Not Even Forgotten: The Higgs Boson and the End of Everything

what do you fear what do you love what do you dream what do you hope [Music] [Music] in 1827 James Lewis a mercenary in the East India Company finally tired of baking under the hot Indian Sun for the benefit of the Jolly corporate Fat Cats he served walked out of his post at Agra and never looked back now a fugitive he changed his name to the more distinctive and French sounding Charles massen and began a career as an archaeologist though he lacked formal training he managed to excavate over 9 000 individual objects from Afghanistan and modern Pakistan but it was in 1829 on the shores of the Indus River near the small village of harappa that Mason Nei Lewis literally made history he uncovered the outline of a ruined Metropolis 370 acres in area which had likely been home to 30 000 people and it was not alone over the preceding centuries dozens of similar sites would be found across the industrial Valley spanning an area roughly the size of modern Peru and possibly representing at its peak over 5 million people what truly sent the archaeologists spinning as they Unearthed the civilization was its age at over 5 000 years the Indus Valley Civilization or Harappan for the more poetic was a contemporary of the first great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia though far larger than either despite its vast extent it managed to maintain common systems of Urban Design weights and measures and most frustratingly for us because we can't read it written language the Harappan civilization lasted for 2 000 years and then one day it was gone five million lives five million voices five million stories silent of whom they were of what they desired and what they feared as they gazed Over the Horizon we cannot even speculate as we cannot read their words and unlike other civilizations lost for Millennia from the historical record the harappans were denied The Refuge of men even before the era of rediscovery in the 19th and 20th centuries the great civilizations of the Bronze Age the Egyptians the Sumerians the Babylonians and the Hittites were still preserved in the Bible Troy had the Iliad and the Minoans the mythophysius unflattering than it was but of the harappans not a wit remains The Vedas make no mention of them in an odd sense they belong more to our time than to their own but at least the harappans belong to a Time if a civilization is vast and enduring as theirs could be lost for Millennia how many are still buried there are millions of stories not even forgotten how many cultures washed down the tributaries of the Amazon as they died from European diseases how many spoken histories were unmade by the crushing advances of heedless hordes to love history is to be empathic I only ask that you feel empathy for those who are not and yet were and with that I wish to discuss the Higgs boson and before I go on I must thank the wonderful Dr Paul Sutter for being the only YouTuber I found who could break this down in a way explicable to myself you're all familiar with the Higgs boson the great scientific achievement of 2012. the hilariously misnamed God particle the last bit of the quantum jigsaw the Large Hadron Collider was built to find you may have heard that it gives particles mass that it is the reactions of subatomic particles as they swim through the Higgs field that imparts Mass to them and yet this is not why Peter Higgs initially formulated his Boson he did so to explain how our universe collapsed all subatomic particles are vibrations within a specific field our universe or at least everything in it exists as a seething overlapping web of fields as one field shifts other fields react like people sharing the same hammock or perhaps a person sharing a hammock with a hamster or an entire Zoo you can Envision this universe as an overlapping pile of a quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion Etc cards each Shifting the others as it moves the question is is this pile of cards a mess on the table or a house however elegant you found the latter simile I promise you you should pray to whatever Gods you cherish that we live in the mess a question I am sometimes asked is why the moon doesn't crash into the Earth or the earth into the sun the answer is quite simple they did or at least parts of them in the turmoil of solar system formation fragments of what would one day be planets were scattered Every Which Way much captured by the Sun or the larger planets much since spiraling into Interstellar space when the house finally collapsed the planets what remained at the bottom of the hole as counter-intuitive as it seems the solar system is the farthest down the material orbiting the Sun could fall in sciencey terms it is the lowest energy configuration what is true for the solar system is also true for the universe at one time specifically a trillion trillion trillionth of a second after the big bang when the ambient temperature was roughly a quadrillion degrees within that brief flicker of a Hellstorm the fields that comprise our universe were arranged in a higher configuration the house as it were was taller the weak Force which governs Atomic Decay and the electromagnetic force which governs your thermostat were combined into a single unified Force this was not the equivalent of melting Neapolitan ice cream with chocolate mixing with strawberry it was a completely different underlying structure the equivalent of melting in Neapolitan and getting a banana presumably there were earlier moments when the other forces of nature the strong nuclear force and gravity were merged together but we don't have the physics to describe them yet but these early high-energy configurations were not stable like a house of cards held up by wires as soon as the wires were cut or in this case as soon as the temperature dropped the house collapsed and the electromagnetic and weak forces split apart as calculated by Peter Higgs the presence of the Higgs boson allowed for the separation of these two forces which means the Higgs boson is the prop currently holding our universe up the question is how stable is it a staple is a rock or metastable like a bar stool just requiring one good kick to knock it over well to know that for sure for the Higgs boson we need to know its mass because the higher particles Mass the less stable it is obviously determining the mass of the Higgs is of some concern and to do it requires determining the mass of the heaviest elementary particle the top Quark as it Bobs up and down most noticeably in the Higgs field well that was done and the result is unsettling in 2014 Stephen Hawking summed up the consternation in a forward to a collection of talks given at the science conference starmus the Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 billion Giga electron volts this could mean that the Universe would undergo catastrophic vacuum Decay with a bubble of true vacuum expanding at the speed of light this could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming okay that statement needs some unpacking vacuum Decay or false vacuum Decay is the standard sciencey term for the card collapse I just mentioned given that it is neither false nor Decay nor technically a vacuum I have no idea why that particular chain of words was chosen but it seems we're stuck with it 100 billion gig electron volts may seem like a lot and from a certain perspective it is but it is important to remember that an electron volt is the amount of energy gained by a single electron as it receives one volt of charge that is a staggeringly ridiculously tiny amount of energy to put in some kind of perspective one joule the amount of energy required to move one kilogram one meter is 6.2 quintillion electron volts and a single calorie which if you've ever wondered is the amount of energy required to heat one liter of water one degree Celsius is 4184 joules kind of makes you want to restart that diet doesn't it fortunately a hundred billion Giga electron volts or 100 quintillion electron volts is a very high energy level for a particle to reach well outside the capabilities of the large hadronical lighter which can only muster energies of around 14 trillion electron volts which if the numbers are spinning your head is about 10 million times less so can particles actually reach such monstrous Energies unfortunately yes on the 15th of October 1991 at The dugway Proving Ground in Utah a cosmic array basically a rogue proton flying through space was detected entering Earth's atmosphere at an energy level of 320 quintillion electron volts for comparison most cosmic rays impart energies between 10 million and 100 trillion electron volts to reach that insane energy level the equivalent of a baseball thrown by a world-class pitcher the proton must have been traveling at five septillions of a percent below the speed of light since then seven other cosmic rays have been detected at energy levels with an order of magnitude of that event which has gained the somewhat risible name the oh my God particle though none have exceeded it there is no reason to assume a Higgs boson couldn't achieve such energy levels the vagaries of quantum mechanics are such that thanks to the uncertainty principle and the theory of indeterminacy a particle can tunnel through any conceivable barrier so what would happen if the Higgs boson did cross that threshold well it would reconfigure it would fall from its current energy state to its lower one like a pile of cards landing on the floor and it would emerge as something else something new and to our species something unknowable remember a new configuration isn't mixing chocolate and strawberry it's a banana in the X higgs's wake Fields would collapse like a sea of falling dominoes reforming to accommodate this new physics the new universe would expand outward as a vast sphere at nearly the speed of light converting all in its path like the Rogue Ice Nine which froze the Earth and Kurt vonnegut's cat's cradle how the sphere would appear to our eyes or even if our eyes could comprehend it is immaterial it would be traveling so close to the speed of light that as Hawking said we wouldn't see it coming in fact we wouldn't see it at all the new reality would brush ours aside like wake before a cargo ship leaving not even wreckage behind Beyond its unfathomable wall a universe takes shape so alien that we if somehow we still existed would likely not be able to perceive it with our ill-tune senses it is even possible the vastly unlikely that a new form of life and intelligence could rise in this new universe unknowingly treading on the reforged subatomic remains of their predecessor they could never know of us nor we of them that our existence was Unwound so that theirs could begin would be merely a philosophical conundrum for those with the scientific understanding to pose it we would not be and yet are in fact such an idea was proposed by Alan Guth the physicist who formulated inflation that the Universe must have expanded very rapidly in its earliest fractions of a second he argues that her own Universe began as just such a moment of reconfiguration and that the alien physics of the false vacuum could explain the early universe's near instantaneous expansion if so that might also explain why our universe seems so fine-tuned to support life we are simply one of countless ear infinite bubbles each forming their own universes some are Barren some Bountiful and some of a tesseractal form beyond their understanding our universe just happens to have the right combination of physical laws to allow us to exist how many innocent sentient Minds were undone over the course of a vigintillion reconfigurations so that we might live random chance gave us this realm and random chance can take it away given everything I've said given the age and size of the universe and the ubiquity of Higgs bosons is it not surprising that this nightmare has not already happened perhaps it has perhaps in some distant corner of the cosmos A new configuration has hatched rolling ever onward gutting our world from its conceptions up chasing our expanding Universe like a wolf could be banging at our heels right now and we would never know what do you fear what do you love what do you dream what do you hope to what do we in our pitiful ego as a species assign value we place our own desires and fears above those of countless others each a heart seeking the light each a mind seeking the truth we enclose ourselves for our own protection branching off small universes of our own making to Shield us from the expanse Beyond but I hope if you are willing to take this journey into higher Realms with me and gaze into the black pit of probability from Once We Came you can grieve for those before us that are not and yet were and hope that in another time in another world what our fears loves hopes and dreams are not even forgotten someone will do the same for us foreign

Channel: ParallaxNick

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Id: uwtU3XmBSpE

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2022