Apocalypse soon

Abstract

Based upon a simple vacuum Lagrangian, comprising cosmological and quadratic scalar field terms, a cosmological model is presented the history of which is indistinguishable from that of an innocuous low-density cold dark matter (CDM) universe, but the future of which is very much shorter. For sensible values of the deceleration parameter (0 < q0 < 1), its age is greater than 85 per cent of the Hubble time, thus resolving the current version of the age crisis, which appears to be that t0 ∼ 1/H0 while q0 is significantly positive.