The End : TIME Magazine Cover Story

Overstated, poorly written, inaccurate, not very valuable:
This Time Magazine cover story encountered withering criticism from all sides when it was written a couple years ago and with good reason. While it does a satisfactory job of describing the 'missing mass' problem and theories of spacetime geometry, it overinterprets the meaning and significance of recent findings to a laughable extent. Studies of apparent supernovae brightness-- suggesting an acceleratingly expanding universe-- were newly minted and the details still being worked out, yet the author went grossly overboard in claiming that the new discoveries somehow detailed the origin and end of the universe. Maybe it was just a case of trying to draw more attention to the magazine, but claiming such detailed knowledge of the end of the universe or the fate of the cosmos is plainly outrageous when the very concepts themselves may have no meaning-- if anything, the supernova data and the implications of supersymmetric string theory seem to be suggesting that the very concept of a linear, beginning-to-ending universe, with a simple time evolution, has to be tossed out entirely. For once, weird talk about parallel universes and re-forming regions of spacetime are beginning to make sense. The author would have written a much more interesting, accurate and valuable article if he'd considered the findings in the context of the theoretical overhaul that seems to be taking place in astrophysics. Instead, he chose to wallow in some of the worst exaggeration ever seen in a popular scientific article-- a good dose of restraint would have done wonders for it.