Photo: The CERN Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, built at the cost of about 4 billion Swiss Francs.
As far as physicists can tell, based on their current theories about matter and energy, the known universe could vanish at any moment.
This event has been labeled, ‘The Big Slurp’. Which I had previously thought was a sugary drink available at 7/11 convenience stores. But now I understand it’s one of the more popular theories about the end of all existence.
To get a clearer picture of the end of everything, I dug up a couple of articles about the “discovery” of the Higgs boson, which is a relatively large, but nevertheless invisible, atomic particle that makes a momentary appearance inside massive scientific machines, when other atomic particles are made to smash into one another at very high speeds.
A momentary appearance, meaning, 10-22 seconds. One gazillionth of a second.
This apparent (but temporary) appearance in 2012 by a Higgs boson further suggests the presence of the so-called ‘Higgs field’ everywhere in the universe. Which, I gather, is sort of like a football field but much, much bigger.
Scientists had been waiting for a Higgs boson to appear for 50 years.
Then one appeared, for one gazillionth of a second. These were very patient scientists
If it were me, I would have given up waiting after a couple of weeks.
One important thing about this surprise appearance: it strongly suggests to certain physicists (who believe in invisible things that seem to appear for one gazillionth of a second) that our universe exists in a precarious state called a ‘false vacuum’.
I myself own a very real vacuum — old, but still serviceable — but the physicists are talking about a different kind of theoretical vacuum, that’s somehow related to the ‘Higgs field’. In the imaginations of these physicists, our universe (theoretically) exists in a state known as a ‘true vacuum’, or else as a ‘false vacuum’. If it’s a false vacuum, then the slightest little thing could (theoretically) cause the universe, or at least parts of the universe, to collapse into non-existence, without so much as a “How d’ya do”.
The fact that this hasn’t happened, over the estimated 13 billion years since the Big Bang, should give us hope.
But maybe we’ve just been incredibly lucky, so far? Theoretically speaking.
From NBC News, from 2013:
If the ‘Higgs-like particle’ discovered last year is really the long-sought Higgs boson, the bad news is that its mass suggests the universe will end in a fast-spreading bubble of doom…
…That’s one of the weirder twists coming out of the continuing analysis of results from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, which produced the first solid evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson last year…
Some physicists are optimistic, that — even with the occasional (and brief) appearance of Higgs bosons — the universe can continue to exist for a long, long time, in spite of being “unstable”.
But a few are expecting the “bubble of doom” to come along any moment now. Like, for example, Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab.
“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.”
That alternate universe would be “much more boring,” Lykken said.
For example, there would be no more physicists.