The End of Cosmology (2007): When the Big Bang's Evidence Fades

“The end of cosmology” is the striking conclusion of a 2007 essay by Lawrence Krauss and Robert Scherrer. If the universe keeps accelerating, they argued, observers in the far future will see no other galaxies, no expansion, no cosmic microwave background and no clue to the Big Bang. To them the universe will look static and eternal.

The question before the paper

Everything we know about the Big Bang rests on a few observations: galaxies receding with Hubble’s law, the cosmic microwave background, and the abundances of light elements forged in the first minutes. Since 1998 we have known the expansion is accelerating. Krauss and Scherrer asked a simple question: what could astronomers in the distant future still learn about cosmology, if the standard Lambda-CDM model is right?

What the paper found

• Galaxies leave the view. Our Local Group stays gravitationally bound, but all more distant structures are carried beyond the cosmic event horizon on a timescale of order 100 billion years.
• No expansion to measure. Future observers would see a single merged galaxy, the Milky Way plus Andromeda, and no evidence of the Hubble expansion.
• The microwave background disappears. Its radiation would be stretched to such long wavelengths that it falls below the plasma frequency of the gas between the stars, and so is screened from anyone inside the galaxy, well before the stars die out.
• No element clue either. The primordial origin of the light elements would become impossible to establish.
• A static universe. With all three pillars gone, the universe would appear static: “the end of cosmology”.

How they did it

The essay follows the standard model forward in time. Krauss and Scherrer combined the known expansion history under a cosmological constant with astrophysics: when distant galaxies cross the horizon, how far the microwave background is redshifted, and what evidence for the light elements’ origin would survive. It received fifth prize in the 2007 Gravity Research Foundation essay competition.

Why it mattered

The paper argues that we live in a privileged window, when the universe still reveals its history. For a site named after our era, it is a reminder that the evidence for the Big Bang is itself temporary. It also reframes the far-future timelines of Adams and Laughlin: long before the stars die, the sky empties. See is the universe young?

What we know now

The conclusion depends on dark energy behaving like a cosmological constant. DESI’s 2025 results, from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, hint that it may be weakening, which would change the details, though not yet in a confirmed way. The “single merged galaxy” is also less certain than it seemed: a 2025 study found only about a 50% chance that the Milky Way and Andromeda merge within the next 10 billion years. See the future of the universe and Deep Time.

Who wrote it

Lawrence Krauss and Robert Scherrer wrote the essay together. It has about 70 citations in Semantic Scholar as of October 2026.

Read the original

Krauss, L. M., and Scherrer, R. J. (2007). “The return of a static universe and the end of cosmology.” General Relativity and Gravitation. doi:10.1007/s10714-007-0472-9. Free on arXiv: 0704.0221.