Higgs data shows alternate reality will SWALLOW UNIVERSE
That Higgs Boson we all got excited about last year because it would reveal the mysteries of the universe? One boffin now says his analysis of the data suggests the Higgs is, in fact, an obituary for the universe. Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston yesterday, Joseph Lykken of …
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Re: Oh, well...
And just enough time to sanitize your telephone too. Or make a documentary about the trials of living with impending doom!
Re: Oh, well...
Or 3 pints of bitter and 2 packets of peanuts?
Re: Oh, well...
it could be that this is the adequate explaination for the thing with the moon
Re: Oh, well...
re: it could be that this is the adequate explaination for the thing with the moon
Been reading 1Q84 then?
Will the bubble have rounded corners? Only Apple's lawyers can save us!
Like all none apple products it will have an infinite number of perfectly flat corners.
---> @ iuniverse2.0
filled with uppity girls drinking flavoured water and walking staring at their chick iphones omg'ing all over twittbook and faceter to prove their worth and great knowledge of hollyworld while professing right from wrong and how killing animals is wrong while eating fish sushi. (urrgh my ex-gf comes exactly to mind, completely itarded oh and SO tech savvy, like.. come on, cause like, all these apps I have), and men's jeans only coming in 'skinny' where men are longer men but we should all just be 'metro' (isn't that ironic)
-- just fkn shoot me since the hipsters refuse to all die
Spider Robinson covered this a few years ago
One of his main characters - Nikola Tesla - described this possibility, and the entire book revolved around its prevention. I believe the book was "Callihan's Key", and one of his better ones.
Re: Spider Robinson covered this a few years ago
James Blish also examined this "bubble universe" topic in 1959 with his Cities In Flight saga. In the final book, A Clash of Cymbals, he describes a collision between two universes (this one of matter and another of antimatter, since the Higgs wasn't known about back then) and how this entire universe would be engulfed as a result.
Re: Spider Robinson covered this a few years ago
Or Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder. Course in that case the new universe was expanding at 0.5c, so you could zip along in front of the boundary and poke it from a suitably equipped ship.
Re: Spider Robinson covered this a few years ago
There's something like it in Greg Egan's Disapora, too, although his bubble isn't advancing at c. [[WARNING: he spends half the book is more than 3 spatial dimensions.]]
I think A Clash of Cymbals is stretching a bit. (But why hasn't Hollywood made any of them into movies?)
Re: Spider Robinson covered this a few years ago
Stephen Baxter has also played with this idea in the "Malifant" series of stories (Space, Time, Origin and Phase Space - especially Phase Space).
Re: Spider Robinson covered this a few years ago
Not dumb and stupid enough for Hollywood. I watched the last Batman film with the family, over 2 hours of my life I won't get back again (guys, you could disable any fusion bomb with small arms, you just need to disrupt the trigger. More holes in the plot than in a tonne of P-doped silicon). By comparison, Blish's wildest fantasy is close to sober fact.
When?
"...at some point billions of years from now..."
Ummm, if they're unsure of their calculations, what's to stop it happening next wee...<carrier lost>
Re: When?
The alternative reality universe will probably pop into existence in Cupertino next week, to fill the alternative reality void created by the death of Steve Jobs.
tags: troll, Apple, James Blish.
Re: When?
I'm more concerned about how. Like a supercollider?
Would it get cancelled out if they made a mini black hole at the same point in space?
Re: When?
It might *start* the alternate universe. Irony, eh?! In an attempt to understand the soap bubble, we invent the pin.
"A little bubble of... an ‘alternative' universe will appear"
You say yes, I say no.
You say stop and I say go go go, oh no.
You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello hello
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Hello hello
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Re: "A little bubble of... an ‘alternative' universe will appear"
Any Beatle reference, no matter how irrelevant, is always worth an upvote!
Re: "A little bubble of... an ‘alternative' universe will appear"
Thank you, Sir. The road to irrelevancy is paved with good intention.
yawn
The string theorists have been saying this for years. Susskind covered this quite well in The Cosmic Landscape (recommended largely math free high level overview of the largely current state of the art of cosmology). I guess the experimental physicists are once again surprising the theorists by starting to prove the theory empirically already.
Re: yawn
How can you have a maths free overview of cosmology? Other than the one that starts "it's big, it's very big..." and that has been done already.
Re: yawn
It goes back well before the string theorists. I've not read this paper but I'd guess he's basically talking of the Higgs in some domain transitioning from some false vacuum he thinks it's in to a lower-energy state (which may itself also be a false vacuum), which would trigger inflation in that domain. (Whether that to us would look like a little black hole or an onrushing wall of death is a different issue and I don't know the answer to that, though I wouldn't actually be surprised if it were the former which is lucky, since if it were the latter I wouldn't have time to be surprised or, indeed, know what was happening.)
Anyway, my point is that the original model of inflation proposed by Guth used almost exactly the same idea; he put the Higgs initially in a false vacuum, and when the Higgs tunnels into a true vacuum it inflated. It doesn't work very well as an inflation, though it can be patched up if you extend the standard model carefully enough, but it would certainly play havoc with the nice, ordered universe we currently have. So this idea goes back at least to the early 1980s.
[Pedant's note: Guth's inflation wasn't actually the original inflation, it was merely believed to be so because the iron curtain put a damper on the Russians' attempts to communicate. I think Linde claims to have built an inflationary model either at the same time as or slightly before Guth - but then, Linde *always* claims to have done something in the 1970s. Certainly Starobinsky proposed an inflationary model well before Guth did, although he built it on a modification of the Einstein-Hilbert action rather than a scalar field. Entertainingly, Starobinsky's R^2 inflation still fits the data at least as well as any other model, and better than most, whereas Guth's inflation died a death within a year or two. My suspicion is that Starobinsky got it right at the first attempt...]
Re: yawn
"I guess the experimental physicists are once again surprising the theorists by starting to prove the theory empirically already."
That's kind of the entire point of experimental physics, dude!
Re: yawn
How can you have a maths free overview of cosmology? Other than the one that starts "it's big, it's very big..." and that has been done already.
You have obviously not read Stephen Hawkins' "A Brief History of Time". Go and pick yourself up a copy from your nearest charity / second-hand book shop. IIRC, the book has one equation in it, which just goes to show you can give quite a comprehensive overview of cosmology entirely empirically, and make quite a lot of money from selling it in book form.
Re: yawn
Yes to truly understand cosmology you have to be a math nerd. I have never seen anybody able to explain non mathematically in but the vaguest terms for example why string theory needs a certain number of dimensions (just the math breaks down, the strings vibrate too much, etc). For the other %99.9 of humans though Susskind, Hawkings, and Brian Greene do a good job of at least giving a taste of what the Ed Witten of the world are working on and what a wonderfully weird reality we live in.
Re: yawn
>That's kind of the entire point of experimental physics, dude!
A slight inside joke that the one thing seemingly consistent in modern physics is the theorists underestimating the ingenuity of the experimentalists. You don't necessarily need a particle accelerator as big as a galaxy to continue to push the boundaries of what we can prove.
Re: yawn
>It goes back well before the string theorists ... Linde *always* claims to have done something in the 1970s.
String theory has been around since the early 70s as far as concerning bosons. So its probably more apt to treat them as contemporaries but yes you are correct that it came out of the inflation studies. I only said string because I learned it from a book by a leading string theorist and misspoke.
Re: galactic sized accelerator mechanism
I think you have touched on the cause - at the rate accelerators are getting bigger, in a billion years or so, one will fill the known universe, so forcing an alternate universe to bubble into existence.
An alternative could be to stop Moore's law for accelerators.
Alternative view
To put it another way... A huge handkerchief is coming.
Please book me a table.
Re: Alternative view
Could be a rampant star-goat, of course.
Some people think it has happened already...
... or are there other explanations for the fact that I actually had to browse to the _second_ page of comments to find the first Hitchhiker reference?
Re: Some people think it has happened already...
Other explanations being that you missed the references on page 1?
When bubbles collide!
Are we alluding to the fact here that the mass of the Higgs is "low" and so the vacuum may "decay" to a lower-state energy with high probability (because not stabilized by a high Higgs mass?) I can only say... HIGHLY speculative. Let's talk about angles on pins instead.
Additionally. with some luck, the universe will be expanding so quickly by then that any of the multicolored bubbles will never see each other....
Also: http://blog.vixra.org/2011/12/04/what-would-a-higgs-at-125-gev-tell-us/
Re: When bubbles collide!
"Let's talk about angles on pins instead."
How many angles can subtend on the head of a pin? That would be a trigonometrical matter.
Re: When bubbles collide!
I quite like a nice 45° myself.
Re: When bubbles collide!
45° is ugly.
I'm fond of acute angle that the other end!
Re: When bubbles collide!
I'm fond of acute angle...
You have a point there.
Re: When bubbles collide!
I am glad no-one is being obtuse
Re: When bubbles collide!
Angles? I'm sure the Saxons will have something to say about that.
Re: When bubbles collide!
I've heard that weeping angles are very dangerous.
Re: When bubbles collide!
>Additionally. with some luck, the universe will be expanding so quickly by then that any of the multicolored bubbles will never see each other....
They may never contact each other but any given point in space will be eventually enclosed in a new bubble if a bubble forms (and continues to grow) anywhere in that point's event horizon.
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