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Does the Higgs Boson Reveal Our Universe's Doomsday?
astroengine writes "If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension one theoretical physicist calls boring. 'It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself,' Joseph Lykken, with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said. 'This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe.'"
Nothing of value will be lost.
News and science channels never waste a second when it comes to predicting doomsday.
No worries, folks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
What's congress going to do about it?!
Jesus rapturing us up, meteors wiping us out, the sun expanding into a red giant, the heat death of the universe--take your goddamn pick.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Betteridge
Think of our children's children's children's children's children's children's...
If you get reincarnated, it is likely not in this universe anyways (there are more people alive at the moment that have died, ever, so they have had their last lives likely not here, as this will hold for any other planets as well at some time). So no worries.
If you do not get reincarnated, even less of a problem.
Still, fascinating physics!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Does the Higgs Boson Reveal Our Universe's Doomsday?"
Yeah, probably.
So Douglas Adams nailed it when he wrote that the universe would be replaced with something bizzare, whereas others believe that it alreaty happened.
What is your proposed solution? Abandon modern science and move back into caves? Call me up when you get ANY traction on that plan.
something catastrophic could happen! yeah, crazy. catastrophic. what is it? well, it's bad. in the future. wow, what a problem! but it's boring. it's totally boring.
seriously, could it be more generic? at least the nbc article mentions a false vacuum event. christ.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Under the Big Bang theory, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself, likely at the speed of light. The tell-tale sign will be redshift instead of blueshift being observed from Earth to various astronomical bodies. What I'd like to ask is how does this change our understanding of the ultimate fate of our universe?
I don't wanna know.
I'm not in favor of ignorance, but sometimes, it's better to live for what time we have and not depress ourselves with the toxic inevitable far-off doom that awaits us.
Let us enjoy our lives free from meta-mortality.
Sounds like Scientology to me.
How do you know we don't want to enter it? It could just as easily be the best thing that ever happened to mankind. And how would stopping discoveries help to fix the world? Help it revert back to the dark ages (after fossil fuels run out)?
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnn-anchor-asks-bill-nye-if-global-warming-had-anything-to-do-with-a-near-earth-asteroid/
IIRC, some law of physics or other says everything will still be there no matter what.
Only a bit jumbled. Anyways I doubt I'll be around so idgaf.
...oh wait, he won't be able to.
I'm afraid there's plenty of support for that plan...
It has been theorized before and this will just be more evidence of a cycle of big crunches and big bangs.
Can't we just stop this discovery period and go about fixing the current issues in the world.
Ignorance is a "current issue".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm sort of suprised by this... I always thought that the universe, at 13.8 billion years, probably had several trillion to go. Now I find out that it's really just middle aged?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
At some point the "hunt" for these special quantum particles is going to go to far and lead us into an area we as of now don't know we don't want to enter. Can't we just stop this discovery period and go about fixing the current issues in the world.
What? Are you seriously proposing that we stop doing scientific research? Yes, of course, what happens 10 billion or more years from now is completely irrelevant to us as individuals. It might be relevant to our species, however, and the physics behind it is relevant always. Pretty much all of our technology is based on research like this that was once considered merely of academic interest. Who knows, maybe we could discover how to travel to other galaxies by manipulating the Higgs field. We won't know until we try. And it's improbable that anything we invent will be all that much worse than the nuclear or chemical weapons that already exist.
And it's not a dichotomy: we don't have to stop physics research to solve all our current issues in the world. In fact, it wouldn't even help to do so. At all.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
This particle has already been banned in Kansas.
I like physics and I like some quantum theory but calculating that in 10 billion years the universe will disappear hardly seems important.
I wouldn't put too much stock in that number - More like one of those things that could already have happened and we just haven't noticed yet, or might not happen for trillions of years.
As a better way to think about it, take a 6 pack of bottled soda and leave it somewhere just below freezing for a few days. About half of the bottles won't have frozen. If you then open one of the non-frozen ones... Or set it down too hard, or give it a whack with a spoon, you can literally watch it freeze over about 5-10 seconds as a wave of ice sweeps out from one spot (the cap / the bottom / where you whacked it). It does this because supercooled water exists in an unstable state but just hasn't figured out how to freeze yet.
Same idea here, except on a universal scale. At some point, one tiny spot in our universe will "figure out" how to reconfigure itself into a more stable universe. That spot will then expand through the rest of the universe at the speed of light.
For all those that have thought the people of Earth should seek balance and be in tune with the universe, congratulations, it seems that we truly are!
Call the 911, pronto.
I like physics and I like some quantum theory but calculating that in 10 billion years the universe will disappear hardly seems important.
At least the prediction is testable (and hence, scientific) unlike the popular science descriptions of what happens to an astronaut falling into a black hole.
I'm curious now, but if there's an inherent instability, would the properties of physics slowly change over time, as its constituents begin to alter or decay?
we just need to construct a form of life that can live in the new universe's rules, decayed protons, whatever, then transfer our thoughts into it. Simple.
It would appear that you don't know what the word "theory" means. You used it where you more properly should have used "ridiculous, evidence free, superstitious presumption."
You're welcome. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nope. This kind of discovery, pushing the frontiers of knowledge, is the only thing we as a species do that's of any value. Spending all of our effort trying to "fix[...] the current issues of the world" would just drag us down to the lowest common denominator.
Let the current issues of the world fix themselves or die trying.
Will we have enough time to build the machine to figure out the Last Question? That seems like the obvious solution to the problem. Why wait for some random alternative universe to appear, we'll just make one ourselves...like William Bell in one of the alternative timeline.
The big bang theory does not require a collapse. It allows that as a possibility, but does not require it as an outcome.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
At least, from your point of view.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Stay sub-atomically stable, my friends.
At least you clearly pointed out what I first said, 10 billion years is the issue. If you can do scientific research that can assist the world in a decade, two decades or even 50 years then go ahead, if your doing research that has an expected date of 10 billion years then your wasting time.
I thought the Big Bang Theory was going to end with Penny and Leonard's Wedding. Or possibly the birth of Sheldon and Amy's alien love-child.
Is this the same guy that scrawled-out the Mayan calendar?
It does sound pretty similar to all the models I have heard of.
1) collapse in on it self.
2) keeping moving apart faster and faster until the universe is just one 0 energy, minimal density nothing.
3) keep moving apart faster and faster until you hit the speed of light, and than the fabric of space-time rips itself apart as dark energy pushes past boundaries that cannot be breached.
The only really interesting one with much hope is the Big Crunch (#1) as it could possibly lead into another big bang. And explosions are always interesting.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Seriously, we are all going to die. Not that we have to wait that long, though.
All tattoos and skinny jeans with nothing to say. Decreasing red shift.
You've got the shift backwards. Redshift is what we already see. It's how we know the universe is expanding.
science is full of shit
The the "true vacuum" spreads at the speed of light. It could be moving towards us and we would never know. Any signal revealing the edge would arrive simultaneously with the event. Shades of the Jame Blish "Cities in Flight" series.
The universe only collapses in on itself if it has sufficient gravitational attraction compared to the kinetic energy of its components. It is the difference between throwing a rock in the air and having it come back down (collapse) versus sending a rocket ship to another galaxy (obviously not going to fall back into the earth). The question of whether we would have a Big Crunch, keep expanding, or hit right smack in between the two (run out of energy on an infinite timescale) is an older question. Now that we know that the universe's components are actually *accelerating* away from each other, the Big Crunch does not appear to be a possibility.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
At some point in the past the Universe inhabitable for life. At some point in the future the Universe will again return to a state that is uninhabitable for life.
The meaning of life is to learn the secret of this box and escape it before the Universe ends.
Huh, interesting. Well if the universe is going to turn into a larger version of my bedroom, I hope I at least get to keep the Interwebs.
It's a fun bit of trivia that draws headlines and can be used to talk to kids about the destruction of the sun, death by meteor, and other fun apocalypses. And who knows: maybe Boson Degredation can be detected somehow, like carbon dating.
Science isn't supposed to be useful. That's engineering. Science is supposed to be insightful in unexpected ways, leading to more understanding.
The ______ Agenda
What do you expect from a type 13 planet?
There's a very good chance that solving how to prevent the end of the universe, or how to survive in/after it, will produce some very other interesting things as a side effect. That's how science works.
The AC is right and I stand corrected on that mix up!
I've been to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Been there, done that.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we're just at the edge of stability, in a "metastable" state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Nature that "without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away."
These seem to imply:
1. a Higgs boson is a metastable state, would decay in top quark
2. the half-life of this metastable state is billions of years
3. the moment even a single such decay event happens, the other Higgs bosons around would "sense" this and spontaneously decay as well, in a sort of chain reaction happening in a Laser medium
If assumption 3 is valid, then 1. and 2. say it can happen any time (with very low probability, but not impossible)
But, I wonder, what exactly suggest that 3. is a valid assumption? For example, not all spontaneous fission reactions that we know of are chain reactions.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Please please please castrate yourself and anyone related to you.
I think you swapped blueshift and redshift...
Now the surprise is ruined...
Very good explaination! But I beleive you need a car reference to explain things on Slashdot. You should forget the 6 pack in your car over the weekend. When you hit a bump it freezes.
Thats a good point!
I am so tired of the 'Mankind's existence is valueless' bravado. We are a billion to one galactic coincidence that has risen to sentient thought and self-awareness. This astronomical concurrence alone is worthy of continuance. If we finally evolve beyond primal tribal and religious bickering, we can get on with off planet settlements... and we have still a cushion of ten billion years to settle other galaxies.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Under the Big Bang theory, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself, likely at the speed of light. The tell-tale sign will be redshift instead of blueshift being observed from Earth to various astronomical bodies.
Is this what you get when you learn your astrophysics from a mass-market broadcast TV show that uses the name of a physics theory as a double entendre and focuses more on sex than science? Or rather, the alleged inability of scientists to understand sex or even behave like normal humans?
As has already been pointed out, the big bang theory does not require a subsequent collapse.
And we're already seeing redshift as the universe expands. It's blueshift we'll be seeing when it contracts. The Doppler effect lowers the apparent frequency of waves as the source moves away from us, and red is lower than blue in frequency.
The question is when should scientist speak to reporters. This is far to silly to report. And irresponsible for scientist. It used to be that economics was called the dismal science. Then we have astronomy. And now physics.
Does it matter ?
sheroobi ... shattered shattered ...
So, what you're saying is that we need to have more scientific research done on hair growth and longer erections, right?
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
If the theory of our universe being in the shape of a torus is correct we are near the end of this universe!
So far all the theoretical data holds up, explaining the rapid expansion during the beginning of our universe using gravity and not "dark energy". As well as the reason we aren't swimming in equal parts anti-matter, the big bang ejected matter and anti-matter from it's two opposing poles (hmm this sounds familiar). Using the observed period of early rapid expansion the resulting estimated time we meet up with our anti-matter twin is only 1.8 billion years! The portion of this theory I find comforting is that when we collide with anti-matter on the outside of the torus shape the resulting collision ends up being the birth of a new universe.
I like to picture it as the universe using a wave pattern that's mirrored by it's anti-matter twin, the vital wave pattern that we see repeated in different mediums that were born billions of years apart (light and water). It's an exciting theory and much more comforting than the big freeze. For those of your out there that got a little wet or hard reading this check out Howard Bloom and his book "The God Problem", the book presents a fascinating take on our history that I wasn't aware of and paints a beautiful picture of reality using patterns.
Fricking tens of billions of years to go, and some mortal speck of dust dares call it unstable.
At those timescales, *anything* could be deemed unstable.
Look at nano-timescales and any old soap bubble is frickin' stable. It's just a matter of prespective.
Figures the week I make an offer on a house this has to come out. They could have let me live in blissful ignorance for a few days, but NOOOOOO!
Damn Realtors and their lies about owning my own little part of the universe, forever if I want she said. LIES! FALSE WITNESS!
And screw the HOA if they think I'm going to waste the short time I'm here on lawn maintenance.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Well now that you've explained it to the dim-witted it surely won't happen:
Bill: If only we could go back to two days ago before your dad lost his keys, and steal them.
Ted: Well, why don't we?
Bill: Cuz we don't have time, dude.
Ted: We could do it after the report.
Bill: Oh, yeah! Where should we put 'em?
Ted: How 'bout behind this sign?
Bill: OK. Woah! It worked! Right, so when we're done with the report, we have to remember to do this or else it won't happen. Except it did happen! Ted, it was you who stole your dad's keys!
Come to think of it, if Kurzweil is right, we'll come across the singularity within our lifetime. So, still assuming Kurzweil is correct, we'll be alive to witness the eschatological event scientists now are just starting to postulate. Granted, we might not care about it now, but we will 10 billion years from now and regretting then not being able to do anything about it while we had the chance now.
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
Can't we just stop this discovery period and go about fixing the current issues in the world.
Ignorance is a "current issue".
Perhaps, but ignorance of events that will have absolutely zero effect on anyone living now, or any time into the foreseeable future? I'm fine with that.
Meanwhile, millions of children the world over continue to struggle just for enough food to keep them alive, every day. I think it's plainly obvious that is the sort of "current issue" OP was referring to. Granted, it appears their premise is that we may very well, someday, discover something that is generally bad for humans, and that I don't agree with, but they do have a point about focusing energy and finances on discoveries that will impact life on Earth today, instead of wasting manpower and finances on discoveries that will probably never have any impact on humanity.*
So, pardon me if your "discoveries-of-shit-that-won't-happen-until-long-after-humanity-is-completely-extinct" don't excite folks such as myself as much as you might like.
* I'm certain there are many here who actually think we humans will still be around in 10,000,000,000 years. To those folks, I make the following request: Stop watching so much science fiction, and start talking to some evolutionary biologists. They'll set ya straight.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Abandoning science altogether seems to me a bit of a knee-jerk reaction. Science is too useful for us. Though we could at least make movies like Event Horizon a standard part of basic education for scientists.
The article says the bubble moves at the speed of light. But I've seen claims that space is expanding or will eventually be expanding so that objects far apart will be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. Does that mean this 'bubble' wouldn't reach everything?
(Somehow, this is making me think of a Greg Egan novel).
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
OMFG! Our universe is going to puff out like a fart in a car in tens of billions of years!
What is the president and Congress going to do about this looming catastrophe?
I need to feel safe from this NOW!
HALP!
THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
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Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
if the collapse itself is at the speed of light, won't we see the shift just as we collapse?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Recent observations show the expansion of the universe accelerating, not slowing. The force responsible for this is not well understood, but is (mis)named "dark energy". We expect an accelerating expansion, not a collapse.
In the vacuum is unstable, that is a completely different kind of catastrophe which will spread through empty space at the speed of light.
This is just more chicken feather voodoo physics from a bunch of crackpots and con artists within the physics community who are facing the prospect of seeing their funding reduced. This is complete BS in the not even wrong category. Physicists are completely clueless as to the nature of the universe. Under the assumption that everybody else is just as clueless as they are, they feel they can safely conjure BS as of thin air and sell it to a credulous public as bona fide science. But not everybody is stupid.
Here is a simple test that will prove that physicists like Joseph Lykken are clueless. Ask any physicist, what causes a body in relative inertial motion to remain in motion? I guarantee you will come face to face with either ignorance or outright superstition. If physicists don't even know what causes motion (their denials notwithstanding), how valid are their pronouncements about the birth and demise of the universe? Not very much, in my opinion.
Obvious troll is obvious. Also, speaking of "voodoo physics from a bunch of crackpots", anyone reading his troll post should also have a look one of his prior troll posts:
But do not let the preceding get you down because a new and fabulous era of space travel is about to be born. Soon, physicists will wake up from their stupor and realize that their understanding of motion is fundamentally flawed. We are on the verge of a breakthrough in physics that will make almost every current approach to energy production and transportation obsolete. It is based on a new analysis of the causality of motion. Essentially, Aristotle was right to insist that motion is caused. As a result, we are swimming in an immense lattice of energetic particles, an ocean of clean energy, lots and lots of free energy. Soon, we will understand enough about the lattice to exploit it for energy production and propulsion. Our future vehicles will move at tremendous speeds and negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring damages due to inertial effects. Floating sky cities impervious to earthquakes, tsunamis and bad weather, unlimited clean energy, earth to Mars in hours, New York to Beijing in minutes... That's the future of energy and travel. It will happen in your lifetime.
TROLL DETECTED! Please, sir or madam, do remind us who the crackpot is? You've no ground to stand on. "What have you done for yourself today?" Aside from post nonsense on /. of course... :)
Well done. +1 Crafty.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
But depending on the shape and certain cosmological constants it is also possible that the expansion will end and the universe will contract. It is open to debate wether this scenario also requires the reversal of time which means that we will be required to live life in reverse. Red Dwarf is clearly on the side that this will happen. I don't know how we would tell.
In any case this finding is interesting because it implies that neither scenario will have the opportunity to come to pass. A quantum fluctuation will end the universe first. The only question is, under the expansion model, if there are parts of the universe that one day might expand at the speed of light, so the fluctuation might never arrive at the edge. Given current values, that might happen when the universe is 100 billion years old. So if the universe only has 10 or 20 billion years left, that will not happen. The universe will just end faster if it is in contraction.
Maybe we can look at it this way. Life on Earth can end by orbital decay, the sun exploding, a meteor hitting it, or man made climate change. Unless we are launching huge number of gravity assist space craft, or figure out how to keep the sun from exploding, the most likely scenario is still that a meteor wipes us out because we are not likely to survive enough to see anything else. Which is what this is saying. We no longer have to worry about whether the universe it to end in heat of cold death. It is simply going to be annihilated.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
On the other hand, if doomsday had proven to be 70 years away, it would have changed some parameters on what tradeoffs are acceptable.
Big Governments are going to Bust this earth before the Boson Bust's us.
It's probably too late already, ever since nuclear weapons were discovered. Mutually assured destruction, can't top that.
That's a relief. For a minute there I thought he said "Millions".
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
While whimsically silly, there is also the notion that a perfectly featureless, flat spacetime of perfect homogeneity is already a singularity, with no need of collapse. The ripping of spacetime from dark energy could therefor be seen as seeing the big bang from the inside of the singularity. (The next big bang would occur in more spacial dimensions than our universe currently occupies.)
This is a very different doomsday scenario caused by an anomaly in the energy state of the background quantum field, such a rupture or lower energy state bubble would then expand at the speed of light eating the existing universe and transforming it to a new one, transitioning to a lower field state, bad news is that the 'new universe' would be very different. Some scientist believe that more powerful LHC could even trigger such an anomaly.
Will "we" meaning "evolutionarily uplifted intelligent monkeys" be around in 10 billion years? The answer is probably "No". Will the results of our intelligence still be kicking around, possibly even consciousnesses born from us? There's no reason that can't be a "Yes".
However, it will certainly be a "No" unless we know what we need to overcome.
We could certainly all die off before getting to that point, but if it is at all possible to survive that long, there is a real chance that we will, in some form. Nothing about evolution makes that impossible.
In the end, if we maintained, in the past, that the ability to turn lead into gold or some other ridiculous alchemical trick was not worth the time of pursuing, we'd never have gotten as far as we have, and made it possible to have even the population we do have. In effect, future science has already fed and clothed millions, maybe billions of children who would have starved if we'd just did something like spend all our time and money on trying to farm more, using old fashioned agriculture without an understanding of chemistry.
Oops, I got the units wrong again. Looks like it happens ten billion nanoseconds from now....
Actually, it's a case for the many-world interpretation. According to it, the Universe is constantly being destroyed - we just perceive the event branches in which it's not destroyed. Since 'true vacuum' bubble nucleation is probably a quantum event there should always be a branch that avoids its nucleation.
It's not really the same (layman's perspective, not a physicist). A good rundown is the Wiki page on false vacuum. Basically, the universe in a metastable state means that the base level of energy we see, our vision of a vacuum, is actually still higher-energy than what it could be if something got tweaked slightly. We're in a valley, but not the lowest valley in the area. On the off chance that one tiny part of the universe spontaneously tweaks itself, jumps the ridge between the valleys, and settles at the "true vacuum" low-energy state, it would catalyze the adjacent tiny bits of the universe to do the same thing, which would then catalyze the ones next to them, and so on in an expanding bubble.
It's not the same as the "Big Crunch", because it's not the universe collapsing in on itself. It's the universe suddenly "shifting" to a more stable arrangement. A poster above mentioned watching a supercooled coke bottle freeze after you tap it - that's a great analogy. The coke is cold enough to freeze, but since it's sitting undisturbed, the liquid is stable and happy and just sits there. Tap the glass, and suddenly it's no longer so happy - a wave of ice spreads outward from where you tapped it, as the coke all shifts to the lower-energy ice instead of liquid.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
1. You don't know the answer until you make this calculation. In fact, we still don't, since this hasn't really been thoroughly vetted yet (or so I understand). Maybe he would have calculated the end to all of our energy issues for the next billion years, making a lot of starving-children-scale problems trivial to solve. Instead, in this instance, he calculated an unusual doomsday in 10 billion years. You roll the dice either way. If you see that some current calculations, when extrapolated into the future, show doomsday, should he just shut up and keep it to himself? That doesn't help the starving children any more than reporting it does.
2. People aren't fungible. Good high energy physicists don't necessarily make good third-world food distributors.
It's not like the entire LHC was made just to figure out if 10 billion years from now, doomsday would happen. It was to figure out real things, which may eventually have real impact. Once it got data, it's not like we're starving a dozen kids rather than having one guy make calculations out of the data we have.
Perhaps, but ignorance of events that will have absolutely zero effect on anyone living now, or any time into the foreseeable future?
Who says high-energy physics only has applications 11 billion years into the future? I think it has a track record that speaks for itself. If we ever hope to wean off of fossil fuels, it will be developments using technologies pioneered by high-energy physics research.
Meanwhile, millions of children the world over continue to struggle just for enough food to keep them alive, every day.
So you'd use the money to invade and stabilize those countries? Starvation is almost entirely a political problem. If you have a way to feed the world on a few billion, you'll have lots of takers.
I'm certain there are many here who actually think we humans will still be around in 10,000,000,000 years.
It's possible that we'll be stored and emulated by whatever comes next. It'll be like real-life seances. Just pull down the emulation of your great-great-great-great-great-great (etc) grandfather and show your friends. Hell, maybe that's what is happening right now!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Physicist here. Motion is induced by gradients in potential energy fields, and the transfer of potential energy to kinetic energy is associated with acceleration and deceleration, not with motion itself. See this image (where H is the total energy of the system, and x_i and p_i are the position and momentum, respectively, of the ith particle in the system).
If you can do scientific research that can assist the world in a decade, two decades or even 50 years then go ahead, if your doing research that has an expected date of 10 billion years then your wasting time.
Uh huh. And then someone researching this 10 billion year problem, trying to discover if they can test whether it will really happen, or if there might be some unknown physical principle that will prevent it, makes a discovery that enables other researchers to develop, in a mere 10 years, a better battery and slightly prettier screen for your iPhone 17.
Then you say "Gee, why couldn't you have been working on that the whole time instead of wasting your time studying the fate of the universe."
Which leads the researchers to their ultimate goal: Measuring emissions from your head at the moment you make that statement, they discover the elusive Irony Tardino.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's not really the same (layman's perspective, not a physicist). A good rundown is the Wiki page on false vacuum. Basically, the universe in a metastable state means that the base level of energy we see, our vision of a vacuum, is actually still higher-energy than what it could be if something got tweaked slightly. We're in a valley, but not the lowest valley in the area. On the off chance that one tiny part of the universe spontaneously tweaks itself, jumps the ridge between the valleys, and settles at the "true vacuum" low-energy state, it would catalyze the adjacent tiny bits of the universe to do the same thing, which would then catalyze the ones next to them, and so on in an expanding bubble.
It's not the same as the "Big Crunch", because it's not the universe collapsing in on itself. It's the universe suddenly "shifting" to a more stable arrangement. A poster above mentioned watching a supercooled coke bottle freeze after you tap it - that's a great analogy. The coke is cold enough to freeze, but since it's sitting undisturbed, the liquid is stable and happy and just sits there. Tap the glass, and suddenly it's no longer so happy - a wave of ice spreads outward from where you tapped it, as the coke all shifts to the lower-energy ice instead of liquid.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
But, I wonder, what exactly suggest that 3. is a valid assumption? For example, not all spontaneous fission reactions that we know of are chain reactions.
It's called a false vacuum. The section you want is on bubble nucleation. Basically, the bubble created has a less interior energy than outside so the outside energy flows in which causes the bubble walls to expand until everyplace is now at the new lower energy.
In his book Cycles of Time, Roger Penrose attempts to look before the Big Bang, and after the end of our Universe.
The general idea is that in the far future the universe is so uniform and cold that it becomes completely uniform, with no sense of scale. All the block holes have evaporated, all the sub atomic particles have decayed away into photons. At this point the universe undergoes spontaneous rescaling, into a very compact, bounded, hot uniform object, busting with all the energy that existed in the original universe.
If I read it correctly, this could be interpreted as the cold death of our universe is the inflationary period of the following one, and the rescaling event is the big bang.
The interesting thing is that he makes testable predictions. The ghosts of energy ripples of cosmic events the old universe should be imprinted on the structure of the following genesis.
The problem being that most of the stuff that would be needed to fix the horrible humanitarian problems of the day are not matters of science. The same people and equipment that *can* perform this research quite probably can't be redirected in a meaningful way to address those problems. For example, monsanto research yields great advances in food production... that are subsequently constrained to protect their business interests. Better for the world to suffer than they not get compensated fully for everything. In the 'first world', you got to figure out a way to get the scientific research without playing into models subverted by greed. Not a problem that science can overcome. Additionally, the best science can hope to do is produce gobs of food to effectively dump on the populace. We've been able to do enough along those lines to know how that ends up, those in power still control the supply, but local capacity for food production is reduced. People are still hungry, but now are more dependent that before on outside help just to get to status quo. The critical problem is beyond the realm of science to address, corrupt and/or powerless legitimate leadership resulting in abuse of what relatively small amount of resources are there.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This used to be a well-worn tol on Slashdot, in the early days. "How can you care about X when millions of childer starve to death/dies of cancer/trololololo"
Something's gon very wrong here when this tripe gets modded up.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I don't think Doppler applies to light. It's more of a Theory of Relativity thing. Although, you are right about the colors.
Oh God, not this Aristotlean nonsense again. Nothing keeps or is needed to keep an object in motion. Something (as in a transfer of momentum and energy) is what you need to make an object stop.
It is certainly true that you are not equally clueless as physicists.
The enemies of Democracy are
You're a physicist, I presume.
The idea here is that the background state of our universe is a so-called "false vacuum" that will at some future point decay into the true ground state, destroying our universe in the process. That's boring.
By far more interesting is the possibility that the Higgs mass has been driven to just above the line of instability by some new physics. This is the first genuinely "that's odd..." moment to come along in high energy physics for quite some time.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
If the descendants of Homo sapiens don't figure out how to manipulate the HIggs field within 10 billion years, they will deserve extinction.
So a Higgs Bosun walks into a church. The priest says "we don't allow Higgs Bosuns in here."
To which the Higgs Boson replies, "but without me, how can you have mass?"
In his book "Cycles of time", Roger Penrose tries to look before and beyond the Big Bang.
The general idea is that when the universe will suffer a cold death - all the atoms have decayed away, all the black holes evaporated and all the photons have redshifted, The universe looses then loses all dimension, and becomes an very small, uniform, very hot thing, containing all the energy of the prior universe. A new big bang.
We may be the inflationary period of the next Universe!
The interesting thing is that cosmic events in the old universe should have left traces on the distribution of energy in the new one.
So the idea is testable.
You can't predict the future. If we had taken your advice 50 years ago, we would be a lot worse off today than we are now. We'd have all the same problems, but be less able to deal with them. Yeah, so maybe learning that the universe will vanish in some billions of years is meaningless to us today, but maybe by understanding why that is, we will learn more about the universe today.
Perhaps, but ignorance of events that will have absolutely zero effect on anyone living now, or any time into the foreseeable future? I'm fine with that.
Meanwhile, millions of children the world over continue to struggle just for enough food to keep them alive, every day.
Why do these two things have to be mutually exclusive?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I believe this covers the important aspects of this story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjNBzyLqDPM
The LHC, even when increased in power, cannot cause such an event because we have already observed stronger events in space, and our continued existence is proof that those energies do not cause such a catastrophe. Thus, the lower energies of both configurations of LHC cannot cause the same catastrophe.
In a sense, the energies we observe from space put a lower bound on the 'unsafe' area of particle accelerator energies.
who is to say this isnt the loop repeating itself?
Perhaps, but ignorance of events that will have absolutely zero effect on anyone living now, or any time into the foreseeable future? I'm fine with that.
That's your choice, but I'm not.
Meanwhile, millions of children the world over continue to struggle just for enough food to keep them alive, every day.
What's so special about human life? It's the fact that we're capable of understanding the universe we live in. Personally I think that we live for this understanding. The reason those millions of starving children are important is because they or their descendents may one day help to figure out something we don't yet know. If this weren't the case, they might as well die, why preserve that life?
So, pardon me if your "discoveries-of-shit-that-won't-happen-until-long-after-humanity-is-completely-extinct" don't excite folks such as myself as much as you might like... I'm certain there are many here who actually think we humans will still be around in 10,000,000,000 years. To those folks, I make the following request: Stop watching so much science fiction, and start talking to some evolutionary biologists. They'll set ya straight.
So if we're all going to be gone at some point, why should we waste any time protecting and helping anyone alive today? We're just a speck in the universe's time, that essentially appeared a moment ago, and will be gone a moment after. Under this scenario, who cares if anyone lives or dies? Why would you waste any of our resources helping anyone? Aren't these resources better spent discovering some cool information about the wondrous universe we live in? I'd like to spend our limited time here finding out something about those things which will last far more than we will. By definition, if it's going to be here long after humans are extinct, it's more important than humans.
Yeah, you don't agree with me. That's ok. But you're not going to convince me that there's anything more important than the work you consider unimportant, so you might as well give up, and devote your time to whatever you consider important. I promise I won't interfere.
Raises a good point in my mind. If we theorize some more and discover that yes, it's possible for us to 'crack' part of the universe hard enough to push it out of the metastable state, well then it sure is a damn good thing we theorized it before we did it by mistake while testing something else!
Having the ability to do that seems unlikely, but we do keep pushing boundaries for science.
So, both sides of a false dichotomy get modded up "insightful" on slashdot these days. Good to know. March of the Morons, anyone?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The "current issues in the world" are not fixable. They are part of humanity. Always have been. Always will be. Fixing them has been the pretext of politicians since time immemorial. Have they been fixed yet? What is this magical solution that no one in all of history has ever been able to find?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Are you seriously proposing that we stop doing scientific research? Yes, of course, what happens 10 billion or more years from now is completely irrelevant to us as individuals.
How about 100 years? If there really is a lower vacuum state (and honestly I don't buy that there is), then we're probably not far away technologically from being about to generate it once in the lab. Then you have worry about not just someone somewhere on Earth ending the universe as we know it, but to some degree someone anywhere in the rest of the universe whose lightcone will intersect with our future in a relatively short period of time.
Archie Pu, is that you?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
What if: They discovered exactly what they created ? They stating that they are creating situation close to big bang ... - breaking material in unnatural way.
Why unnatural ? - just because of big bang happened just once ( at least for us ). Now they are simulating those conditions, increasing the chance to get out those conditions something.. - that already did not happened before.
Another thing to think of: Something highly unstable can be only in unstable conditions for it. How they can know all conditions of universe ? They does not know even for sure conditions in another galaxy. All they know for sure is just best guess. They does not know for sure results of interaction between galaxies. How can they be sure, that those conditions they created in unnatural way - really are not compensated somehow in the nature - at the time they would happen in natural way, if could happen at all ? Nature does not have artificial particle colliders on every tenth planet for any tenth star of any tenth galaxy to call those conditions they created as exact replica of something "natural"...
If a bubble that propogates at C does form it does not destroy the entire universe only that portion inside of its hubble volume.
If the chance for us is on order of tens of billions of years given the current age of the universe we should statistically be able to detect these sorts of bombs going off by observing changes upon objects within our hubble sphere made by false vaccume explosions outside of it.
Wait, are you suggesting they will figure out how it's going to cause the universe to end and make a big red button for it? Because that would be seriously badass. Just saying. I endorse this science, it may not be very humane, but to be badass, totally worth it.
Ugh. I don't know why they're making that particular claim, because vacuum decay should be a property of spacetime (and therefore shouldn't be dependent upon the speed of light).
But yes, if vacuum decay is limited such that it travels more slowly than the expansion of the universe, you would have a "hole" with the decayed state in it which occupied a progressively smaller and smaller fraction of the universe.
Under the Big Bang theory, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself, likely at the speed of light. The tell-tale sign will be redshift instead of blueshift being observed from Earth to various astronomical bodies. What I'd like to ask is how does this change our understanding of the ultimate fate of our universe?
Based on what we currently know this is incorrect. We clearly observe a dark energy dominated universe. There is currently no substantive evidence a "big crunch" will ever occur.
Ruling out:
The ice caps melting,
A meteor being crushed into us,
The ozone layer leaving,
And the sun exploding;
We're definitely going to blow ourselves up.
Egan explained that ten years ago http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild's_Ladder#section_1
I don't think 3 is the case. This is how I would interpret it, although the TFAs are sorely lacking in info. The higgs boson governs the higgs field - the bosons are required for it to opperate and have any effect. The higgs field is CRITICAL to the universe behaving the way it does - if it were not there (or had a different 'value'), physics would look VERY different, to the point where we are dealing with a different set of particles with a different set of fundamental forces. http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-known-apparently-elementary-particles/the-known-particles-if-the-higgs-field-were-zero/
So my guess would be, that they estimated in 10 billion years (give or take some) a particular local area of space time will experience enough higgs bosons having decayed that the higgs field colapses. It would be the collapse of the higgs field that propergates and 'infects' the rest of space time. In the wake of the collapse, we would be left with a very different universe.
There are some major problems with this, in particular that particles aren't really a "thing" as such, they are just a label we give to ripples in a field that behave in certain ways and can act as a discrete object at times. (This is certainly the case for the virtual particles, I think it also applies to the rest although it is possible they may have their own existance independant of a field.) You could argue that we could still have these field ripples decay (since we know particles DO decay) and therefor have the higgs bosons drop out of existance enough to cause a problem - but as far as I know, they are being constantly emitted and absorbed in the processing of 'managing' the higgs field, and thus are constantly being (re)created and so should not be vulnerable to decaying.
IANAP
Wouldn't it be more like all matter would exist in the same space, so it would present the big crunch theory where all matter and energy converge? I don't any of it's true, I think there'll be a fundamental shift in matter states similar to just after the big bang.
In addition to the fact that precise numbers needed by the calculation are not available yet we do not know A LOT about the physical reality of the universe. A huge part of it we attribute to dark energy that is basically stuff we have no idea about. Not to mention the possibility of all of this be a simulation which would bring the possibility of changing the parameters of it.
"Think globally, act locally".
If it was millions you'd have to get to work on your Bucket list. Billions? Sure you can afford to sit down and watch braindead TV for another few years.
It's called a false vacuum. The section you want is on bubble nucleation. Basically, the bubble created has a less interior energy than outside so the outside energy flows in which causes the bubble walls to expand until everyplace is now at the new lower energy.
A bit strange... it's like saying that, on a surface of a lake in constant vibration (thus at higher energy than the "rest/ground state"), if somehow a patch of "surface at rest" develops, suddenly (with the speed of the surface wave) all the lake surface will be "dead and boring".
The above is a forced analogy and I user it only to set the context for my next question: what happens with the entire energy resulted from the transition, where would it "evaporate"? What other "particles" would be created in the process? What is the cross-section of these particles in interaction with the surrounding "unrestless void" ? How can you be sure that the interaction cross-section is big enough to cause a cascading effect similar with lasing?
After all, we may already have seen the results of energies higher than the necessary "metastable vacuum" would require to trip a "stable state", without experiencing any cascading effect. For all we know, this may be happening at any given time in this universe.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I don't think Doppler applies to light.
Although first noticed and generally illustrated using sound waves, Doppler applies to waves from moving objects (in your reference frame) in general, including electromagnetic. E.g., Doppler radar for weather observations. Radar is an em wave, similar to light.
Will this affect my reservation at Milliway's?
If you can't understand my point then it's not me who needs help.
lol what? I mean a big red button would be bad ass :P
Don't worry, it won't be boring. Think of it as a physical anti-singularity which shatters time.
I also haven't owned a television or received any TV broadcasts since 2001, so I'm not sure if you are referencing a real or imagined television show.
That said, while the big bang theory does not necessarily require a collapse, hasn't a collapse or movement together towards forming a massive singualrity (as it was during the big bang), one of the mainstream theories they teach in these astrophysics classes?
I wonder how certain they are of the time. I mean, if the universe wants to be a lower-energy universe, could it already have happened? After all, if the universe is popping at the speed of light, it would still take billions of years before it's all gone, and we wouldn't really notice, mmm, ever (we'd be destroyed before we realized what happened.) How certain are they that all of existence as we know it won't end... now!? Ok, well, obviously not then, but you see my point?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Meh? MEH!
Slashdot seems to be broken, I got like 20 email notifications for this post.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Quantum Mechanics is primarily a statistical pursuit, so saying the universe is going to end in 10 billions years, what they really mean is the universe is most likely to end then, it could actually happen anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 billion billion years; the real question is how much more likely.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'm almost certain I've read this story before.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What didn't I understand? It's a pretty simple point. Research of things occurring on a time frame of billions of years is useless, research of things that will show results in a few decades isn't.
Right? That's almost exactly what you wrote.
And since if you understood that researching things that'll happen billions of years from now could result in unexpected discoveries relevant on the shorter timescale you approve of, but that you don't know this when you begin researching, you never would have written something so stupid, I think I get the point quite well.
Feel free to elaborate. I'm sure there's a deep nuance to your point that I'm missing.
The enemies of Democracy are
It was doing really strange stuff for the monsanto topic too.
Positing Probabilities by series end:
Penny and Leonard's Wedding ~ 67%
Sheldon and Amy's alien love-child ~ 33%
Raj talking to women sober ~ 80%
Sheldon giving Walowitz respect 0.1%
"Under the Big Bang theory, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself, likely at the speed of light."
No. Seriously, look it up.
"The tell-tale sign will be redshift instead of blueshift being observed from Earth to various astronomical bodies."
Pardon? Various astronomical bodies (specifically: billions upon billions of galaxies) are currently not observed as having blueshift, but redshift.
But tell me, why for this quantity called "the action", the difference between kinetic and potential energy, is the integrated value of which between fixed starting points in space in time minimized?
And why is it this "principle of least action" can only be formulated for an energy conservative system, which means that you have to formulate the solution to that variational problem as a differential equation and add the energy loss terms as fudge factors on that differential equation?
I asked this question of one colleague with an ongoing DOE grant in Controlled Nuclear Fusion and another colleague whose degree is in Physics and gotten only shrugs. I asked this of a Mechanical Engineering grad student who is from Russia and he started saying about a "Legendre transformation" followed by a discussion of Feynman Diagrams where he lost me.
Does anyone outside of Russia understand any of this?
Theoretical physicist calls alternate dimension "boring". Alternate dimension claims it was "boring" theoretical physicist's mother the night before. Discussion went downhill from there.
We push boundaries for what we can do, but in a universe where black holes and quasars are common occurrences what we are capable of is still not much more impressive then banging two rocks together.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
That brings up a good point that statistic's in it's own right is a pseudo math, it doesn't answer anything, just makes some good and some bad guesses as to the general time frame. Statistic's is no more a proper division of Math then Scientology is a religion.
No, he's just not a total moron like you.
Well then you do understand which makes your first post ridiculous. The point is you shouldn't release statistical research which shows an event happening 10 billion years out. Release the news when you find something with in the current expected life time. Sure if in 20 years the iPhone 17's battery can last two days because of research done today then great. However if in 9.5 billion years the universe ends no one will care.
I read that and the first thought that popped into my head was: Somewhere out there is a universe where Sheldon said, "You know what, you're right. The only reason an engineer needs a doctorate is to teach engineering. You decided, 'Screw that, I don't want to teach a bunch of idiots. I want to make some really cool stuff.' Good for you!"
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I know, right?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
This kind of discovery, pushing the frontiers of knowledge, is the only thing we as a species do that's of any value. Spending all of our effort trying to "fix[...] the current issues of the world" would just drag us down to the lowest common denominator.
What sort of reasoning is this? One which assumes that it is impossible to fix the current issues, it would seem. A big assumption.
Otherwise, fixing the current issues of the world would result in milestone progress towards a better world, where we're better enabled to push the frontiers of knowledge.
If by vibration you mean heat and flow of the water, and by rest/ground state you meant frozen water, your analogy would work if you could supercool the lake below the freezing point. It would be metastable, as long as nothing nucleated a crystallization point, it would remain liquid, but any seeding of ice would quickly grow to include most of the water in the supercooled portion of the lake, releasing energy in the process.
interesting thought..
If the rip occurs OUTSIDE of our light cone, then we will *never* encounter the rip, because it is outside of our lightcone.
This means that this could already have happened in reference frames we have no possibility of experiencing, elsewhere in the universe, and that it will not have any impact on our frame at all.
(We already have galaxies with redshift values indicating superluminal rates of cosmic expansion between them and us. We see a freezeframe moment of extreme redshift of the exact instant that hubble expansion exceeded C. Such a galaxy could experience the quantum fluctuation, and we would never know, because its shock front would never reach us.)
On a positive side, this means that if WE create the fluctuation through science, we won't have doomed the whole universe, only the portions within our lightcone.
This makes me wonder though... since this is a decay to a more stable state for the vacuum, what possible candidate states are there, and what probabilities of creation? Our universe's spacetime could become little explosions of new physics, all different and strange, but still obeying the rules of hubble expansion from our current set of rules, and thus never touching or interacting with each other except under special circumstances.
Extrapolating out all the possible consequences of this would be entertaining. What WOULD happen if region A reconforms one way, and region B within A's light cone reconforms a different way, and they intersect? Etc.
While that notion may exist on the internet and in some people's heads... it doesn't exist in the heads of researchers who work with general relativity, including the colleagues I've worked with...
In order to trigger such an event by creating situations not already existing in nature, the "more powerful LHC" would either have to be the LHC scaled up to the size of the galaxy, or based on a technology currently unknown to us (... even wakefield accelerators would have a long, long ways to go).
Hey, high-energy physicists, try to not pop the balloon before the billions of years are up.
Ask any physicist, what causes a body in relative inertial motion to remain in motion?
Do you know why it remains in motion? Do you know why your answer to that question is true? Do you know why your answer to the second question is true? Do you know why your answer to the third question is true? Do you...
Any theory under such questioning* is going to at some point end up with some form of the answer, "because that is the way the universe." To say that alone makes someone ignorant or superstitious would only paint yourself with the same brush. If on the other hand, you have a theory that explains observations more completely or simply, that is a different story. But your approach here appears to be more of the former than the latter, whether through intent or bad communications.
*(If by chance your theory breaks this cycle, people won't care it solves physics and all of philosophy, but instead will value it more as a way to stop kids from asking "Why?" repeatedly.)
XAOS. I was playing around with XAOS once and it dawned on me that that is the nature of the physical universe, the fractal universe.
Sure does. It's Schild's Ladder.
I agree. But what if, what if we're looking in the wrong direction. What if Buddha was right and the secrets lie inside, not outside of us?
Correct, with a 100 billion stars in the galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies billion to one odds will have occurred 100 times in our galaxy alone. However I dispute that we have any clue how likely intelligent life is. For all we know every habitable zone planet we have found, and perhaps some of the non-habitable zone ones too, have life. Or the odds of life may be so overwhelmingly unlikely we are alone. We simply have no clue and can only make mildly educated guesses based on assumptions that could be wrong.
Essentially what you are asking is why are energy and momentum conserved since the laws of motion can all be derived from that. Emily Noether showed that for any conserved quantity there is a symmetry (note this is a purely mathematical proof). For energy this symmetry is translation in time I.e. the laws of physics today are the same as they were yesterday and the same as they will be tomorrow. The symmetry of translation in space gives conservation of momentum I.e. the laws of physics here are the same as the laws of physics where you are.
So effectively the laws of motion we observe are a direct consequence of the symmetries of the space time in which we live. When you add in relativity you get Lorentz transformations (which is undoubtedly what your Russian friend was talking about). Indeed we think of the fundamental laws of physics in terms of the symmetries they obey Since Noether's theorem and Lagrangian mechanics is taught in first or second year mechanics (depending on where you are) anyone with a physics degree should know this...
you fail.
Even in a fairytale singularity, matter does not get to attain the speed of light due to entropy.
Which only goes to prove that everything you think you know is bullshit.
Bwa ha ha! So glad to know I nailed it the first time. But wait, there is in fact a nuance here that I missed. It's not that they're wasting their time actually doing the research -- even though, you know, that's exactly what you said -- because obviously nobody should give a shit what you think is important to research or not. Obviously.
No, it's that they just shouldn't bother releasing their research until they've converted it into something you think is important.
And of course you think that's not ridiculous.
Since you're a Tardino emitter of intensity equal to the Large Moron Colider, let me explain: Releasing their research is how they make others aware of and interested in their findings, eventually enabling one of them to be the ones who discovers how to turn this into something you'd care about. Science is colaborative, you see, and you never know which other scientist might be the one to make the breakthrough; it might not even be someone who has their degree yet, and is only reading about this on /.. Notice how this is basically the same thing I already said? No matter. Now that I understand your point better, though, I think I can cut down to what you really meant.
You didn't really mean that it's a waste of time to do the research, or publish the research. You said those things, but that's obviously not what you meant.
What you really meant is that they're wasting their time telling you.
Which is also obvious. But not their problem. Don't click the link if you're not interested in things that won't go into your iPhone, you incurious clod.
The enemies of Democracy are
March of the Morons certainly describes you, since you're complaining about comments being modded insightful when you clearly don't know what "insightful" means.
Here's a hint: it doesn't mean "factually correct" or "I agree with this".
He'll just have to yell. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If by vibration you mean heat and flow of the water, and by rest/ground state you meant frozen water, your analogy would work if you could supercool the lake below the freezing point.
Well, while you are right, that's a big claim for the state of the universe. Because it will require the entire universe be in a "super-cooled" state; you see, there are quite a high number of events that would cause not only the tunneling but jumping over the metastable barrier, so that the probability of at least a "nucleation event" in the Universe seems to be very close to one. And still, the Universe seems to be warm enough for everything we know to continue to exist (or maybe it isn't that warm and we don't know it yet).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
If we theorize some more and discover that yes, it's possible for us to 'crack' part of the universe hard enough to push it out of the metastable state....
There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. (L. Cohen)
--
.nosig
I was under the impression that some were just more equal than others.
I'm sort of curious which axe gp is grinding... Because I can't quite put my finger on it. Creationism? Or just general feelings of superiority and/or rejection from university?
"There are Things man was not meant to know..."
"and Songs man was not meant to sing... "
"and THIS is one of them!"
-sung to theme from "Exodus"
(heard years ago at a Filksing)
I don't know, exactly. I'm assuming it's the same Aristotlean Physics Kook from quite some time ago with a new nick. They had a pretty extensive blog about how Newtonian mechanics was wrong and Aristotlean motion was obviously correct. Seemed like a bit much for just a troll. So, instead, I think it's your run of the mill Internet Crackpot who never studied any physics, came across one puzzling question, decided ignorance + a question + their genius = proving everyone else wrong. The rest is history and irrational slashdot posts.
The enemies of Democracy are
You're assuming that the metastable state would be nucleated by those high energies. Some of the potential nucleation methods discussed require much higher energies, well beyond the GZK cutoff, and/or particularly high energy densities. Others are based on methods not requiring high energies at all, making cosmic rays irrelevant, and instead amount to very low probabilities for other reasons.
You are correct. Even though in infinite time the bubble would expand to infinite volume, this would only affect a volume that was initially finite, if very large. The "edges" (cosmological horizon) of the affected volume would always outpace the bubble's expansion. (This is assuming the expansion of the universe continues. Its apparent acceleration might be just an artifact) However, there doesn't have to be just one bubble, nor does it have to arise in "billions of years". Nowhere and nowhen is safe... unless the Many-Worlds Interpretation is true. (to see why the MWI helps, see quantum suicide and quantum immortality)
Have you ever studied any actual statistics, at least beyond the cookbook stuff taught at the intro level that doesn't cover any of the derivation and basis? Statistics is quite rigorously derived and well defined. Assumptions and limitations are quite clearly laid out to those that pay attention. And to those that don't pay attention to such things, there is nothing special about statistics, as even basic arithmetic will give you a proof 0=1 if misuse it, and there is quite a lot of time wasted by people mishandling complex extensions to functions because they ignored basics.
It is tempting to make some analogy to how wrong it is in response to your own ending with an analogy... but I don't think it would do any good. Either you have never actually looked into statistics and need far more than a snappy one-liner, or have become so jaded that you ignore what you do know and are beyond hope.
And I had dinner plans a day after that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This isn't a fucking Civ tree with easy-to-follow lines of research. How the fuck would anyone know that this research doesn't lead to cheap energy, teleportation, ridiculously smart AI, or any number of other things?
You might as well bitch about guys who drew on Scotch tape with a pencil and discovered graphine, which may well pave the way for world-changing energy storage.
So pardon me if I call you a shortsighted ass, and that I'm surprised you're even reading /.
You're assuming that the metastable state would be nucleated by those high energies.
Yes, indeed (with the pedantic correction of: the transition from metastable state would be nucleated)
Some of the potential nucleation methods discussed require much higher energies, well beyond the GZK cutoff, and/or particularly high energy densities.
GZK is not necessarily an absolute cutoff: energies well beyond it are "allowed" to exist, just need to be closer than GZK horizon to the source producing them (over 100 Mly if memory serves).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
From our vantage point in the universe we can only see so far. Speed is limited by the constant of light but space itself is expanding. So two objects can be moving further apart faster than light.
Any effect that propagates at the speed of light can never catch up with the entire universe.
Of course, if we can, we should back-up our species to at least a few more planets. But we should not, IMO, aim to occupy ALL the living space denying it to other civilizations, present and future. Based on science and common sense I propose "Pax Galactica" - live and let live, golden rule and Prime Directive.....you get the idea.
It is likely that other civilizations have reached the same conclusion if they know their biology well and are enlighten enough to see further from their noses and realize that a conqueror style civilization even if it manages to crush all opponents (very unlikely) eventually fills all space and turns against itself.
Or possibly the birth of Sheldon and Amy's alien love-child.
That would be Sheldon's genetically engineered clone of Leonard Nimoy.
I am anarch of all I survey.
If the rip occurs OUTSIDE of our light cone, then we will *never* encounter the rip, because it is outside of our lightcone.
A lot of stuff happens outside your current light cone that you later interact with... in fact just about everything. Being outside the light cone doesn't mean you will never see or encounter it, it just means it can't be causally linked to you at the particular moment from any frame of references.
Even I can create a plan to fix the current issues. First of all people will stop being greedy, lazy, horny and violent. After that I can give more pointers on how to distribute food. But I really don't have to, because when nobody is greedy, lazy, horny, or violent the current issues pretty much solve themselves.
Great analog.
Every once in a while I come across a really good .sig here on slashdot. Yours made me smile.
<posted anonymously for reason of being hopelessly off-topic>
Sorry, but there is no reason to believe that the Higgs field acts like a supercritical fluid: I think your "analogy" is wrong.
So what they're really saying is, is that it's more likely to happen in 10 billion years (+/- a billion years) than it is in the next thousand years (+/- a hundred years). But no more likely to happen on Tuesday 29th September in the year 10,000,000,000 than in on Thursday 21st of Feburary 2013.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
ah... those are replies from the next universe along...
So, who do we need to tax and what do we need to restrict/ration/regulate to keep this from happening?
It's for the Children, after all.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"Looks like I, uh, forgot to carry the one."
-Professor Frink
between this and the Big Rip?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Well, I was going to release a paper explaining another effect can be ignored since it would take billions of years and hence it isn't relevant. I guess your argument is convincing, and I don't need to publish my results. Other scientists can just continue to repeat the calculations for themselves, each on figuring out it is billions of years in the future before deciding to not tell other scientists to move on to something else. After all, a priori I didn't know it was going to be billions of years and in good agreement with observations that it hasn't happened yet, so I had to at least do the calculations once. Maybe if enough people repeat it, it will still get published when someone makes a mistake and gets a much shorter answer.
I guess it is back to my work on nuclear modeling. I was studying the effects and predictions for the half-life of Xe-136. I'll need to find something new, because if I get a result that agrees with measurements of quintillions of years, I can't publish the results for that either.
No, but they can be mitigated. As they have been progressively for quite a few centuries now.
Perhaps, but ignorance of events that will have absolutely zero effect on anyone living now, or any time into the foreseeable future? I'm fine with that.
Meanwhile, millions of children the world over continue to struggle just for enough food to keep them alive, every day.
Why do these two things have to be mutually exclusive?
Because there are only so many research funding dollars to go around.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with studying cool, abstract physics concepts and their potential benefits... I just fail to see, in light of current events and situations, how such research is a worthwhile effort, when that money could have been spent researching something that will have a positive impact on the humans of today, like cancer cures or pollution fixes.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
point and match
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The universe is infinite, how can a tiny particle called Higgs boson generate enough energy to wipe it out?
Ever wanted a 'Big Black Hole'?. It is on the internet http://www.thebigblackhole.co.uk/
if you think that was his point you lack reading comprehension.
likewise for whatever moron modded him "troll".
his point is about perspective.
telling us yet another way in which the universe will end many billions of years from now is practically meaningless. here's some perspective: all of known human history, all 10k years of it, represents only 200-300 generations (avg lifespan between 33 and 50 years). Modern humanity is between 40k and 20k years old, depending on what you use as the basic (civilization/culture , agriculture, etc). homo sapiens sapiens (anatomical modern human) is only around 200k years old. the earliest original homo sapien is ~2 MYO, but it took nearly 90% of that time to get to Homo sapien sapien, and 99% of that time to get to modern humanity.
this event is scheduled to happen > 20 billion years from now ("tens of billions", ie at least 2 tens of billions). assuming its just 20B and not more, in 20B years life as we know it could evolve on earth >5 times. in fact, since many consider life to have evolved multiple times already, due to the various mass extinctions and whatnot, its even greater.
this time scale is so huge, so vast, it is beyond human comprehension. ALL of human history as we know encompasses just 200-300 generations of peoples strife, drama, success and failure. And we're talking about an event more than 400,000,000 (400 million!) generations into the future. there is essentially zero chance of our race having any impact on that event. hell, even if you consider it a Kevin Bacon linkage of civilizations, from us, to Alien A, to Alien B, Alien C, Alien D, and so on, serially through 26 other alien civiliations, the chances are still slim to none.
And meanwhile we have kids starving, wars being fought, greenhouse gases, etc etc etc.
That is the guys point: Perspective. Y'all could use a little.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
"the universe will disappear at the speed of light"
At the speed of light this process would take forever.
Not "a long time", forever.
It's a basic fact of there being a limited speed, and acceleration. Look up Unruh Effect.
Seriously, a slurp? A friggin' slurp??
I am so tired of the 'Mankind's existence is valueless' bravado. We are a billion to one galactic coincidence that has risen to sentient thought and self-awareness. This astronomical concurrence alone is worthy of continuance. If we finally evolve beyond primal tribal and religious bickering, we can get on with off planet settlements... and we have still a cushion of ten billion years to settle other galaxies.
...and I'm so tired of theistic arguments from otherwise apparently rational people. Self-awareness certainly makes it possible to assign some specific destination or goal for the system. But self-awareness doesn't confer any magical status to the system, selecting out a specific goal or destination for it simply because it is self-aware.
Seriously -- self-awareness is within reach of any species capable of modeling its environment and then inserting a representation of itself into the model. Is a cat self-aware? Certainly. A horse? Absolutely. There is nothing noteworthy or astonishing about the existence of self-aware systems, so there is nothing astonishing or special about our species. A recursive function call is self-aware, for crying out loud. Well, it's self-aware 'til the stack overflows, anyway. :)
By assigning some kind of magical status to self-awareness, your otherwise reasonable plea for a species-level sanity becomes a religious argument, indistinguishable from the "religious bickering" you are directing yourself to "evolve beyond." I think you are capable of appreciating just how ironic this is. What if your self-aware goal results in the extinction of your species? So much for the magical status you assigned to self-awareness, eh?
So, I guess this means don't make any plans past 20 billion years or so?
This is BS.
I'm afraid there's plenty of support for that plan...
Yeah reminds me of the Simpsons. Now, let's burn down the observatory so this never happens again!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
The sad part is, we'll never see it coming.
I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
I suppose you could treat friction as a conservative system with a gadzillion particles for each of the molecules. But generally speaking, there are mechanisms that transfer energy out of the system into "something else" (mainly heat). And I think I came across one old paper trying for a "variational" method on such systems, but mostly folks turn the Lagrangian variational problem into the Euler-Lagrange dif eq, interpret the terms as "generalized forces", and add friction forces. But then you incur the problems of numerical solution of differential equations whereas if you could keep things at the variational level, you can get better solutions because you can enforce the conservation of energy, momentum.
GZK is not an absolute cutoff, but gives a rough idea where we're not sure if there is much more energetic particles naturally occurring or not. There are probably still plenty at ten times or hundred times the cutoff, although at higher energies the interaction happens over much shorter distances and there are interactions that can happen much easier in potential sources, etc. The point is that if you start to need energies orders of magnitude above the cutoff, then it is not so obvious that such energies exist in the universe, especially in any appreciable quantity if the result is not a guaranteed outcome and has small chances of happening for any given particle with such energy. That is a rather steep contrast as opposed to saying something needs only a few orders of magnitude of LHC's energy, which is a point easily countered by the presence of such high energy cosmic rays.
You truly are an anonymous coward. An incomprehensibly babbling one. I have no idea how any of the words you wrote relate to my posts. I challenge you to spew your nonsense under your real identity. And take your meds please.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
As others have mentioned, most hunger deprivation in the world is a political issue, not a technical or distribution issue. See Norman Borlaug's work for an example
where simple technological effort saved the lives of millions of people. Scientific research always produces an understanding of how the universe works that pays
for itself. Solving political or societal food distribution issues is orthogonal to scientific research, and setting up a false dichotomy between the two is moronic.
If you want to feed the third world, get the first and second worlds to channel their entertainment spending into such feeding. Meanwhile, fund science---it pays for
itself.
Nature is funny, very funny. Arrogant little humans.
No My Problem.
In this case though, if the conversion os spacetime happens at the speed of light, and hubble expansion of spacetime between 2 points has an effective inflation that makes the two objects appear to be moving away from each other at faster than light speed, then if the rip occurs at point A, it will never overtake expansion, and thus never reach B, unless the expansion slows down.
This means that the entirety of the universe cannot be consumed. (Imagine: fuse burns at the speed of light, but new fuse is added faster than that. The lit part of the fuse will never reach the dynamite.)
You're an idiot. The point of research is to learn things we didn't know before. The goal isn't to solve a certain problem. When you try to only solve one practical problem you miss all the solutions that may be better but weren't obvious.
Yes, that is true, but has nothing to do with light cones, hence the previous comment complaining that being outside of a light cone does not imply that.