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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.
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?
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)?
...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'
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
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.
The idea that more people are alive than have died is an urban myth; if you google it, estimates are that about 100 billion people have lived and died over the last 50k years. So we're outnumbered by dead people by quite a bit.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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...
I just did my best to read the original paper. (I'm a physicist but this is out of my field). Take-away items (assuming this and a paper it references are correct)
1. It is possible for the universe to have ended up in a meta-stable state as it cooled. Think a little like super-cooled water that will suddenly turn to ice if there is a source of nucleation. The lifetime of this state (given what data we have) can be pretty much anything. The fact that it hasn't decayed yet suggests that if the universe is metastable the lifetime is at least billions of years, and it could easily be MUCH larger. The lifetime is exponential in some unknown parameters.
2. One form of instability would result if the mass of the Higgs, the mass of the Top quark and some coupling constants had a certain relationship. We do not currently have a sufficiently accurate measurement of those numbers to know if the universe is stable, metastable, or unstable - the last being disallowed because we are still here. It is interesting that we are anywhere near the stability boundary and that may imply some interesting physics.
3. If we build a Linear Collider (another $10B machine) it will be able to measure the required parameters to sufficient accuracy to tell if the universe is stable or metastable.
Note: if the universe is metastable there is not imaginable technology that could cause a phase change (read destroy the universe). There are cosmic rays with 10^21 ev enrergies (a billion times higher than LHC) and there have been some head-on collisions on the history of the universe. Nothing we are going to do will trigger a state change.