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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/v...79#.US0rROfD5oY
Is the Higgs boson a herald of the apocalypse? That's the suggestion behind a theory, developed more than 30 years ago, that is back in the headlines this week. According to physicists, the mass of the Higgs-like particle announced last summer supports the notion that our universe is teetering on the edge of stability, like a pencil balanced on its point.
"It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable," Joseph Lykken, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, said on Monday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "At some point, billions of years from now, it's all going to be wiped out."
Physicists have been wringing their hands about this scenario since 1982, when theorists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek published a paper about it in Nature, NBC News points out. The pair showed that the vacuum of space can be in different energy states, and it will be most stable at its lowest energy. Trouble arises if we're not there yet, and we're inhabiting a temporarily stable state that should ultimately collapse.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/s...m-unless-a.html
We think of a “vacuum” as being empty, but the trippy thing about space is that even vacuums have matter in them. The vacuum of space is filled with the Higgs field, which interacts with elementary particles, and gives rise to the Higgs particle. The vacuum of space can be in different energy states, but like all of nature, it is inclined towards the lowest energy state, where it will be the most stable. What we don’t know is which energy state our universe is in: is it high or low? What will it look like if it goes to a lower energy state?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/v...79#.US0ri-fD5oZ
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