Funny, this in a way reflects some recent thoughts I've had.
Basically, I don't believe in the heat death of the universe because it seems to me that gravity (for one thing) would always keep things swirling, squashing, exploding and the rest, over and again,
ad infinitum. I'm no cosmologist though and have probably missed something, like what the consequences of all the fusible elements having been fused into stable isotopes might be. Nor do I have the time or patience to sit down and work out even the vaguest approximation of what that might mean.
What would be the final state of this heat dead universe? Is that even a relevant question given that it implies the absence of any observer, at least in the conventional materialistic sense? What would be the final state of matter? It seems to me that the flaw in the "heat-death" model is that it fails to make a place for conscious agency - or would that, too, have met its end under the (purported) relentless march of entropy?
Consider something akin to what occurs as temperatures approach ever closer to absolute zero, except with time instead. The time scales, with so little going on, would stretch out to an even more mindboggling extent than length of time it took to get to that point of ever-so-nearly-but-not-quite heat death such that that 'final moment' could only ever be asymptotically approached. This means the process scales out exponentially and at that level of even more mindbogglingly huge expanses of (apparently ultimately boring) time, processes would come into play which we have not yet even dreamed of.
This seems to resonate with the idea that there are further dimensions beyond this everyday space/time - dimensions of which certain areas of physics are apparently firmly convinced, in order to make stuff work. There alone is reason to consider that this very likely isn't the whole story.
Would protons really be entirely stable under such a time scale? And electrons? Is there somewhere that has a clear and concise explanation of the alleged heat death anyhow? Does not quantum indeterminacy cause particles to randomly boil out of pure nothingness? It appears that a bored universe always manages to cook up something for itself to do...
“There is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call 'a field of force'. The field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-à-vis the universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work."
― Jacques Bergier, quoting Fulcanelli