Do you remember when you were little and you used to blow bubbles with a burnt-out babysitter who had a really cool nose ring? Your eyes would gaze upon the bubble as it floats along until suddenly, within a split second, it pops. The bubble no longer exists.
Guess what? That’s how long it will take for the universe to end. A split second. If your descendants manage to survive our sun supernova-ing, they’re going to witness the end of existence before they can even put together it’s the end of existence.
This is all in theory, of course, and it all depends on whether it was indeed the Higgs boson particle the Large Hadron Collider detected in 2012. The Higgs boson particle (also known as the “God particle”) is the theoretical elementary particle that essentially would be the basis for matter having mass.
Are you still with me? It’s okay. I’m not even with me.
Dr. Joseph Lykken, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, spoke to reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He spoke about a calculation that can theoretically be used to determine how our universe will end should scientists be able to verify the mass of the Higgs boson and other elementary particles.
Furthermore, the calculation could verify that in billions upon billions of years from now, the end of the universe will be, to quote Dr. Lykken, “a catastrophe.” Lykken also stated that this catastrophe would be at the speed of light.
“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,” states Lykken.
He went on to say, “Essentially, the universe wants to be in a different state and so eventually it will realize that. 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.”
All right, then!
Obviously the end of the world calculation can likely result in a lot of implications in a variety of fields from physics to philosophy to maybe even some religions. One factor we can take away from this is that, yes, our universe is unstable. Our universe will do its own intergalactic version of whining because it needs a change. It’s finicky, similar to a toddler. Maybe it’s the universe that needs a burnt-out babysitter with a nose ring.
Or some type of, let’s say, Guardian? Chris Pratt, I’m looking at you.
Source: Discovery
