One of the exciting aspects of some fields of physics is that they involve calculating the expected time until the Universe ends or experiences fundamental shifts that would render most if not all of the ‘laws of physics’ invalid. Within the Standard Model (SM), the false vacuum state is one such aspect, as it implies that the Universe’s quantum fields that determine macrolevel effects like mass can shift through quantum field decay into a lower, more stable state. One such field is the Higgs field, which according to a team of researchers may decay sooner than we had previously assumed.
As the Higgs field (through the Higgs boson) is responsible for giving particles mass, it’s not hard to imagine the chaos that would ensue if part of the Higgs field were to decay and cause a spherical ripple effect throughout the Universe. Particle masses would change, along with all associated physics, as suddenly the lower Higgs field state means that everything has significantly more mass. To say that it would shake up the Universe would an understatement.
Of course, this expected time-to-decay has only shifted from 10794 years to 10790 years with the corrections to the previous calculations as provided in the paper by [Pietro Baratella] and colleagues, and they also refer to it as ‘slightly shorter’. A sidenote here is also that the electroweak vacuum’s decay is part of the imperfect SM, which much like the false vacuum hypothesis are part of these models, and not based on clear empirical evidence (yet).
https://arxiv.org/html/2409.06737v1
Another recent paper says earth may no longer be habitable in less than 1000 years
This isn’t about Earth, it’s about how long civilizations can maintain exponential energy growth.
far out it’s the popular larry niven novel ringworld
Are there any sciences proven to predict future events (say at least five years in the future) besides large bodies such as solar eclipses?
It’d really suck if we weren’t able to predict stuff more than 5 years in advance when we launch probes with decade-plus transit times.
I don’t recall any effort to predict the immediate future for spacecraft other than a brief period after launch. Generally if it survived launch, one could expect it to work for some period of time preferably long enough to accomplish its life task. Or not, since some hardware disassembled a brief period after launch.
“I don’t recall any effort to predict the immediate future for spacecraft other than a brief period after launch.”
Uh… this is not how spacecraft navigation works. You don’t just launch it and it goes, there are trajectory changes you do to get where you want.
Voyager literally had positioning tables coded into it for decade-plus timespans that had to get updated, and (as was noted on Hackaday!) they literally just changed over thrusters after a degradation they expected years ago occurred right on schedule.
“expected time-to-decay…”
Realizing that “pure” science has value throughout numerous current and future experiments, one wonders if we citizen-scientists really give a poop about this other than to wonder about the public funds expended in generating this “refinement.”
I made a career about not being concerned about anything outside the range of +99 to -99 exponent on my HP RPN calculator.
Public funds expended by, lemme check the paper here… University of Slovenia? Settle down, gramps.
The change in the number doesn’t matter, it’s the tooling to get there. I don’t think people quite realize how bad we are at doing quantum field theory calculations.
I mean, it’s better than GR, but not a lot.
The actual paper was about how the new result changes the gauge fields’ contribution by 7%. The part about the death of the universe sounds like a sort of subtle physics joke meant to get people’s attention. Looks like it worked!
“The new result modifies the gauge fields’ contribution by 7% and slightly decreases the previously predicted lifetime of the electroweak vacuum, which remains much longer than the age of the universe. Our discussion of the transverse mode degeneracy applies to any calculation of functional determinants involving gauge fields in four dimensions.”
Also I get the impression that this was a “we went back and re-checked the math.” Pretty sure a 7% impact to equations used to understand the universe is worth the time of a few physics doctoral students and faculty ;)
The joke in the paper is “The SM vacuum lifetime remains longer than the current age
of the universe and there is no occasion for anxiety.”
“Pretty sure a 7% impact to equations used to understand the universe”
It’s not just that, too – the fact that the Higgs vacuum is metastable is a pain in the neck theoretically. If it were stable, OK, that’s fine, and if it showed up as unstable, you’d know you were wrong and there was something else going on.
Which is like, the dream of every theoretical particle physicist. They’re not really talking about wanting the Universe to explode, they’re talking about knowing that the Standard Model is incomplete because the Universe hasn’t exploded.
With it being metastable, you really do want to find a way to calculate it to as many orders as you can to see if you screwed up with the simple assumptions, or if there might actually be new physics hiding somewhere, or if the Universe is just an ass. Sadly, this is just saying “nope, those calculations were actually OK, the Universe really is effing with us.”
“the range of +99 to -99 exponent on my HP RPN calculator”
Hmm. My sliderule covers the same range but without batteries. :)
So, not that soon. I still have to go to work tomorrow, right?
Treat any day as if it’s the last day of the universe as we know it. It might’ve changed.
It just changed.
Oh it changed again.
Aw man it happened again.
Ad infini… 10^940
If we can’t predict when the nucleus of a radioactive atom is to decay, how can we reportedly predict when physical laws are going to decay? What is the basis for this when we have only been observing the Higgs boson since 2012?
Yes, it’s statistical, as in, the characteristic lifetime/halflife is on the order of that.
The Higgs vacuum, with our current understanding/measurements of physics (which is certainly wrong) is metastable, but it’s so close to stable that the halflife is absurdly long, even given the size of the Universe.
There are a few possible things you can take from that: first, the Universe really is metastable and we’re just in a temporary phase transition, second, there’s physics beyond the Standard Model that stabilizes things (wouldn’t take much), or third, we haven’t calculated the dynamics of the Higgs vacuum right in the Standard Model.
This is investigating the third thing. The math of the Standard Model is really really hard, so it’s a lot of work to improve things even a little bit.
Thank you for the informative reply
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone 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 mentioned, which states that this has already happened.”
(The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
Yup, looks like Adams was right about that. :-)
So modifying the Higgs field gives us anti gravity?!
The inertia of the universe is billions of years, so nothing to fear, humans will be dust anyways.
I plan to be out of town when this happens.
There is a book by professor Unzicker called “The Higgs Fake”. If there are any physicists on this website, what is your take on it? And the sceptisicm for the Higgs boson and modern particle physics in general?
I am not a physicist, but my take on the Higgs Boson was…
We need to find it to make the Standard Model complete.
We need more money to make more powerful accelerstors.
Now we need to power the accelerator up and smash particles.
Oh! We saw something! That must be what we were looking for!
Write up the research papers and press releases and ask for more money to find Next Thing!
Particle physicists would’ve loved to not find the Higgs. That would’ve been awesome – because we’ve known about the effect of the Higgs for like, what, 50-60 years? They predicted the existence and mass of the Z, after all.
There were lots of alternatives to the Higgs. It’s just that none of them worked.
It’s also worth noting that the Higgs is literally the stupidest field you can invent to do what it does. It’s a scalar field. It has absolutely no extra degrees of freedom whatsoever. It’s the first thing everyone screws around with in QFT, and what everyone uses when playing around with new particles at first. Rocky Kolb used to have a joke he gave in public presentations – “it’d be nice if experimentalists could find one scalar particle, please? just one?”
the funny thing, that is really does not matter. While theoretical high energy elem particle physics is nothing but pure math that an average physics student with phd level course work of 60 credits is not trained to understand! IMO this is all conjecture with no way to affect our everyday life. The limits of colliders to prove anything fundamental have been reached years ago. The higgs boson was “found” through statistical analysis. Long gone are the days of an image of a particle radiating and decaying on film. Assuming some theory and even doing math does not prove that it is true.
“nothing but pure math that an average physics student with phd level course work of 60 credits is not trained to understand!”
I dunno what classes you’re taking, but I definitely took QFT and Standard Model in grad school, and electroweak symmetry breaking and the metastability of the Higgs vacuum is totally straightforward.
i was in school in the late 90s, very proud to have had such people as prof Bunji Sakita, may he rest in peace.
i also took 800s series classes of the day, such as QED taught by prof sakita, general relativity but that was it. A typical phys major will have 2 semesters of math methods, maybe diff equations and maybe group theory. That’s it for math coursework as offered by phys dept. Things like tensor calculus are picked up “on the way”. Also, the way math is taught to phys majors is very different than how it is taught to math majors, as i later discovered. My advisor told me to start taking courses offered by the math dept on top of the 60 credits required for phd. After 1 semester of topology i knew it was not for me. This is not physics I am sorry. I love math, esp diff geometry, but I knew i was not smart to contribute anything useful. And now I see, some 30 years later, nothing really has come of all that research world wide. It peaked with electro-weak unification (in the 70s?), but that was it, from then on, mostly conjecture. I am not saying it’s not worth studying, but it is not clear if this is in fact the truth about the physical universe.
I dunno, all the coursework I took was in the physics department. I took a few grad level math classes as undergrad for fun, but that’s it. The common grad coursework path typically ends before QFT, because not everyone needs it, but if you’re going into any particle physics or related field, they’re standard courses. All my grad students take it.
The math for QFT and the Standard Model is more physics than math: heck physicists were the ones who came up with the math in the first place, as opposed to GR, which was from mathematicians in the mid 1800s.
Heck, it’s called the Dirac delta because Dirac just said “I need a function that works like this, let’s pretend it exists” and mathematicians were like “I’m sorry, what?” Feynman came up with a trick for evaluating loop integrals that bears his name, renormalization and supersymmetric group theory are all physics inventions, even though they’re math ideas.
“as suddenly the lower Higgs field state means that everything has significantly more mass.”
No, it’s nowhere near that simple (and “lower Higgs field state” would probably mean less mass, at least if you think of the field’s vacuum expectation value decreasing).
The Higgs vacuum is actually doing more than just providing mass to everything (except possibly neutrinos), although that’s usually the only thing that gets mentioned. The Higgs field causes a spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak force into electromagnetism and weak nuclear.
Weak nuclear is a flavor symmetry: meaning electrons/muons/tau all interact the same, up/strange/top act the same, etc. At high enough energies electroweak is “screw it, everything acts the same” because now even the fact that up/down have different charges and electrons/neutrinos have different charges no longer matters.
If the Higgs field decays to a different vacuum, it isn’t “everything’s mass gets changed.” It’s everything changes, period. Fundamental particles are no longer fundamental particles: there are new fundamental particles (which are admixtures of the old ones) – essentially new “basis states” of the Universe.
The “simple version” of “the Higgs vacuum is metastable” (as in, basic grad-level physics stuff) would suggest that – with the Higgs mass where it is – the true vacuum is actually that the VEV=0: so it’s not actually the diagram here (the Mexican hat potential) – instead there’s a bigger dip in the center, but the Universe just got ‘trapped’ in a shallow dip at higher field values. I call this the ‘simple version’ because it’s just a low-order calculation.
Which means in this “simple version” the Higgs vacuum would tunnel to zero, meaning mass goes away.
In other words (not joking!): try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously, and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Imagining mass stopping instantaneously?
Pretty sure from our perspective ( made of mater) this event would rush out as things would be moving faster near the epicenter. Which I guess would probably mean that it would just appear as an explosion of light/energy. I would guess space would appear much like if we ignited the atmosphere and Sun and planets would pop like a balloon filled with smoke, puncture by a needle. Where the rubber balloon was the release of gravity and then the release of internal atomic energy was the equal to the smoke.
So, like, what? …. you notice the center of the universe is gone before you aren’t there anymore? And that would be if someone was watching for that event
It’d propagate out at the speed of light, which means you literally wouldn’t see it coming. I seriously wasn’t kidding when I said “all life stopping instantaneously.”
It also wouldn’t be an explosion of light, because light is an electromagnetic wave, and electromagnetism as we know it would cease to be (and no, this doesn’t contradict “propagate out at the speed of light” because c as a physical constant wouldn’t change).
Like I said, it’s not just mass. The Higgs doesn’t just give mass to everything, it splits the electroweak into electromagnetism and weak nuclear. Electromagnetism is the portion of the electroweak field that’s orthogonal to the Higgs vacuum: without the Higgs, that all changes.
Question from a position of ignorance: I understand that it appears nowadays that photons have size, contra the electron but do they have mass now? Or are you “just” equating energy with mass as one does?
A physicist on C-SPAN recently said something I found helpful <– so perhaps I misunderstood it! “What’s really going on is all waves in fields but the universe presents as particles.” Thoughts?
Strictly defined “exploding” is “burning fast” so a better word s.v.p. and how do you know the speed of this unprecedented event? It’s not susceptible of experimental verification and even in this infinitesmally brief perhaps close to intantaneous “time” there’s a lot of medium around so Ancient Alien theorists have to ask “The speed of light in what medium?”
No, photons don’t couple to the Higgs, they’re the part of the electroweak field that’s orthogonal to the Higgs vacuum (hence no mass). But electrons, quarks, and the W/Z bosons do, that’s where they get their mass (neutrinos might, but who knows).
(“photons having size” is a different topic, mainly having to do with ‘what does size mean’)
When people say “the Higgs gives mass” people think the Higgs field changing would just change particle masses, but that’s the wrong way to think about it: it also gets rid of the difference between the weak nuclear and electromagnetic forces.
“and how do you know the speed of this unprecedented event?”
The Universe already did transition from a high energy state into the current field configuration. That’s literally the math that’s being worked with here – you’re just working through further dynamics of the same electroweak theory. That’s also the reason why you study the same phase transition, because it affects cosmological observables.
Let me stress that – this is just working out the dynamics of the electroweak interaction. No one really seriously thinks this would happen (although there’s always this glimmer of ‘well maybe’), because we know that the Standard Model (and electroweak theory by inclusion) is incomplete.
It’s the same thing as saying “a star collapses to a point if it gets too big.” In some sense that’s just playing around with the math – we don’t even really know what happens when stars go supernova, since you’ve got the interplay of all 4 forces and we can’t do that yet.
“have to ask “The speed of light in what medium?””
That’s why I said “speed of light” as in the constant, not the actual speed of an electromagnetic wave.
“Strictly defined “exploding” is “burning fast” so a better word ”
That was literally a quote from the movie Ghostbusters.
Just to be clear, the electroweak phase transition that already happened (after the Big Bang) isn’t understood yet, which is part of the reason you work on stuff like this. The “hahaha universe end” part is because the fact that the Universe hasn’t gone boom puts a constraint on your theory, and this is just saying that it’s not a problem (which is actually sad, because again, not understood yet).
The dynamics of this aren’t likely to be what will happen (because the theory’s incomplete) but we don’t even know how it’s incomplete yet, because it damn well acts like it’s fine.
Type type ghostbusters kind of answer one of three questions. Thank you.
To clarify my answer to your first question more directly, when I say “mass” I mean “mass.” Photons don’t have mass, they carry energy: when people say “well you can think of photons as having an ‘equivalent’ mass” they’re just being silly and trying to apply relativistic concepts to non-relativistic ideas. They don’t have mass: in a given frame of reference, they carry energy and momentum, but never have mass.
Mass (in energy units) is the norm of the 4-momentum, which is the same in whatever frame you want. Energy is just the time-component of the 4-momentum: photons have zero mass because their energy and momentum are strictly related (the relationship between energy and momentum is called the ‘dispersion relation’ of a particle).
I didn’t answer your second question because I hate getting into goofy discussions like that. The Standard Model is a theory of fields, you think about it like excitations on a field. It’s not a theory of waves or particles, it’s a theory of fields.
My impression is that trying to categorize quanta as waves or particles is a mistake, They have characteristics related to macroscopic phenomena that we call waves or particles, and we can use mathematics of waves and particles to help understand how things work, We end up having to use the words “waves” and “particles” because we lack better words, but we should think of those words as having an asterisk attached to them. The asterisk refers to a footnote that reads “to the best of our limited knowledge.”
“We end up having to use the words “waves” and “particles” because we lack better words,”
Sigh. I always get drawn into this stuff eventually. I avoid “wave vs particle!” stuff like the plague because that’s a quantum mechanical way of thinking of things, rather than a quantum field theory way, and so when people say stuff like “blah blah interaction instantaneous collapse” it’s annoying because obviously that doesnt’ make sense, you’re using a non-relativistic theory and asking questions about relativity.
We really, really do have better words. They’re just fundamental modes of the field. It’s exactly the same as standing waves on a drum, or a string, or a tuning fork, etc. (Yes, it gets complicated when you start thinking of the modes of coupled systems, like an atom, but we’re still used to that with stuff like a Newton’s cradle).
The problem is that they’re four-dimensional excitations, between two points in spacetime. That’s the awkward part, because everyone wants to imagine an particle “just sitting there” in the open, having an existence independent of anything else, and that only works as a thought experiment – it doesn’t actually exist.
The classic “double-slit” experiment where you imagine a single photon? The problem is thinking of photons all as the same kind of thing. They’re not. They’re modes. If you change the shape of the drum, the modes change.
Repent! Repent! The end of the world is only a few billion years away!!
It will be a Monday when it all ends, of course it will be.