

If Higgs Boson Calculations Are Right, A 'Bubble' Could End Universe - Mitt
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/19/172422921/if-higgs-boson-calculations-are-right-a-catastrophic-bubble-could-end-universe

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

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

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dmd
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
As cited in this Wikipedia article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Vacuum_metastabil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Vacuum_metastability_event)

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potatohead00
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
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 ;)

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wcoenen
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.

~~~
Filligree
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.

~~~
wcoenen
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>

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jasonzemos
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...

~~~
3pt14159
Wow this book looks f'ing awesome. I'm definitely going to read it.

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yk
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...](http://pubdb.desy.de/fulltext/getfulltext.php?uid=23383-59716)
(pdf)

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

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

~~~
hardtke
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.

~~~
klodolph
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.

~~~
yk
But 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
If the highest energy cosmic rays are nuclei, the energies available for
particle production are comparable.

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5partan
A self eating Universe? come on guys, i still struggle to make the change from
the flat earth model to the geocentric model.

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powertower
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.

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3pt14159
Even if it expands at the speed of light, it would likely be outside of our
observable universe though, right?

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

~~~
nickmain
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-
light#Universal_exp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-
light#Universal_expansion)

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michaelfeathers
_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.

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aremie
"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.

~~~
richforrester
No, they don't.

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

~~~
nitrogen
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.

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

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jsien7
Not with current accelerator energies.
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v302/n5908/abs/302508a0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v302/n5908/abs/302508a0.html)

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

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muloka
This sounds a bit like the plot of Fringe.

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arthulia
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.

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

