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If Higgs Boson Calculations Are Right, A 'Bubble' Could End Universe
- wlesieutre 14y agoBoth interesting and terrifying if this is true. The idea sounds a lot like Vonnegut's ice-nine, only for space instead of water.
- jfasi 14y agoIf there's nothing you can do about it, and no discernible consequences (we'd all cease to exist if it were to happen) why get upset?
- Aardwolf 14y agoBecause as a matter of fact it happens to be so tha
- austingunter 14y agoWell that was quick.
- h0w412d 14y agoA comment that survives the end of the universe? Shit what kind of computer are you using? And more importantly, don't ever let it fall into the hands of a spammer...
- muyuu 14y agoWell, it's not going to happen during our lif
- hardtke 14y agoIt's exactly like ice-nine. The universe exists in some sort of meta-stable state. The usual argument against this sort of thing happening is that we'd already be dead. Cosmic ray interactions happen all the time at very high energies, so these interactions have already been seen in the universe. The LHC, however, pushes the energy limits towards unexplored territory -- due the fact that it is a collider, the center of mass energy of the LHC may exceed the highest ever cosmic ray collisions.
- klodolph 14y agoThe LHC collision energy is around 7 TeV. GZK limit (theoretical maximum cosmic ray energy) is about 50,000,000 TeV. Particles have been observed with energies above the GZK limit. You know the Higgs Boson as the "god particle". Well, there's also the "oh my god particle", which was a cosmic ray with observed energy on the order of 300,000,000 TeV.
- throwaway2048 14y agofor reference, the single particle had about as much kinetic energy as a pitched baseball, consider that trillions of photons and other particles normally hit you every second. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_my_god_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_my_god_particle
- Retric 14y agoHowever, only a small fraction of this energy would be available for an interaction with a proton or neutron on Earth, with most of the energy remaining in the form of kinetic energy of the products of the interaction. The effective energy available for such a collision is the square root of double the product of the particle's energy and the mass energy of the proton, which for this particle gives 7.5×1014 eV, roughly 50 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider. So, still not an issue, but not quite as far from omg collision energy's. And still no where near what can happen in and near black holes.
- yk 14y agoBut the center of mass energy for a GZK proton colliding with a proton in the air is something like 100 TeV - 1 PeV. So still quite a bit higher than the LHC, but not by a factor of 10^7.
- hardtke 14y agoIf the highest energy cosmic rays are nuclei, the energies available for particle production are comparable.
- Keyframe 14y ago
- 3pt14159 14y agoEven if it expands at the speed of light, it would likely be outside of our observable universe though, right?
- klodolph 14y agoWell, if the theory is correct, it would not be observable until the moment we suddenly all died. But the important difference between "stable" and "metastable" is that metastable systems spontaneously collapse, whereas stable systems don't. According to the theory, we could be at a metastable vacuum energy state, which means that we could spontaneously drop to a lower energy state at any time. The difference between "metastable" and "unstable" is really just the time span involved.
- colomon 14y agoI found it very odd that the article seemed to insist we certainly had billions of years left -- how do we know the collapse didn't start billions of years ago?
- tribe 14y agoI believe the article mentioned that signs of such an event would be visible in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and right now we have not seen them.
- splat 14y agoSince the bubble expands faster than the speed of light, it would not be visible in the CMB. The reason that there should be billions of years left is just a statement about probability. Given that the universe has already lasted for billions of years, it would be very unlikely for it to end tomorrow (in fact the odds would be about one in a trillion). So at the very least the universe should last for at least about as long as it's lasted so far (though it could last much longer).
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- wcoenen 14y agoIf the Everett's many-worlds interpretation is correct, this could be happening all the time. But we can only experience one of the world lines where our universe does not collapse.
- Filligree 14y agoThe old quantum suicide argument? It's not an especially cheerful idea, to be honest. Even if that argument works -- and to be fair, this is about the best possible scenario for it -- it's too easy to generalize. There's no particular reason you should limit your self-identification to just the other branches you exist in in this universe. The full argument is a bit oversized for this site, but.. consider that there are branches where you've got the exact same past as here (as far as you can tell), except that you're actually living in a simulation being run by some alien. If you accept the notion of quantum suicide, and also provisionally this expanded version, then consider that even if the proportion of timelines in which you live in simulations (and thus, the credence you should give to such claims) is low now, a sufficient number of vacuum collapse events could actually change that over time.
- baddox 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Darwinism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Darwinism is another fun read.
- wcoenen 14y agoI don't mind that generalization. I feel that modal realism[1] is the only sensible way to explain why anything exists at all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism
- waps 14y agoBelieve it or not "you"/your person/soul is completely part of the world, and thus getting duplicated without any knowledge of any of the others. No part of you exists independently of the laws of quantum mechanics. So a more correct interpretation would be : there's infinitely many copies of you, each experiencing slightly different event, and while most survive (an infinite number), every moment in time there's a few (still an infinite number though) die horribly every moment in time. Sooner or later it will be one of you reading this. :)
- jsien7 14y agoNot with current accelerator energies. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v302/n5908/abs/302508a0.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v302/n5908/abs/302508a0...
- jessriedel 14y agoYour article is referring to an accelerator-induced transition. The OP refers to a spontaneous transition.
- aremie 14y ago"If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," That's exactly it, there is much more physics to discover and count in. People always think they know everything, at every point in history.
- mistercow 14y agoI'm pretty sure that scientists don't think they know everything. What leads me to believe this is that they keep building theories and doing experiments.
- richforrester 14y agoNo, they don't. If we thought we knew everything, we'd stop researching. They're called "theories" for a reason.
- nitrogen 14y agoThat's not exactly the way the word "theory" is used in a scientific context. I'd say the scientific use of the word is more like that in "music theory". It's not intended to imply a lack of confidence.
- scarmig 14y agoReminds me a bit (apocryphal?) of the first test of the atomic bomb at Trinity. All the famous scientists had put down bets on how big the explosion would be. Edward Teller, IIRC, had a macabre one: it would set off a chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere through nitrogen and hydrogen fusion. Calculations were done, and the possibility of it happening was shown to be one in a million. The test went ahead.
- gamegoblin 14y agoNot a very wise bet. Even if he won, it would hardly matter!
- raverbashing 14y agoYes, if they were right, it wouldn't matter much, but it would energy a lot
- martinced 14y ago"Calculations were done, and the possibility of it happening was shown to be one in a million." "shown"!? "supposed" you mean right!? Or is there one in a million chance of this happening any time a nuclear bomb is/was tested?
- Tuna-Fish 14y agoThat's not quite correct. The calculations disproved it to a certainty of one against a million. Or, to put it in another way, the data they had clearly showed that it couldn't happen, but taking into account all known sources of errors, there was a one-in-a-million chance that the data they had was the result of random errors.
- Filligree 14y ago..and a much larger chance that the scientists had made a mistake somewhere in the calculations.
- 14y ago
- krapp 14y agolisten: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go.
- 5partan 14y agoA self eating Universe? come on guys, i still struggle to make the change from the flat earth model to the geocentric model.
- adam-f 14y agoThis could be worse than the Silicon Valley and the housing market bubbles combined.
- dmd 14y agoIn their paper, Coleman and de Luccia noted: The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated. The second special case ... applies if we are now living in the debris of a false vacuum ... This case presents us with less interesting physics and with fewer occasions for rhetorical excess than the preceding one. S. Coleman and F. De Luccia (1980). "Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay". Physical Review D21: 3305.
- stephengillie 14y agoAs cited in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Vacuum_metastability_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Vacuum_metastabil...
- potatohead00 14y agoEven more proof that Douglas Adams saw this all coming "There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." [1] I can't believe I'm the first one to get this quote in :) [1] http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Douglas_Adams/ http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Douglas_Adams/
- dhughes 14y agoYou're not someone else did but the quote was something completely different, now you've gone and changed it to a bizarre new quote ;)
- yk 14y agoIt seems that npr is talking about this paper [1]. Where a simple Standard Model Higgs is assumed and then extrapolated to the Planck mass. (We already now that this does not work.) And the news is not that we all are going to die ( we knew this already), but the news [2] is actually that such a naive extrapolation gives a value for some coupling very close to 0 at the Planck Mass, which might hint at some interesting phenomena. In addition the paper makes a nice sales pitch for a future electron-positron collider. [1]http://pubdb.desy.de/fulltext/getfulltext.php?uid=23383-59716 http://pubdb.desy.de/fulltext/getfulltext.php?uid=23383-5971... (pdf) [2] News for me, I am no specialist.
- jasonzemos 14y agoThis reminded me of Schild's Ladder: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schilds_Ladder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schilds_Ladder) > ...the experiments unexpectedly create a bubble of something more stable than ordinary vacuum, dubbed novo-vacuum, that expands outward at half the speed of light as ordinary vacuum collapses to this new state at the border... The local population is forced to flee to ever more distant star systems to escape the steadily approaching border...
- 3pt14159 14y agoWow this book looks f'ing awesome. I'm definitely going to read it.
- muloka 14y agoThis sounds a bit like the plot of Fringe.
- powertower 14y agoSo the bubble forms within, not outside? Because I've heard it both ways before, and even in the article it mentions something about two bubbles that are separate from each other colliding. In the later circumstances... What I can't understand is how two universes that are "separated" from each other by a vacuum (no space-time fabric) could ever collide... As they are separate by a pure nothingness, they for all purposes exist inside different realms and have no chance of ever colliding as there is nothing for them to travel through to reach each other.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- arthulia 14y agoPhew, from the title I thought we were talking about soap bubbles. Just one more thing kids of this age would have to grow up without.
- michaelfeathers 14y agoPhysicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote ... 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." Carpe Diem.