La izquierda se muestra perpleja de que los ciuadadanos no pasen factura a los partidos que inspiraron las políticas económicas causantes de la crisis. Se olvidan, así, de que mientras gobernó no trató de corregirlas ni de cuestionarlas. Más bien les ofreció un aval en la línea de la Tercera Vía de Tony Blair y se limitó a marcar sus diferencias con los conservadores en terrenos como los valores y las costumbres. Como consecuencia, la izquierda no sólo no se ha legitimado como alternativa cuando tenía que hacerlo, sino que, en muchos casos, la crisis le sorprendió en el Gobierno, gestionando la economía desde los presupuestos que han fracasado y que los electores castigan en su cabeza. Cuando ahora los conservadores adoptan para salir de la crisis las políticas que tradicionalmente se asociaban a la socialdemocracia, no hacen más que ocupar un territorio que ésta dejó vacío durante los años de bonanza.

La reacción de la izquierda ante esta situación no puede resultar más equivocada. Por una parte, se ha dedicado a buscar los problemas en su interior, desencadenando luchas de liderazgo que, hasta el momento, se han saldado con una victoria de los aparatos y, por consiguiente, de los dirigentes que mejor los controlan, no de los más capaces y experimentados. Por otra, ha reforzado el discurso de los valores y las costumbres, que la crisis ha convertido en una lengua de madera de acentos beatíficos y compleja traducción práctica. Mientras los partidos a la izquierda no dispongan de un análisis de lo que está pasando, y no tanto de lo que les ocurre a ellos, es difícil que puedan revertir una tendencia electoral que los está alejando del poder en los países más importantes de Europa.

Many different explanations have been put forward to resolve Olbers' Paradox. The best solution at present is that the Universe is not infinitely old; it is somewhere around 15 billion years old. That means we can only see objects as far away as the distance light can travel in 15 billion years. The light from stars farther away than that has not yet had time to reach us and so can't contribute to making the sky bright.

Another reason that the sky may not be bright with the visible light of all the stars is because when a source of light is moving away from you, the wavelength of that light is made longer (which for light means more red.) This means that the light from stars that are moving away from us will become shifted towards red, and may shift so far that it is no longer visible at all. (Note: You hear the same effect when an ambulance passes you, and the pitch of the siren gets lower as the ambulance travels away from you; this effect is called the Doppler Effect).

An analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated. Because supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to cosmic entropy, the finding suggests that the entropy of the universe is also about 100 times larger than previous estimates, the researchers reported online September 23 at arXiv.org.

Entropy quantifies the number of different microscopic states that a physical system can have while looking the same on a large scale. For instance, an omelet has higher entropy than an egg because there are more ways for the molecules of an omelet to rearrange themselves and still remain an omelet than for an egg, notes cosmologist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

A black hole is the entropy champ because there are myriad ways for all the material that has fallen into it to be arranged microscopically while the black hole retains the same numerical values for its observable properties — charge, mass and spin.

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Having a more reliable entropy estimate is important, says Egan, because for life or other complex phenomena to exist, the entropy of the universe must be less than the maximum possible value. Consider, he notes, when hot water is poured into a cold bath. Initially the hot and cold water are separate and the system is orderly — it has low entropy. But once the hot and cold water are thoroughly mixed, the entropy is maximized and no further heat flow is possible.

In the case of the universe, Egan says, “we’d like to know [when and] if the entropy will eventually reach a maximum value, marking the end of all dissipative processes, including life.” Physicists have dubbed that maximum entropy “heat death.”

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Not everyone agrees that the higher entropy contributed by supermassive black holes puts the universe closer to heat death. Theorist Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles says that because the extra entropy is locked inside the black holes, the rest of the universe should have lower entropy and be further away from heat death.