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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.
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?
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.
So Douglas Adams nailed it when he wrote that the universe would be replaced with something bizzare, whereas others believe that it alreaty happened.
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/
...oh wait, he won't be able to.
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'
Same as everything else - nothing, nothing at all - then get into a huge argument about something completely unrelated and mind-bogglingly unimportant.
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.
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?
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.
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.
How about they keep their cotton picking nose out of it for once. They are the arrogant branch of a dysfunctional government of a petty country on a backwater planet circling an unregarded yellow star in the unfashionable arm of a rather ordinary spiral galaxy. This is quite plainly out of their jurisdiction.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You could do worse than nothing. Often they do the wrong thing instead.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
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.
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.
Same as everything else - nothing, nothing at all - then get into a huge argument about something completely unrelated and mind-bogglingly unimportant.
Sadly you are wrong. They will conveniently leave the "billions of years from now" part out and stir up fear so that they can funnel more money that we don't have into whomever's pockets that bought them dinner the previous night in the name of preventing the end of the universe.
And if they can spin it so it's the "terrorists" that will be ending the universe, well then there is just no stopping them...
I'd like to say the sarcasm tags should be implied there, but I'm not at all sure at least one senator/representative won't try it...
you do realize that this is a place for discussion so headlines that provoke conversation and debate are appropriate?
No.
Dark Reflection
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
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."
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)
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.)
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.
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).
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 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.
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?"
I can't do you a car analogy, but here's the very basic idea (massively watered down, physics friends - I know, I know, but let's try to keep this simple enough):
Consider a ball rolling on a set of hills and valleys. For our purposes, let's make it simple and 2-dimensional, but you can generalize quite easily. A 'vacuum' for this system equates to being at the bottom of a valley, as this is a point of lowest energy, and things tend to roll down and end up in the bottoms of valleys. The shape of the hill (called a potential which relates strongly to potential energy you might recall from high-school/college intro physics) determines the physical properties of the particle like its mass.
However, the valley you're at the bottom of might not be the lowest point overall in the system, it might just be a local minimum. This is what we call a 'false vacuum' in particle physics: A point in the system which looks to all intents and purposes to be a minimum in a small locale. However there could be a lower point.
Now, when you're just dealing with classical systems (like a ball rolling on a hill) this is all well and good. However in a quantum theory the wavefunction describing the particle can happily have non-zero values anywhere and (again very roughly speaking) this means that you can 'tunnel' from one minimum to another with some probability - breaking your false vacuum and moving you to another one. This tends to be in a downward motion - you go to a vacuum lower than the one you're in. This means that the mass of the particle will appear to change, and so all the physics you observe will be completely different.
These effects can related to all kinds of cool physics - the ones often talked in about popular-ish media are inflation/cosmological constant type things - if there is some energy associated with a particle being in a certain state, this can look a lot like a cosmological constant and produce and accelerating universe. However, if this isn't the global minimum there is a probability at all times that the tunneling effect mentioned above can happen, turning off the acceleration.
Anyway, hope that helps. Sorry I couldn't give you a car analogy, but here's an effort at one:
You (the particle) get a Mustang for your 17th birthday (lucky you!) and all your friends are jealous. You then start to think that since all the cars you see around you are worse than yours that you have the best car ever, and act accordingly. However, there is a chance that one day you'll catch glimpse of something sublime - an E-type. And your world view will change - there's a better car out there! Yours is only a false "best car ever", and now you have to act according to your new knowledge, which changes your behavior. Eventually you save up and buy yourself an E-type, moving to the 'true vacuum' / best car ever, and all your interactions with your friends are now based on this new car.
OK, that was godawful. But I tried.
Hah, billions. Billions are so 1990's. We use trillions now.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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
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%
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?
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?
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 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)