Forgive me for my lack of knowledge on the subject. But can someone explain to me how a higgs boson could essentially eradicate the universe?
From the stuff that I've read the only thing left of the catastrophic unravelling of matter in this way would be hydrogen. Why hydrogen?
What would be left? Simply a black void of nothingness? Dark matter? It's hard for me to wrap my head around complete destruction of all matter.
Maybe because hydrogen is proton.
>>7656822
>But can someone explain to me how a higgs boson could essentially eradicate the universe?
No, because it can't.
I don't know shit about the hydrogen.
But the higgs, quantum tunnels into the true vacuum from our meta-stable vacuum when our vacuum decays, a considerable time after total heat death. Creating a bubble of this true vacuum that either decays instantly or expands at light speed.
Or on the edge of tiny decaying primordial black holes, which probably don't exist.
>>7656822
I think you're on about the possibility of the universe being a false vacuum - ala the quantum field meta-instability event.
Higgs Boson doesn't enter into it, at least not directly, it just suggests that it's a possibility. Whether or not we actually live in a false vacuum depends on the nature of the top quark, and to measure that, we'd need a particle accelerator about twenty times as large as the LHC.
It's not worth checking though, as if the universe is a false vacuum, there's nadda we can do about it, and it'd just suddenly come to an abrupt end at the speed of light due to its natural instability.
As for what would be left - no one knows, because we'd be dropped into another universe with entirely different physical laws, and all our atoms would likely go kaput.
No idea where ya got hydrogen from though.
>>7658663
Isn't heat death basically the 99% outcome?
>>7658879
Basically heat death = Big Freeze, followed by Big Rip, seems to be what the most likely outcome, ever since Hubble.
Big Crunch has more or less been ruled out (lest some strange multi-verse stuff is going on.)
Big slurp being the next most likely possibility, but again, depends on how unstable that top quark is, and whether there's any more stable a state to fall into. If both be true, then the event has probably already happened, and just hasn't reached us yet.
>>7659094
Or we may find a fourth option - or a fifth. Sure as fuck find at least one or two new ways for the Earth to end every decade, and invent a new one every once in while. If we've not spread among the stars before then, it's same as the universe ending, from our perspective.
Given everything we know that can go wrong, most of it without notice... Closest thing to evidence of the divine? That there's only been four global extinction events, and not four million.
>>7659103
I'm not entirely sure man. So far we've come up with two different ways the universe could have been created. By the divine, or from a big bang. But considering the fact that we're observing the universe with extreme variables at play. Then maybe there are some other options as to how everything came to be that we haven't considered yet. With the divine you then have to ask what created that being? And then that one?
Then with a big bang you then ask "well how did something come from nothing?"
Both are illogical based on our relative experience.
I just doubt that you could put a religion on whatever diety could be behind this if there is one. The amount of galaxies and our lack of knowledge and our lack of ability to communicate with other intelligent life shows that we might not be particularly special. We've reached sentience, but we don't have the ability or capacity as a young species to get definitive answers.
your saying at any second everything could just end?
>>7659985
It could be nonsense, our vacuum might not be metastable and the chances are exceptionally slim, so maybe.
>>7659985
Yes, but this is how it's been forever, you could die of an aneurysm right now. Most religious texts have large sections devoted to the transience of life.
The Higgs field's found in the electron field, meaning it could maybe cause some sort of chain reaction throughout all electron fields?
Mass isn't inherent of the Higgs boson. Wanted to point that out. Protons and neutrons, well, actually, I'd need to know the size of the Hb to know if it'd be plausible for one to exist inside of the fluctuating energy field within protons and neutrons. Okay so Higgs bosons have a mass 126 times the mass of a proton, existing for a ~septillionth of a second.
Reading the article http://m.livescience.com/47737-stephen-hawking-higgs-boson-universe-doomsday.html explains. (Credit to >>7659837)
>>7660037
The Higgs boson's found in the electron field shit dude idk
>>7659837
>make it so that hydrogen would be the only element that could exist in the universe
Ah, that's where the hydrogen came from.
Article's okay, just neglects to mention the stability of the top quark still being the undiscovered and determining factor.
>>7659864
>"well how did something come from nothing?"
/sci/ will hate me for posting this, but if you have an hour to kill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
But, waxing religious aside, it's true, science is still in its infancy, even it seems folks constantly forget that. We're all still John Snow - and it's still uncertain if that red haired witch is gonna do anything to save us.
