I am not trained in astronomy but I do love to think about the solar system, the universe, and other such things. So I am starting a thread on all that -- because I can, by golly!

Here's today's entry, from the NBC News Cosmic Log:

Will our universe end in a 'big slurp'? Higgs-like particle suggests it might

“It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable. At some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to be wiped out.”

He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we’re just at the edge of stability, in a “metastable” state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Nature that “without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away.”

Lykken put it slightly differently: “The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize 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.”


That alternate universe would be “much more boring,” Lykken said. Which led him to ask a philosophical question: “Why do we live in a universe that’s just on the edge of stability?” He wondered whether a universe has to be near the danger zone to produce galaxies, stars, planets … and life.


Even Hill found it interesting that the parameters of particle physics put our universe right along the critical line. “That’s something new, which we didn’t know before, and which leads some of us to that there’s something else coming,” Hill said.