
What would a Higgs at 125 GeV tell us? - llambda
http://blog.vixra.org/2011/12/04/what-would-a-higgs-at-125-gev-tell-us/
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yread
Wow this is the first time I heard about unstable vacuum and that

> the universe could in theory spontaneously explode at some point releasing
> huge amounts of energy as it fell into a more stable lower energy vacuum
> state. This catastrophe would spread across the universe at the speed of
> light in an unstoppable wave of heat that would destroy everything in its
> path.

Also

>instability could also set in at energies around a million TeV

.. so if LHC was million times more powerful it could explore such
instabilities i.e push the vacuum out of the metastable state and trigger the
scenario above!? It seems I wasn't giving enough credit to the religious nuts
saying that LHC will destroy the world

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Sharlin
Yes; triggering a vacuum collapse is one of the three (EXTREMELY hypothetical)
doomsday scenarios associated with high-energy particle accelerators:

* Triggering the collapse of the vacuum to a more stable state

* Production of strangelet particles that convert everything to more strangelets

* Production of microscopic black holes that eventually swallow the Earth

First of all, all three require hypothetical extensions to currently accepted
physics, but the most compelling argument against these being possible is the
fact that thousands and millions of times more energetic events than what LHC
is capable of occur all around the Universe all the time, including in Earth's
upper atmosphere, and we're still here.

See <http://user.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html>

~~~
maeon3
Also, assuming there are advanced civilizations in our visible universe, none
of them have produced a universe destroying event... At least not for the last
14 billion years. We are safe.

everything going on at the lhc has already happened Near the earth. On the
plus side, if something does go wrong, you wont get a chance to worry about
it.

~~~
jordanb
I don't think we have to go that far. These particles exist in nature, but not
conveniently here on earth in the vicinity of test equipment.

The Universe produces very high energy events all the time -- supernova among
others -- and many of these have happened within our light cone, yet have not
thrown a wave of new vacuum at us.

~~~
sp332
Since the expansion happens at the speed of light, we would have no advance
warning. We couldn't "see" the event approaching us, since the event would
arrive at the same time as the light from it.

~~~
JanezStupar
That is if the event would have been instantaneous.

Otherwise it would probably be the most beautiful phenomena possible.

Also this event might have happened somewhere in the universe and never reach
us. Right?

~~~
sp332
Let's say the event happens 4 light-years away from us. It's not traveling
instantaneously, it's only traveling at the speed of light. So it will take 4
years to get here. But we will never see it, because the light from the event
will also take 4 years to get here, so we will be destroyed at the same time
that the light from the event arrives.

~~~
JanezStupar
Well if the phenomena was not instantaneous and would have some sort of
"flash" preceding the shock wave, for a couple of minutes. It could be
visible. And anything on that scale would be extremely bright and beautiful.

Its just an alternative to black wall you will never see or feel.

But honestly I have no idea which one is more likely.

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ghshephard
Perhaps more fascinating than the article itself, was the appearance of
particles that started moving across the graphs and text. At this early hour
of the morning I thought I was having some type of hallucinatory episode.

~~~
wladimir
I had the same WTF. White particles on a white background, making parts of the
text disappear. Site owners, please don't pull these kind of tacky javascript
tricks, especially not if we're meant to read the (difficult) text.

~~~
gegenschall
Me too. I instantly stopped reading to return here and see if anyone else
complained. Now I have to start over. -.-

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michaelcampbell
I didn't understand most of this article, but it was fascinating nonetheless.
It, combined with the comments (which also seem written by well informed
people), would make a great corpus from which to generate markov chains.

~~~
bigohms
As Larry David told Ari Gold in Entourage: "I dont know what you talking
about, youre talking chinese!" in all seriousness, i agree and am thankful
there are people dedicating their lives to answering some of these fundamental
questions.

~~~
CountHackulus
Small aside, "you're talking chinese" is a French colloquialism for not
understanding someone. So the quote is quite apt in this case.

~~~
bigohms
Good to know!

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jerf
Generally speaking I consider the Many World hypothesis unprovable, but
proving the vacuum is unstable is one proof I'd accept. For a sufficiently
unstable vacuum, that would imply that the vast majority of our futures end in
vacuum-instability death, and that our continued existence is actually a
universe-scale Quantum Suicide result; we can never observe a wave front of
total death coming at us at light speed. If Many Worlds is true, it wouldn't
matter how what percentage of our futures are wiped out in total light-speed
annihilation as long as the survival percentage chance is non-zero.

~~~
jessriedel
An extremely large or infinitely large universe would also be compatible with
this anthropic argument, without invoking many worlds. (The philosophical
caveats are legion here, since both quantum mechanics and the anthropic
principle is involved.)

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petercooper
Well, if Doc Brown used 1.21 gigawatts to go back in time and the "God"
particle is at 125GeV, perhaps we learn that God turning back time would draw
9.68 million electron amps.

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chris_gogreen
the snowflakes are slowing firefox down

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rkon
I can't imagine the talk of vacuum instability and universe-destroying
explosions will make the general population very supportive of this project:

"World's Most Powerful Laser to Tear Apart the Vacuum of Space"
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-
news/8857154/Worl...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-
news/8857154/Worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-tear-apart-the-vacuum-of-
space.html)

