If Higgs Boson Calculations Are Right, A 'Bubble' Could End Universe

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/19/172422921/if-higgs-boson-calculations-are-right-a-catastrophic-bubble-could-end-universe

by Mitt • 13 years ago

79 65 13 years ago

npr.org

wlesieutre• 13 years ago

Both interesting and terrifying if this is true. The idea sounds a lot like Vonnegut's ice-nine, only for space instead of water.

jfasi• 13 years ago

If 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?

Aardwolf2• 13 years ago

Because as a matter of fact it happens to be so tha

hardtke2• 13 years ago

It'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.

klodolph2• 13 years ago

The 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.

Steuard• 13 years ago

Just to be clear, none of the people in this article are claiming that producing Higgs boson particles is going to cause collapse of a (hypothetical) false vacuum. They're using the new data about the Higgs to learn about the existing state of the universe.

3pt141593• 13 years ago

Even if it expands at the speed of light, it would likely be outside of our observable universe though, right?

klodolph2• 13 years ago

Well, 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.

colomon2• 13 years ago

I 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?

apapli• 13 years ago

I gather so - we wouldn't be able to see it "coming".

chris_mahan• 13 years ago

it may already be coming... It may take another 100 million years to get to us...

russell• 13 years ago

If it's outside our observable universe, would it ever get here? Maybe our universe get nibbled around the edges but still survives.

dasil003• 13 years ago

Couldn't help noticing this post was 26 mins ago right now.

nickmain2• 13 years ago

Are you referring to the fact that the furthest galaxies are actually receding from us at faster than the speed of light (due to the expansion of space itself) ?

tpollo• 13 years ago

Lol, I'm pretty sure that's horse manure.

3pt141593• 13 years ago

Yes. How would the bubble reach us?

wcoenen3• 13 years ago

If 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.

Filligree2• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Darwinism is another fun read.

wcoenen3• 13 years ago

I 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

waps• 13 years ago

Believe 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. :)

NPC82• 13 years ago

>Sooner or later it will be one of you reading this. :)

O_O ...

Aardwolf2• 13 years ago

Can't work because "it" would have to predict the future...

When does it shift you to another parallel universe? At the moment your consciousness would get lost? At the moment your body gets wounded but your mind still experiences it? At the moment a bullet starts flying towards you?

What about dying from getting old, if "it" has to keep your mind alive, does it mean everyone eventually ends up experiencing a world where they get 10000+ years old while the rest doesn't?

wcoenen3• 13 years ago

> When does it shift you to another parallel universe?

According to this interpretation there is no "shift", just copies. In fact, this interpretation is attractive exactly because it doesn't have the weird feature of the copenhagen interpretation where the wavefunction collapses when it is "observed", whatever that means.

jsien7• 13 years ago

Not with current accelerator energies. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v302/n5908/abs/302508a0...

jessriedel• 13 years ago

Your article is referring to an accelerator-induced transition. The OP refers to a spontaneous transition.

aremie• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

I'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• 13 years ago

No, they don't.

If we thought we knew everything, we'd stop researching. They're called "theories" for a reason.

nitrogen• 13 years ago

That'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• 13 years ago

Reminds 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• 13 years ago

Not a very wise bet. Even if he won, it would hardly matter!

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Yes, if they were right, it wouldn't matter much, but it would energy a lot

martinced• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

That'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.

gwern• 13 years ago

It's not apocryphal. You can actually download the analysis they did and see the calculations for yourself. (I did; it was wasted on me.)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/rg/la602_vs_rhic_review/ (The link in Yudkowsky's essay seems to currently be down, but if you google the filename you find mirrors like www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf )

krapp• 13 years ago

listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go.

5partan• 13 years ago

A self eating Universe? come on guys, i still struggle to make the change from the flat earth model to the geocentric model.

adam-f• 13 years ago

This could be worse than the Silicon Valley and the housing market bubbles combined.

dmd• 13 years ago

In 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• 13 years ago

As cited in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Vacuum_metastabil...

potatohead00• 13 years ago

Even 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/

dhughes• 13 years ago

You're not someone else did but the quote was something completely different, now you've gone and changed it to a bizarre new quote ;)

yk2• 13 years ago

It 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=23383-5971... (pdf)

[2] News for me, I am no specialist.

jasonzemos• 13 years ago

This reminded me of Schild's 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...

3pt141593• 13 years ago

Wow this book looks f'ing awesome. I'm definitely going to read it.

muloka• 13 years ago

This sounds a bit like the plot of Fringe.

powertower• 13 years ago

So 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.

arthulia• 13 years ago

Phew, 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• 13 years ago

Physicists 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.

If Higgs Boson Calculations Are Right, A 'Bubble' Could End Universe

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