We may have survived the Large Hadron Collider, but the Higgs boson still has a trick up its sleeves. According to new findings on the "Higgs-like" particle discovered last year, the universe will end in a bubble of doom.
"If you use all the physics that we know now, and we do what we think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Lykken said. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable. At some point, billions of years from now, it's all going to be wiped out."
He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we're just at the edge of stability, in a "metastable" state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Nature 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."
Lykken put it slightly differently: "The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us."
But you've got time, it likely won't happen for a few billions of years: Link | Image: I Survived The Large Hadron Collider
Like you said, Bertrand is one cheerful fellow.
Bertrand must be cheering in his grave. Oh, wait...