If Higgs Boson Calculations Are Right, A 'Bubble' Could End Universe

Reminds me a bit (apocryphal?) of the first test of the atomic bomb at Trinity.<p>All the famous scientists had put down bets on how big the explosion would be. Edward Teller, IIRC, had a macabre one: it would set off a chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere through nitrogen and hydrogen fusion.<p>Calculations were done, and the possibility of it happening was shown to be one in a million. The test went ahead.

In their paper, Coleman and de Luccia noted:<p>The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.<p>The second special case ... applies if we are now living in the debris of a false vacuum ... This case presents us with less interesting physics and with fewer occasions for rhetorical excess than the preceding one.<p>S. Coleman and F. De Luccia (1980). "Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay". Physical Review D21: 3305.

Even more proof that Douglas Adams saw this all coming<p>"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." [1]<p>I can't believe I'm the first one to get this quote in :)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Douglas_Adams/" rel="nofollow">http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Douglas_Adams/</a>

If the Everett's many-worlds interpretation is correct, this could be happening all the time. But we can only experience one of the world lines where our universe does not collapse.

This reminded me of Schild's Ladder: (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schilds_Ladder" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schilds_Ladder</a>)<p>&#62; ...the experiments unexpectedly create a bubble of something more stable than ordinary vacuum, dubbed novo-vacuum, that expands outward at half the speed of light as ordinary vacuum collapses to this new state at the border... The local population is forced to flee to ever more distant star systems to escape the steadily approaching border...

It seems that npr is talking about this paper [1]. Where a simple Standard Model Higgs is assumed and then extrapolated to the Planck mass. (We already now that this does not work.) And the news is not that we all are going to die ( we knew this already), but the news [2] is actually that such a naive extrapolation gives a value for some coupling very close to 0 at the Planck Mass, which might hint at some interesting phenomena.<p>In addition the paper makes a nice sales pitch for a future electron-positron collider.<p>[1]<a href="http://pubdb.desy.de/fulltext/getfulltext.php?uid=23383-59716" rel="nofollow">http://pubdb.desy.de/fulltext/getfulltext.php?uid=23383-5971...</a> (pdf)<p>[2] News for me, I am no specialist.

Both interesting and terrifying if this is true. The idea sounds a lot like Vonnegut's ice-nine, only for space instead of water.

A self eating Universe? come on guys, i still struggle to make the change from the flat earth model to the geocentric model.

So the bubble forms within, not outside?<p>Because I've heard it both ways before, and even in the article it mentions something about two bubbles that are separate from each other colliding.<p>In the later circumstances...<p>What I can't understand is how two universes that are "separated" from each other by a vacuum (no space-time fabric) could ever collide... As they are separate by a pure nothingness, they for all purposes exist inside different realms and have no chance of ever colliding as there is nothing for them to travel through to reach each other.

Even if it expands at the speed of light, it would likely be outside of our observable universe though, right?

<i>Physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote ... that "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."</i><p>Carpe Diem.

"If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news,"<p>That's exactly it, there is much more physics to discover and count in. People always think they know everything, at every point in history.

This could be worse than the Silicon Valley and the housing market bubbles combined.

Not with current accelerator energies. <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v302/n5908/abs/302508a0.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v302/n5908/abs/302508a0...</a>

This sounds a bit like the plot of Fringe.

Phew, from the title I thought we were talking about soap bubbles. Just one more thing kids of this age would have to grow up without.

listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go.