The Higgs Boson May Have Saved Our Universe from Cosmic Collapse. For Now.
The Higgs Boson May Have Saved Our Universe from Cosmic Collapse. For Now.
The Higgs Boson May Have Saved Our Universe from Cosmic Collapse. For Now.
Will the universe expand forever or will it eventually collapse into a small spot?
An article published in June suggested that infinite expansion was impossible according to an important theory of physics, a conjecture that generated huge waves in the physical community.
"People get very, very emotional about it because if it's true and [is] discovered, it would be spectacular, "said Timm Wrase, a physicist at the Vienna University of Technology.
Now, Wrase and his colleagues have published a separate study that opens a big hole in that argument, which means that a universe in constant expansion can not be ruled out yet.
Dark energy and cosmic expansion.
Our universe is impregnated with a vast invisible force that seems to oppose gravity. Physicists call this force dark energy, and it is believed that it is constantly pushing our universe out.
But in June, a group of physicists. He published an article in the arXiv prepress magazine. which implies that dark energy changes over time. This means that the universe will not expand forever but could collapse to the size it was before the Big Bang.
Almost immediately, however, the physicists found problems with the theory: several independent groups subsequently published articles suggesting revisions to the conjecture. Now, an article published on October 2 in the magazine. Physical revision D suggests that, as it stands, the original conjecture can not be true because it can not explain the existence of the Higgs boson, which we know exists, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle collider on the border between France and Switzerland.
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Still, with a little bit of theoretical adjustment, the conjecture of the collapsed universe could still be viable, said Wrase, the lead author in the new Physical Review D article, to Live Science.
How do we explain everything that once existed?
String theory, sometimes called the theory of everything, is a mathematically elegant but experimentally unproven framework for linking Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics. String theory suggests that all the particles that make up the universe are not really points, but one-dimensional strings that vibrate, and the differences in those vibrations allow us to see one particle as a photon and another as an electron.
However, for string theory to be a viable explanation for the universe, it must incorporate dark energy.
Imagine this dark energy as a ball in a landscape of mountains and valleys that represent the amount of potential energy you have, Wrase said. If a ball is on the top of the mountain, it can be still, but it can roll down with the slightest disturbance, making it unstable. If the ball is sitting in a valley, it is not changing or moving, it has little energy and resides in a stable universe, because even a strong push would roll it into the valley.
String theorists assumed for a long time that dark energy is constant and invariable in the universe. In other words, it is nestled in the valleys between mountains, not from the mountain tops and therefore does not change over time, Wrase said.
But the conjecture made in June suggests that, for string theory to work, the landscape has no mountains or valleys above sea level. (In this conception, our universe is above sea level, metaphorically marking the point at which dark energy begins to unite the universe or separate it).
Rather, the landscape is a slight slope and the ball of dark energy is rolling down. "As it rolls down, the dark energy gets smaller and smaller," Wrase said. "The height of the ball corresponds to the amount of dark energy in our universe."
In this theory, dark energy could eventually make its way below sea level and begin to bring the universe back to its pre-existingBig Bang shape.
But there's only one problem, Wrase said.
"We have shown that those unstable mountain peaks have to exist," he said. That's because we know that the Higgs particle exists. And we've experimentally proved that Higgs particles can exist in these mountain ridges or "unstable universes" and can be disturbed with the slightest touch, he said.
Difficulty with the stability of the universes.
Cumrun Vafa, a string theorist at Harvard and lead author of the June conjecture paper, told Live Science in an email that, in fact, the original conjecture has "difficulties with unstable universes." This new document and some others show this problem, he added. But there are several articles that proposed minor revisions to the conjecture that still adhered to the limitations that Wrase and his team proposed, he said.
Even in the revised conjecture, "we would not be in a stable universe, but things would change," Wrase said. The review says that mountain tops may exist, but stable valleys can not, he said. (Imagine the shape of a horse's chair). The ball has to start rolling and the dark energy has to change over time, he added. But "if the guess is [totally] wrong, then the dark energy could be constant, we would sit in a valley between two mountains, "and the universe would continue to expand.
Within 10 to 15 years, he hopes that satellites that more accurately measure the expansion of the universe can help us understand if dark energy is constant or changing.
Vafa agreed. "These are exciting times in cosmology and we hope that in the coming years we will see experimental evidence of the change of dark energy in our universe," he said.
Originally published in Living science.
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