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Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Higgs Boson Spells Doom and Gloom


The long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say. The mass of the particle is a key ingredient in a calculation that predicts the future of space and time.

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," says Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out."

The Higgs boson particle is a manifestation of an energy field pervading the universe called the Higgs field, which is thought to explain why particles have mass. After searching for decades for proof that this field and particle existed, physicists at the LHC announced in July 2012 that they'd discovered a particle whose properties strongly suggest it is the Higgs boson.


3 comments:

christopher said...

I read that article a little while ago. What I don't get is why it won't happen now if it will happen sometime. The scenarios of doom apparently have no warning about them, start somewhere and propagate at the speed of light. This universe is some fifteen billion light years in radius. It can have started already somewhere...

christopher said...

Also, red shift reaches a significant portion of light speed. If such a thing starts at the other end of things, overcoming red shift will prolong the propagation of doom. And by the way, if such a thing doesn't happen, it is now thought that the expansion of space/time will isolate everything from everything else in about the same time frame...

christopher said...

Try this one:

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/02/20/the-worst-kind-of-science-hype/