The best available measurements and theory suggest that given the mass of the Higgs boson and the running of various Standard Model physics parameters with energy scale, that the vacuum is only "metastable" and has a tiny probability of collapsing and ending the universe as we know it. But events like this are likely to happen only once in a period of time that is significantly longer than the current age of the universe.
A new preprint looks at whether ultra-high energy cosmic rays or particle collider concentrations of energy could trigger such a vacuum collapse.
Fortunately for us, the bottom line is that we are safe from that happening. We are many orders of magnitude in energy scales below the danger zone.
5 comments:
so a sufficiently powerful collider could trigger the vacuum
A sufficiently powerful collider couldn't be built anywhere in the Milky Way.
A sufficiently powerful collider couldn't be built anywhere in the Milky Way.
2 super massive black hole collision
We don't have two super massive black holes.
However, it's statistically certain that super massive BH collisions have occurred during galaxy collisions. And the universe is still here by golly.
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