don’t panic, but the universe can explode at any second thanks to the higgs boson

Oh, for crying out loud, I’m gone for a Murphy’s Law kind of week and as soon as I can get back to blogging, the universe is supposed to explode. Well at least it’s all uphill from here. I mean if the end of the universe in a random fiery explosion of quantum fluctuations isn’t the worst thing that could happen to us, what is? You can blame the Higgs boson for all this because due to its effects on matter as we know it, we can extend the known laws of the Standard Model one way and end up with a universe that’s more or less stable as it is today, but could easily be brought down to a lower energy level, which is a theoretical physicists’ euphemism for “cataclysmic blast violent enough to change the fabric of existence.” All that’s needed is a little quantum vacuum and next thing you know, fireballs will engulf the entire cosmos at the speed of light.

Or at least that’s one way to read that data which makes for an exciting headline from what’s an otherwise very specialized conference where scientists throw around big ideas just to see if any seem to catch the mass media’s interest. You see, we just found out that matter is stable over a very, very long period of time, and we’re also pretty sure that tiny quantum instabilities happen pretty much all the time, forming virtual particle/anti-particle pairs, so little quantum vacuums in the depths of space shouldn’t force matter across the cosmos to start radiating energy. And on top of that, as noted by Joseph Lykken, the originator of the hypothesis, if the tiniest change to our current models has to be made after the LHC performs its next round of experiments in the next three years, the entire notion of a universe on the brink of disaster from a quantum vacuum has to go out the window. Suddenly, doomsday doesn’t seem so imminent, huh?

Basically this idea is like forecasting that humans will be exterminated by an alien horde one of these days. It’s not entirely unthinkable and it could happen, but the odds aren’t exactly high in favor of this event and we have very little reliable data to be used to make this prediction with any sort of concrete authority. Sure, the Standard Model is incredibly well tested and underpins much of what we know to be true about matter, but when it comes to its predictive powers for all things cosmic, it’s not exactly a crystal ball, more of a murky lake with odd shapes twitching and slithering underneath. So why would Lykken make such a claim? Remember the media interest part about the purpose of the meeting where the idea was aired? There you go. Now the media is abuzz with doomsday fever and people are talking about quantum physics on the web, exactly what the meeting’s organizers were hoping would happen.

Again, this could all be true, but if we consider that the claim was made for the press and laden with enough caveats to make it more or less a wild guesstimate based on a hunch rather than a peer reviewed body of work on entropy with an attempt at the Grand Unification Theory, I’d say that it’s a pretty safe bet of be very skeptical of this one. Though it’s rather hard not to concede that “instantaneous death by quantum collapse of the cosmos” would be a pretty badass cause of death on your official paperwork because you could well claim that when you went down, you took the entire damn universe with you in a fiery explosion. Just a thought…