If you’re going home this weekend and have to carry on a conversation with your parents about something intellectual, fear not. I have the perfect topic of discussion for you.
You may or may not remember that on July 4, 2013, scientists discovered what they believed to be the Higgs Boson particle. In all honesty, I learned this information from the Google Doodle that day, but I’m an avid fan of the TED talks and a number of speakers have gone on to talk about what this discovery actually means in terms of the purpose of the universe and where it’s headed in the future.
Gian Giudice, a CERN expert, discussed this in his TED talk on Monday. The Higgs Boson particle, apparently, is not the full story. Rather, it is the start of a long, extended theory about a multiverse on the verge of collapse.
An explanation of the Higgs Boson begins a tenth of a second after the Big Bang. Essentially, the creation of Higgs Boson was a change in the fabric in space and time; empty space was filled with the “Higgs Field,” which surrounds us all the time and supplies energy that nowadays we quantify as a particle’s mass. For a long time, this was nothing more than a theory, but on July 4, scientists recreated this incident in a Hadron collider.
Scientists think that the Higgs Field, much like water, probably exists in two states: the one we have recreated and one that is millions and millions of times denser than that called the “ultra-dense Higgs Field.” There is a chance that the “normal” Higgs Boson will rapidly and suddenly condense by means of “quantum tunnelling” somewhere in the universe at an unpredicted and unexpected time. If a “bubble” of ultra-dense Higgs Field shows up somewhere, it will spread and “infect” everything in our universe until Hydrogen will become the only possible element in the universe because of the intense energy. After hours and hours of math, Giudice and his team calculated that the current density of the current Higgs Field is extremely unstable and that, sometime within the next million years or so, the field will probably spontaneously collapse on itself, thus ending our universe as we know it.
Giudice theorizes that our universe is nothing more than a “bubble” amidst a whole field of other universe bubbles, each of which is on the verge of it’s Higgs Field collapsing. In a sense, the entire multiverse is on a knife-edge, perhaps on the brink of falling apart as we speak.
If that’s not a perfect topic of discussion for your dinner table this week, I don’t know what is.