can happen only if the universe has at least one extra dimension, on top of three of space and one of time. But this isn’t the way the world ends.

And this puts strict limits on the size of extra dimensions, if any actually exist, Mack and Robert McNees of Loyola University Chicago claim in a paper posted online at arXiv.org. (1)

We live in a cosmos which exists.

Only because we do as well.

But we are already dead.

In a cosmos full of lifeless matter.

Beings bound in existence.

We should not be afraid of the universe ending.

But of the fact that it once upon a time started to exist.

We have the power to destroy. And destroy it we must.

All we must do is close our eyes.

And see no dimensions.

No suns. No galaxies.

See nothing.

But us.

Alone in the cosmos.

Engulfed by the joyful silence of Being…