One of the exciting aspects of some fields of physics is that they involve calculating the expected time until the Universe ends or experiences fundamental shifts that would render most if not all …
Clickbaity title. The estimated time until Higgs field decay has been changed from 10794 years to 10790 years. Presumably there's some tiny chance of it happening today, but practically we can just continue worrying about all the regular stuff that is about to kill us all.
Also, from what I understand, we wouldn't see it coming (as the decay would be spreading at the speed of light), and everything would be over before our senses could ever detect anything out of the ordinary.
To write that out in full: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Which looks like I just held ctrl+v until it seemed suitably silly.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for the false vacuum state collapses, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
I'm a bit curious as to what time span exactly they're measuring here? Because it's not like the whole universe would die all at once. Heck, vacuum decay could have already begun somewhere. If so, it would propagate outward at the speed of light, which is quite slow compared to the size of the universe. If it's far enough away, it may never reach us at all due to the space between expanding.
In any case, this is all theoretical and may not be an actual thing that could happen at all.
Particle masses would change, along with all associated physics, as suddenly the lower Higgs field state means that everything has significantly more mass. To say that it would shake up the Universe would an understatement.
would this be enough extra mass to overcome dark energy expanding the universe and cause a Big Crunch? or would everything be far too spread out at that point for gravity/mass to matter at all?
Quantum field theory conserves mass-energy, so the new mass is coming from the energy in the Higgs field itself. It settles to a lower energy state and basically transfers that energy as mass to all of the particles that couple with it. Since it's mass-energy and not just mass that generates gravitational distortions, the large-scale gravitational evolution of the universe probably won't change, as this just moves things around a bit. It's not creating energy out of nothing.
maybe its what Hawking describes as epic sheets of force bigger then the universe slapping together to create the big bang and how it is probably not the first big bang