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Collapse of the universe is closer than ever before
Maybe it happens tomorrow. Maybe in a billion years. Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball. New calculations from physicists at the University of Southern Denmark now confirm this prediction – and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.
Sooner or later a radical shift in the forces of the universe will cause every little particle in it to become extremely heavy. Everything - every grain of sand on Earth, every planet in the solar system and every galaxy – will become millions of billions times heavier than it is now, and this will have disastrous consequences: The new weight will squeeze all material into a small, super hot and super heavy ball, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.
Sooner or later a radical shift in the forces of the universe will cause every little particle in it to become extremely heavy. Everything - every grain of sand on Earth, every planet in the solar system and every galaxy – will become millions of billions times heavier than it is now, and this will have disastrous consequences: The new weight will squeeze all material into a small, super hot and super heavy ball, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-12/uosd-cot121213.php
It's always something.
16 replies
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--imm
I hope to be at Milliways enjoying a great meal and floor show when it happens.
Zarquon's ghost!
...which is not to say they weren't always fuzzy.
Here's an article from back in February 2013 with a somewhat similar prediction/conjecture of a phase change: Universe Has Finite Lifespan, Higgs Boson Calculations Suggest:
"It may be that 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," said Lykken, who is also on the science team at Europe's Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.
Physicists last year announced they had discovered what appears to be a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which is believed to give matter its mass.
<snip>
"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there'll be a catastrophe," Lykken said. "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," Lykken said, adding that the event will unfold at the speed of light.
<snip>
The calculation requires knowing the mass of the Higgs to within one percent, as well as the precise mass of other related subatomic particles.
Physicists last year announced they had discovered what appears to be a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which is believed to give matter its mass.
<snip>
"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there'll be a catastrophe," Lykken said. "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," Lykken said, adding that the event will unfold at the speed of light.
<snip>
The calculation requires knowing the mass of the Higgs to within one percent, as well as the precise mass of other related subatomic particles.
A problem with this conjecture back in February was that the folks at CERN and other facilities using the CERN data was weren't even certain that the had found THE Higgs boson. From Quantum Diaries: It looks very much like we have “a” Higgs boson:
No more Higgs-like, Higgs-ish or even Higgsy boson. The CMS and ATLAS collaborations, the two large experiments operating at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, have now gathered sufficient evidence to say that the new boson discovered last summer is almost certainly “a” Higgs boson. Note that we are going to call it “a” Higgs boson and not “the” Higgs boson since we still need more data to determine what type of Higgs boson we have found. But all the analysis conducted so far strongly indicates that we are indeed dealing with a type of Higgs boson.
The Standard Model predicts there should be only one Higgs boson and so far, our Higgs boson is compatible with being the Standard Model Higgs boson. But it could still be one of the five types of Higgs bosons postulated by supersymmetry, a theory that would build on the Standard Model and complete it in a way that it would not only be able to explain the world made of matter that we know, but also provide a possible explanation for something still completely unknown called dark matter.
Both ATLAS and CMS checked not only the mass but also the couplings of the new boson. In all cases where the experiments have sensitivity, the couplings are consistent with the Standard Model. But the truth may lie in the tiniest detail. Take for example the signal strength, a quantity that measures how many signal events are found in different decay channels compared with the numbers expected from the Standard Model. The Standard Model boson would then come out with signal strength of one in all decay channels. But if other, yet undiscovered particles exist, then they would provide more options in the ways the Higgs boson could decay, and we should start seeing more signal events or if additional Higgs bosons exist we might see less signal strength in some channels.
Among new results shown this week at the Moriond QCD conference, CMS reported updated results for a Higgs decaying into two photons and ATLAS had an update on the Higgs decaying to a pair of W bosons. CMS presented their main result and a result from a cross-check analysis using a different analysis approach. The two results, of 0.78±0.27 for the main analysis and 1.11±0.31 for the cross-check, are consistent within uncertainties. ATLAS measured a signal strength of 1.0±0.3 in the WW channel and, 1.30±0.21 for all channels combined. These results are so far in reasonable agreement with a value of one predicted by the Standard Model. Values different from one can come from statistical fluctuations as well as from new physics as mentioned earlier. Only more data and more study will allow us to tell.
The latest results presented at Moriond mark an important step forward in the Higgs analysis, but also serve as a reminder that we still have a long way to go. It looks very much as though we have “a” Higgs boson, the question now is what kind?
The Standard Model predicts there should be only one Higgs boson and so far, our Higgs boson is compatible with being the Standard Model Higgs boson. But it could still be one of the five types of Higgs bosons postulated by supersymmetry, a theory that would build on the Standard Model and complete it in a way that it would not only be able to explain the world made of matter that we know, but also provide a possible explanation for something still completely unknown called dark matter.
Both ATLAS and CMS checked not only the mass but also the couplings of the new boson. In all cases where the experiments have sensitivity, the couplings are consistent with the Standard Model. But the truth may lie in the tiniest detail. Take for example the signal strength, a quantity that measures how many signal events are found in different decay channels compared with the numbers expected from the Standard Model. The Standard Model boson would then come out with signal strength of one in all decay channels. But if other, yet undiscovered particles exist, then they would provide more options in the ways the Higgs boson could decay, and we should start seeing more signal events or if additional Higgs bosons exist we might see less signal strength in some channels.
Among new results shown this week at the Moriond QCD conference, CMS reported updated results for a Higgs decaying into two photons and ATLAS had an update on the Higgs decaying to a pair of W bosons. CMS presented their main result and a result from a cross-check analysis using a different analysis approach. The two results, of 0.78±0.27 for the main analysis and 1.11±0.31 for the cross-check, are consistent within uncertainties. ATLAS measured a signal strength of 1.0±0.3 in the WW channel and, 1.30±0.21 for all channels combined. These results are so far in reasonable agreement with a value of one predicted by the Standard Model. Values different from one can come from statistical fluctuations as well as from new physics as mentioned earlier. Only more data and more study will allow us to tell.
The latest results presented at Moriond mark an important step forward in the Higgs analysis, but also serve as a reminder that we still have a long way to go. It looks very much as though we have “a” Higgs boson, the question now is what kind?
However, with results published just last week, the CERN folks announced One giant leap for the Higgs boson:
Both the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN have now shown solid evidence that the new particle discovered in July 2012 behaves even more like the Higgs boson, by establishing that it also decays into particles known as tau leptons, a very heavy version of electrons.
<snip>
The CMS experiment had already shown evidence for Higgs boson decays into fermions last summer with a signal of 3.4 sigma when combining the tau and b quark channels. A sigma corresponds to one standard deviation, the size of potential statistical fluctuations. Three sigma is needed to claim evidence while five sigma is usually required for a discovery.
For the first time, there is now solid evidence from a single channel – and two experiments have independently produced it. ATLAS collaboration showed evidence for the tau channel alone with a signal of 4.1 sigma, while CMS obtained 3.4 sigma, both bringing strong evidence that this particular type of decays occurs.
<snip>
The CMS experiment had already shown evidence for Higgs boson decays into fermions last summer with a signal of 3.4 sigma when combining the tau and b quark channels. A sigma corresponds to one standard deviation, the size of potential statistical fluctuations. Three sigma is needed to claim evidence while five sigma is usually required for a discovery.
For the first time, there is now solid evidence from a single channel – and two experiments have independently produced it. ATLAS collaboration showed evidence for the tau channel alone with a signal of 4.1 sigma, while CMS obtained 3.4 sigma, both bringing strong evidence that this particular type of decays occurs.
The data collected by the ATLAS experiment (black dots) are consistent with coming
from the sum of all backgrounds (colour histograms) plus contributions from a Higgs boson
going into a pair of tau leptons (red curve). Below, the background is subtracted from the data
to reveal the most likely mass of the Higgs boson, namely 125 GeV (red curve).
Right, now they have additional evidence, but not quite a discovery.
With these new results, the experiments established one more property that was expected for the Standard Model Higgs boson. What remains to be clarified is the exact type of Higgs boson we are dealing with. Is this indeed the simplest one associated with the Standard Model? Or have we uncovered another type of Higgs boson, the lightest one of the five types of Higgs bosons predicted by another theory called supersymmetry.
It is still too early to dismiss the second hypothesis. While the Higgs boson is behaving so far exactly like what is expected for the Standard Model Higgs boson, the measurements lack the precision needed to rule out that it cannot be a supersymmetric type of Higgs boson. Getting a definite answer on this will require more data. This will happen once the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resumes operation at nearly twice the current energy in 2015 after the current shutdown needed for maintenance and upgrade.
Meanwhile, these new results will be refined and finalized. But already they represent one small step for the experiments, a giant leap for the Higgs boson.
It is still too early to dismiss the second hypothesis. While the Higgs boson is behaving so far exactly like what is expected for the Standard Model Higgs boson, the measurements lack the precision needed to rule out that it cannot be a supersymmetric type of Higgs boson. Getting a definite answer on this will require more data. This will happen once the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resumes operation at nearly twice the current energy in 2015 after the current shutdown needed for maintenance and upgrade.
Meanwhile, these new results will be refined and finalized. But already they represent one small step for the experiments, a giant leap for the Higgs boson.
So, no, things didn't change overnight, and they are still changing.
My recommendation would be not to sell your beachfront property on the Universe just yet on the basis of articles like this about a possible big crunch.
