George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe
Hawking: "...unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."
Osborne: "See, I told you we needed those austerity measures!".
Hawking: Higgs boson in a BIG particle punisher could DESTROY UNIVERSE
Once upon a time, Stephen Hawking was so sure the Higgs Boson was a fantasy that he bet $100* against its discovery. But now the British boffin has dramatically changed his mind, warning that the so-called god particle could go rogue and destroy the entire universe. Clearly annoyed that Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence …
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 13:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe
... in other news, another Al-Qaeda splinter group, calling itself Al-Qaeda-with-an-interest-in-science-in-order-to-beat-the-Infidel-at-their-own-game, announced on Twitter that it has launched a programme to kidnap any scientist with the slightest clue about time travel in order to perpetrate a 'dead cert' investment fraud to raise the massive funding needed to create a particle accelerator big enough create the Ultimate Suicide Bomb, thus cleansing the entire universe of the accursed Infidel, Jews, the Danish, competitors and all temptations at a stroke.
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Wednesday 10th September 2014 17:14 GMT Andus McCoatover
Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe
Has Al-Qaeda-with-an-interest-in-science-in-order-to-beat-the-Infidel-at-their-own-game commenced a "Kickstarter" account? If £20 gets you 46 virgins, stick me down!
Oh, wait - what's that ominous "chop chop chop" I hear in the sky above my house?
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Thursday 11th September 2014 21:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe
Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe
"...If £20 gets you 46 virgins, stick me down!.."
OK, infidel:- but you do not get to choose the gender of the virgins.
Or the species.
Any quantity of virgins over 3 is unlikely going to be *heaven* anyway. Anyone who has a few sisters knows that the recipient is not going to enjoy himself very much..
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Thursday 11th September 2014 15:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe
@Andus McCoatover
Aiieeee Andus! Verily you are blessed to support the cause, and your generosity shall be rewarded in the afterlife! For which we will throw in an 'early adopter' five-virgin bonus pack, a copy of our handy guide "Wahabbi Fundamentalism for fun and profit in 42 easy steps (Lite version) - the sceptics edition", and a subscription to our house monthly magazine "Jihadi Kewl" which is packed full of helpful tips on Fundamentalist fashion, misogyny, lobotomy and subverting scientific know-how to defeat the infidel!
PS - Don't worry those are OUR helicopters!
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Wednesday 10th September 2014 07:27 GMT Wzrd1
Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe
Hawking: "...unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."
Fortunately, said funding has already been provided, courtesy of many millions of neutron stars and those pesky supernovae.
I stand here, before you now, truthfully unafraid. Why? Because I believe something you do not? No, I stand here without fear because I remember. I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me but because of the path that lies behind me. I remember that for 13 billion years we have fought these machines, errr, survived such energetic events. And after Hawking's pronouncement, I remember that which matters most... We are still here!*
*Liberally mutilated from a stolen passage from the Matrix Reloaded.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 11:36 GMT MacroRodent
Hmm,
If some particle collision can trigger such an intergalactic doomsday, then it should already have happened, since the universe contains objects like black holes, supernovas, magnetars etc that spout more energetic particle beams than we can ever hope to generate. So I'm not worried.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 22:53 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Hmm,
Mmmm....you forgot to take into account the expansion of the universe so although the effect is moving at the speed of light, the expanding affected zone itself is moving away from us by whatever the universe expansion rate is. By my estimates, that will be next Tuesday rather than tomorrow.
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Sunday 14th September 2014 08:58 GMT Vociferous
Re: Hmm,
Maybe it already has. It then expands outwards at the speed of light
And thanks to the accelerating expansion of the universe, which is not limited by the speed of light, odds are such a bubble expanding at the speed of light will never reach us.
That expansion will eventually rip every atom in the universe to shreds, but you can't get everything.
But, more to the point, the fact that the universe still exists means that Hawking is wrong. The universe carries out these high-energy experiments at billions of neutron stars and black holes every instant.
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Thursday 11th September 2014 17:48 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Intrigued
how would one calculate the velocity needed for a grain of sand to destroy a planet?
The simplest way is to ask Randall Munroe. He's an expert on doomsday mathematics.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 13:30 GMT TitterYeNot
"I'm sure we have noticed - how do you think our universe popped into existence...."
No, I think you'll find that was the Universe Mark 1. Current estimates are that we're now up to at least Mark 9 - why else do you think life seems to get even more bizarre and inexplicable as time goes on?
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 11:58 GMT stucs201
larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate
And the size relative to the Earth or our current budgets affects more advanced dyson sphere building (*) civilisations building one how? Admitedly we can't do much about it if they do.
(*) example only, the practicalities of that is a separate discussion.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 12:20 GMT Destroy All Monsters
"I WILL DO ANYTHING TO STAY IN THE NEWS"
Seriously, shut the fuck up, Prof.
Rehashing old physics ego-vertisements, Might/Could/Bes and pulling random energy levels out of the hat just doesn't cut it.
Peter Woit, February 21, 2013:
At the AAAS 2013 meeting in Boston this past week [Feb. 2013], a press conference was held to update the media on the Higgs. What the media got from the press conference was the news that the Higgs may spell doom, unless supersymmetry saves us. This isn’t just doom for HEP physics research, it’s doom for the entire universe:
“At some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to be wiped out…. The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realise 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,” Lykken said at AAAS.
This is based on a renormalization group calculation extrapolating the Higgs effective potential to its value at energies many many orders of magnitude above LHC energies. To believe the result you have to believe that there is no new physics and we completely understand everything exactly up to scales like the GUT or Planck scale. Fan of the SM that I am, that’s too much for even me to swallow as plausible.
If you are being kept awake by the Higgs metastability issue, you’ll want to know the Higgs mass as accurately as possible. The rumor from ATLAS is that the difference in best fit masses between the gamma-gamma and ZZ channels has narrowed, with gamma-gamma moving up slightly to 126.8 GeV, ZZ quite a bit, to 124.3 GeV.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 15:14 GMT Pascal Monett
"A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth"
Um, far be it from me to cast the eminent Professor's words in a disparaging light, but I do believe that his words should be amended to read:
"A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, with current technology"
Indeed, fusion reactors will exist, and nobody knows what performance fusion reactors will attain, so this declaration must be bound by the current limitations in energy generation, notwithstanding future improvements.
Sorry, Professor.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 17:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth"
"100Billion GeV is only 16 Joules"
Er, no, the energy imparted to one electron by falling through that potential in volts is 16J.
One electron.
How many protons are there in the LHC while it's operating? About 10^14
At 10^20 GeV, that would be 1.6 * 10^15J. The output of a nuclear power reactor is around a GW, so call that the full output for 20 days.
A bit more impressive, don't you think?
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 15:20 GMT skinnykid
I like to think of the universe as,well,universal.. in other words, goes in all directions forever without
End...my gut tells me this is true even if I can't grasp the immensity of it all....so.....an event cant
Ever happen in conclusion as Hawking predicts...it would eventually collapse from inertia decay ..
Honestly I wish he would think these things through.....relatively speaking :-)
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Wednesday 10th September 2014 09:25 GMT Psyx
"I like to think of the universe as,well,universal.. in other words, goes in all directions forever without
End...my gut tells me this is true even if I can't grasp the immensity of it all....so.....an event cant..."
Well, so long as you've determined that the universe is actually infinite because the word 'universal' seems to mean infinite to you, and because your gut tells you it's true, I'm happy to go along with your conclusion, rather than the research results and tomes of equations produced by leading physicists.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 15:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'm seriously struggling to get worked up about this threat to our existence. A quick googling tells me that we have observed a number of particles with energies in the region of 5.7*10^19eV which is about half what would apparently cause the universe to melt. I seems that theoretically the universe should be able to produce particles with powers up to 10^21eV as well
Since the universe apparently still exists I'm going to go out on a limb and say either something was lost in translation or this isn't much of a threat.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 20:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Perhaps we need a new headline?
"Shock Horror, Hawkins Hawken up the Wrong Tree with His New Theory!"
Or he is just trying to grab some space on some headlines with some tongue in cheek comments. It's if he believes them that it's a problem...
It's like worrying about time travel because all we need is more energy than is in the universe to make it possible. ;)
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Thursday 11th September 2014 18:02 GMT Michael Wojcik
I might be wrong, but to produce a metastable Higgs, I believe you'd need a particle collision at that energy level, not just some random particles whizzing away from a supernova.
If 1020eV particles are relatively scarce, and mostly happen Out There, then collisions are relatively improbable and so will happen only infrequently. If the probability of producing a metastable Higgs from such a collision is also low1, then false vacuum collapse may simply not have happened yet in our Hubble volume.
It might have happened innumerable times outside our Hubble volume - we'll never know.
As others have pointed out, it might also have happened within our Hubble volume and simply not reached us yet. (I've seen sources that claim the expansion of the lower-vacuum-state bubble happens a bit slower than the speed of light, for some reason I can't recall; and if that's true we will be able to see its effects, though probably only briefly.)
Since the universe apparently still exists I'm going to go out on a limb and say either something was lost in translation or this isn't much of a threat.
The key word there is "apparently". All we can go on is what we perceive, and we very likely don't perceive more than a very small part of the universe.2
But it's not worth worrying about false vacuum collapse, for the simple reason that you can't do a damn thing about it before it happens, and you won't care afterward.
1I have no idea what the speculation on this topic says, and I can't be bothered to look it up, since I'm in no position to vet the material I find.
2It's unprovable whether there's anything outside our Hubble volume, for reasons that should be obvious, so this remains forever a cosmological hypothesis. Of course per the epistemological scandal so does everything else, ultimately.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 16:30 GMT John Savard
Optimism and Pessimism
A particle accelerator larger than the Earth is unlikely to be funded even in a positive economic climate, at least until technology advances. However, can you prove that some alien race hasn't already made this mistake? Something like "solanite" from Plan 9 from Outer Space.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 21:03 GMT Chris G
Re: "A really big bloke
If the bloke in the pub had gone to university he would know that a bloke with a cricket bat big enough to destroy the universe would collapse into a super massive black hole before he could hit anything with his bat.
The super massive black hole might suck up everything later though!
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 18:41 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Surely
we can build a particle accelerator that size..... all we need is 2 decent 'ish sized black holes, set them at a minimal safe distance and have them spining in opposite directions.... then at the right time fire couple of planets into them , and hey presto 2 beams of radiation heading towards each other at a fair fraction of the speed of light... BOOOM
Boris
whats this note on my file? "caution :this patient should not be allowed within 50Km of any particle accelerator"
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Thursday 11th September 2014 18:07 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Bubble of the true void expanding at the speed of light
Doesn't have to be dark inside the lower-vacuum-state bubble, unless I've missed something. There will still be elementary particles and photons, and probably eventually atoms, though they'll have different properties due to changes in shell energies and the like.
Also, I don't see why a metastable Higgs would necessarily cause collapse to zero vacuum energy. Surely there could be local minima between our current state and zero?
But this really isn't my area, so I may be wildly incorrect.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 21:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
if it was going to happen
it probably already has. Natural phenomena that give particles incredible energies are already well known. Something is kicking up cosmic rays to energy levels beyond even what this feared ubercollider could reach.
If it's only a matter of scale, it's already done, and if it causes some sort of mega doom, it's already happened in a few places in the Universe and is already en route.
"I'm gonna sing the Doom Song now!"
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Wednesday 10th September 2014 18:59 GMT Calin Brabandt
Re: if it was going to happen
Whether the event is likely to have already occurred is a matter of probability. Regardless of the present age of universe, perhaps it is still improbable. Or perhaps it is probably. No one seems to know and I suspect more study is required to reasonably assess this probability. I have only read conjecture here.
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Tuesday 9th September 2014 23:25 GMT roger stillick
Void Expansion Event Horizon...? ?
A Flash of pure energy...Oh Wait, that's the Big Bang...and we were told BB void expansion had no 'C' speed restriction, or, why would the idea of a void expansion be limited to 'C' speed ??
Joke Alert= remember that 497 DBM / 0.5 GW limit of emmitted power in the atmosphere ?? seems reverse stsnding waves would destroy any emitter...CPA or Chirp Compression Amplification got around that nicely, and, now we have Peta Watt Lasers...
Please Note= this Higgs Boson / Collider hypothesis stuff is simply sub-particle MHD plasa flow and, it follows the same paths and effects that high energy EM or Particle light does ( go high enough in power and REV- SWR kills the emitter - only).
The second deduction, if you buy any of this, is CPA or Chirp Compression Amplification techniques will allow Peta Watt Colliders without any problems other than scaring the rest of the universe at a non / higher than 'C' transmission velocity...
caveiat= MHD sometimes trumps Sci-Fi in audacious hypotheses (that Plasma Physics and Light have the same constraints, or, i have yet to move a light beam w/ a magnet)...please accept my attempt at an on-topic joke...RS.
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Wednesday 10th September 2014 01:59 GMT Private Citizen.AU
Finite probability?
"Space is big really big..." Zem, Zem, and I, were falloping about and thought that an infinite universe is more than capable of providing the necessary energy and circumstances to create this "Killer-Boson" particle?
Universally I would expect it to happen quite often. I just dont see the need to globber about it. Granted I as a mere mattress I dont usually have lot of time for astrophysics.
- Zem, founder and sole member of the Sqornshellous Zeta Mensa society.
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Wednesday 10th September 2014 09:53 GMT Sanlorenzo
Higgs universe slayer...
Given that we affirm ideas about the age of the universe and the ubiquity of intelligent life, then this should already have happened somewhere. Alternatively the structure of the universe is such that by the time we are able to build such a big accellerator, then we (all sentient life) are (will have become) wise enough to know that its use would/would not destroy everything. If the latter is true then we can deduce what will happen to everything (how all things evolve) in our universe. If not then we should go to the pub and order 6 pints of bitter, some peanuts and a towel right now.
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Wednesday 10th September 2014 14:30 GMT LHC Safety Review
A hole in the LHC's vacuum bubble safety argument
One of the four specific risks considered in the most recent official safety review for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the possibility that LHC collisions could trigger a transition to a lower-energy vacuum state. The current review by the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) [2] asserts that this risk was ruled out in the earlier report of the LHC Safety Study Group (LSSG) [1]. The conclusion of the LSAG's report states:
"In the case of phenomena, such as vacuum bubble formation via phase transitions or the production of magnetic monopoles, which had already been excluded by the previous report [1], no subsequent development has put these firm conclusions into question."
It should be noted, however, that the LSSG's report considers only the three specific risks of strangelets, black holes, and magnetic monopoles. The LSSG's report includes no mention whatsoever of the possibility of vacuum bubble formation and includes no data relevant to the vacuum bubble safety argument briefly outlined in the LSAG's report.
References
[1] Blaizot J P et al (LSSG), 2003, Report of the LHC Safety Study Group, CERN-2003-001 (http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/613175/files/CERN-2003-001.pdf)
[2] Ellis J et al (LSAG), 2008, J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 35 115004 (arXiv:0806.3414) (http://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.3414)
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Monday 6th October 2014 10:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yup that would do it
Posted some ideas last year about this.
Also relevant, the "Oh-My-God!" particle detected recently had about as much energy as a baseball moving at 25mph so imagine two of those hitting head on.
Then realize that this happens probably ten times a second (!) at the center of every Galaxy and this has been going on for close to 9B years and we are all still here.
On the other hand, Ebola is much MUCH more likely to cause human extinction and the world's attention should be focused on dealing with this threat and not petty squabbling over resources.
10% of the money to be spent on Trident's replacement ought to nip it in the bud, and Cameron would be nominated for next years Peace Nobel.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
