We
may have survived
the Large Hadron Collider, but the Higgs boson still has a trick up
its sleeves. According to new findings on the "Higgs-like" particle
discovered last year, the universe will end in a bubble of doom.
"If you use all the physics that we know now, and we do what we
think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Lykken
said. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable.
At some point, billions of years from now, it's all going to be wiped
out."
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."
Lykken put it slightly differently: "The universe wants to be
in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble
of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere,
and it will spread out and destroy us."
But you've got time, it likely won't happen for a few billions of years:
More
No comments:
Post a Comment