Death of the Universe (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 14, 2013, 15:01 (3976 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George: Reviving an old thread here.
> It seems the Big Crunch is back on the agenda
> 
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131212113034.htm
> 
> Or a new form of Collapse of the Universe 
> due to a glitch in the Higgs Field.
> 
> But apparently the discovery of one new particle 
> may contradict the whole thesis!-Thanks George for the reference. I've not been following closely for two days with other issues taking my time. I never realized retirement could be so time consuming. -Science news writers always like to hype the research to mean more than it does:-"collapse of the universe will happen if a bubble forms in the universe where the Higgs particle-associated Higgs-field will reach a different value than the rest of the universe. If this new value means lower energy, and if the bubble is large enough, the bubble will expand at the speed of light in all directions. All elementary particles inside the bubble will reach a mass that is much heavier than if they were outside the bubble, and thus they will pull each other into supermassive centers. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southern Denmark" -The double "ifs" put the entire conjecture into never-never land. Mark Strassler, whose blog I follow, points out that it is important to imagine strange new universes because it opens up areas and ideas for theoretical particle physicists to explore and occasionally stumble into a really important insight. This study is that sort of 'what if' approach, and is taken too seriously by the science writer. The current Higgs, according to Strassler, should be stronger to fit current theories, and in fact there may be as many as 5 Higgs, but the studies need to be at much higher energies than have been available. The LHC will go to higher levels in two years. But the geometry of space-time still favors flatness and continuing expansion. The increased speed of that expansion is certainly not fully understood, requiring the assumption of 'dark energy". I don't buy an outlook for 'crunch' Although Steinhardt keeps pushing for it.