**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[MadMojoMonkey]

I consider equilibrium to be similar to infinity. One can approach it while never actually getting there. Much like continual halving will approach zero while never getting there.

Then we're talking about something besides thermodynamic equilibrium.

IRL, particles move around with random motions, and some of them overshoot the equilibrium point, then oscillate about a mean value. Except remember that in Thermodynamics, we're talking about the statistical average of usually at least an Avogadro's Number of particles. Those oscillations about the mean are frequently very tiny and are averaged out over the ensemble of particles.

Well... I mean... some equilibrium points are like you mentioned. Theoretically a critically dampened oscillation will behave as you describe. In practice, there is QM stuff that usually crops up before infinite time has passed.

So the idea is that eventually the universe will be expanding faster than light speed?

Replace "eventually / will be" with "already / is"

That's gonna take some time to wrap my head around.

OMFG, I KNOW, RIGHT?!

I still don't fully get it, but I'm pretty sure Veritasium did a video about it.

How can this ever happen? Does this mean new space is being created between two given particles?

I think this is the current hypothesis, yes.

Or that one particle is moving away from another at >c, creating the illusion of "expanding" space?

No, definitely not this.