**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[MadMojoMonkey]

TL;DR
Wowee! That's a long time.

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10^32 years is unimaginably longer than a billion years (which is already fairly unimaginable).

10^9 is a billion. If you multiply a billion times a billion, you get 10^18. A billion billions is still (much) less than one billionth of 10^32.
If you multiply that billion billion by a billion, you get 10^27, which is still 1/10,000 of 10^32.
A billion billion billions is still 0.01% of 10^32.

Even if he meant 10^32 seconds, that is still 3*10^24 years... which is still more than a billion billion years by a factor of 100,000.

Here's a sense of how long away that really is. I hesitate to cite this, but it illustrates what I was thinking about how long that time scale is. It's just that these predictions are heavily motivated by hypotheses, and widely speculative.

10^19 - 10^20 [years from now]: Estimated time until 90% – 99% of brown dwarfs and stellar remnants are ejected from galaxies. When two objects pass close enough to each other, they exchange orbital energy, with lower-mass objects tending to gain energy. Through repeated encounters, the lower-mass objects can gain enough energy in this manner to be ejected from their galaxy. This process eventually causes the galaxy to eject the majority of its brown dwarfs and stellar remnants.

10^30 [years from now]: Estimated time until those stars not ejected from galaxies (1% – 10%) fall into their galaxies' central supermassive black holes. By this point, with binary stars having fallen into each other, and planets into their stars, via emission of gravitational radiation, only solitary objects (stellar remnants, brown dwarfs, ejected planets, black holes) will remain in the universe.

Wikipedia "Timeline of the far future"

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Relaxation time is a measure of exponential decay. Which means that the amount of relaxation that occurs during the relaxation time is proportionally the same amount of relaxation that always occurs over that time period. It's like radioactive half-life or the charging time of a capacitor. I bring this up because even after the relaxation time has passed, that only implies some percentage of the total relaxation having occurred, not full relaxation.

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We like the electrical permittivity of free space.

Of course we do. It's awesome. If you're reading this, and you are on the fence about the electrical permittivity of free space, then go ahead and say, "electrical permittivity of free space" and see how you feel about it then.

OR

Chemist wants to cuddle, too, Ongie.