Physics
Higgs Boson Will Destroy The Universe Eventually
Mark Hoffman
First Posted: Feb 19, 2013 01:43 AM EST
Astonishing news about the end of the universe--and this is NO joke--were announced today, saying as much that the Higgs boson particles are unstable and will one day cause the destruction of our whole universe by swallowing it. Ongoing calculations by scientists about the Higgs boson particle that was spectacularly discovered last year by the LHC at CERN in Switzerland indicate that it's not looking good for the future of the universe, they said Monday.
"If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.
"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," said Lykken, who is a member of the science team at Europe's LHC, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.
The discovery of the Higgs boson, which still needs to be confirmed by extensive calculations and further experiments, would help to answer a key question about how the universe came into existence some 13.7 billion years ago - and likewise how it will ultimately end.
If it wasn't for this unfortunate (for the universe, that is) and surprising problem with the Higgs boson, the universe could exist forever because it was shown (2011 nobel prize) that it actually accelerates its expanison! But says Lykken: "This [my] calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there'll be a catastrophe."
"A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative' universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us," Lykken said, adding that the event will unfold at the speed of light.
The question about the long-term stability of our universe was already standing in the room before the Higgs discovery, but scientists could get the actual calculations going once the boson's mass began settling in at around 126 billion electron volts - a critical number it turns out for figuring out the fate of the universe.
The calculation requires knowing the mass of the Higgs to within one percent, as well as the precise mass of other related subatomic particles.
"You change any of these parameters to the Standard Model (of particle physics) by a tiny bit and you get a different end of the universe," Lyyken said.
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First Posted: Feb 19, 2013 01:43 AM EST
Astonishing news about the end of the universe--and this is NO joke--were announced today, saying as much that the Higgs boson particles are unstable and will one day cause the destruction of our whole universe by swallowing it. Ongoing calculations by scientists about the Higgs boson particle that was spectacularly discovered last year by the LHC at CERN in Switzerland indicate that it's not looking good for the future of the universe, they said Monday.
"If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.
"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," said Lykken, who is a member of the science team at Europe's LHC, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.
The discovery of the Higgs boson, which still needs to be confirmed by extensive calculations and further experiments, would help to answer a key question about how the universe came into existence some 13.7 billion years ago - and likewise how it will ultimately end.
If it wasn't for this unfortunate (for the universe, that is) and surprising problem with the Higgs boson, the universe could exist forever because it was shown (2011 nobel prize) that it actually accelerates its expanison! But says Lykken: "This [my] calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there'll be a catastrophe."
"A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative' universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us," Lykken said, adding that the event will unfold at the speed of light.
The question about the long-term stability of our universe was already standing in the room before the Higgs discovery, but scientists could get the actual calculations going once the boson's mass began settling in at around 126 billion electron volts - a critical number it turns out for figuring out the fate of the universe.
The calculation requires knowing the mass of the Higgs to within one percent, as well as the precise mass of other related subatomic particles.
"You change any of these parameters to the Standard Model (of particle physics) by a tiny bit and you get a different end of the universe," Lyyken said.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone