If you have a slowly-developing cancer, do you want to know about it? This issue, in various forms, comes up frequently in the health care field. Now it arises on a cosmic scale.
Just last year we were laughing and pounding each other on the back because we had -- probably -- discovered the Higgs Boson, right? The "God particle"? The particle that's a manifestation of the universal field pervading every cubic inch of the, well, Universe? The field that gives what we perceive as "mass" to those bundles of concentrated energy that we perceive as "things"?
Turns out that, metaphorically, we had discovered the MRI. Today, we're told that the "MRI" reveals that we have incurable "cancer."
By calculating the mass of the Higgs particle, physicists now claim to be able to estimate the stability of the Universe. Turns out it, it ain't. Stable, that is.
The physicists announce that a few tens of billions of years from now, pffft! We'll be gone.
"A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative' universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us," [physicist Joseph] Lykken said, adding that the event will unfold at the speed of light.
In other words, the cataclysmic event will reach us at the same instant as does the information advising us of the event's occurrence. We'll cease existing, along with our families and our world, without even ever knowing what hit us.
Oh, they try to reassure us that the sun will burn out in another 4.5 billion years anyway, so no big deal. Please. I have no doubt that within the next 4.5 billion years, mankind (or whatever has by then replaced mankind as intelligent life) will have figured out how to escape the solar system and find a more salubrious planet(s) circling a less short-lived sun on which to settle down, kick back, and watch TV.
But I'm not so sure we'll find a way to escape the self-annihilating Universe. To my way of thinking, it's pretty much all we have -- our very own little niche of space-time. When it implodes, so does -- for all intents and purposes -- what we like to call "reality." I realize that there may be billions upon billions of parallel universes living alongside us, worlds in which other Vikings raid other villages and other kids grow up under similarly bland Eisenhowers. But barring discovery of some way of visiting those universes -- or at least exchanging greetings with them -- I don't find their hypothetical existence to offer much consolation.
Dr. Lykken says that if the mass of the Higgs Boson had been just a tad greater or smaller, the instability leading to this calamity would not exist.
Well, damn! That's really irritating, right? I wish they hadn't told us.
2 comments:
I just finished a superb "hard" science fiction series (Revelation Space) that told the story of a distant future humanity attempting to escape our birth universe because of an impending apocalypse.
The author, Alastair Reynolds, is a physicist, and introduced me to some whacky ideas, like parallel brane dimensions and stuff like that.
As far as the Higgs goes, I think it shows something positive about people that we get a little sad when we hear the universe will end in 10 billion years.
...now if everybody would just recycle.
Thanks, Jesse. Not sure I want to read the entire series, but I've downloaded the first volume just to get the flavor! I'll let you know if I get hooked.
I got that odd sadness as a teenager when I read "Last and First Men."
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