A mode of possible universe death more interesting than expanding into the still cold or collapsing back into hot doom: For reasons not stated, this would only happen 10s of billions of years from now? ...if the higgs boson truly exists at the appropriate mass, our universe may be in some serious trouble. At least it is according to a theoretical physicist from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, who claims: “If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news.” ...suggest that the vacuum of our universe may be inherently unstable, existing in a perpetual ‘metastable’ state... ...physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek, who published a paper in Nature back in 1982 that suggested this unpleasant scenario; “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.” Which means, as far as I know, that there would be no way to know that it was coming until you were gone. From your perspective you would just stop existing in a snap. fromquarkstoquasars/the-big-slurp/
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 18:19:07 +0000