Out, Out, Brief Candle!

“Why you’re only a sort of thing in his dream! If that there king was to wake, you’d go out–bang!–just like a candle!”–”Through The Looking Glass”, Lewis Carroll

Most scientists now think that the inflationary Big Bang was the event that set the Universe in motion almost 14 billion years ago. The inflationary Big Bang model is currently the prevailing cosmological theory of the Universe’s formation and early development, whereby it is thought that the Universe, originally in an extremely dense and searing-hot state, expanded exponentially, and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Up until the 20th-century, we did not realize that our Universe likely had a definite beginning–and therefore may likewise end. In February 2013, scientists announced their finding that a subatomic particle, the Higgs Boson, might cause a Cosmic Doomsday tens of billions of years from now. According to this scenario, the Universe will vanish at the speed of light, only to be replaced by an alternative bizarre, alien, and “boring” dimension.

The Universe that we see today is in a very much diluted state compared to its very hot and very dense beginnings–and it continues to expand today, at an accelerating rate. Based on the best available measurements, the original state of the Universe existed around 13.7 billion years ago, and is often referred to by cosmologists as the time when the inflationary Big Bang occurred. This theory is currently considered to be the most comprehensive and accurate explanation of our Universe’s formation, and it is strongly supported by the best scientific evidence and observations currently available.

The inflationary Big Bang model is too-often misinterpreted to mean that the Universe was hatched from a single point, experienced an explosion, and has been flying apart ever since. However, the Big Bang, despite its name, does not really refer to an explosion at all. The inflationary Big Bang refers to the expansion or stretching of Spacetime itself. It is incorrect to imagine that things are flying out from a point. Instead, all things are traveling away from each other. It is like having an infinitely large glob of leavening raisin bread. According to this frequently used example, as the restless raisin bread rises, all the raisins travel further and further away from each other. If a raisin could observe its situation, it would appear to it that it was at the center of an explosion. But that is merely an optical illusion–all of the raisins are moving away from all of the other raisins, and there is no center.

If we run the wonderful story of our Universe’s formation in reverse, both Time and Raisin Bread become increasingly smaller and smaller and smaller, and all the raisins travel closer and closer and closer together in the ever-shrinking glob. At last, in the end, when all of the raisins are finally so close together that they are literally on top of one another, we are back at the beginning, according to the inflationary Big Bang model. This starting point is termed the cosmic singularity. A singularity is a region of infinite gravitational field and infinite Spacetime curvature. Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, in which gravity is the curved geometry of Space and Time, predicts that a singularity is the ultimate result of gravitational collapse.

Elusive Denizen Of The Particle Zoo

The Higgs Boson is a theoretical elementary particle whose existence was predicted by what is termed the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The Higgs was named for Dr. Peter Higgs, who was one of half-a-dozen particle physicists who, back in 1964, described the mechanism that indicated such a particle should exist.

The Higgs Boson is the long-sought missing piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes all of the known subatomic particles in the Cosmos. The great import of the boson is that it is thought to be linked to a Higgs Field that causes other particles to acquire their mass. Imagine an elementary particle acquiring its mass by rolling through a tray of molten caramel. The molten caramel would be the all-important Higgs Field. The blob of caramel that sticks to the particle would be its newly acquired mass.

Without the Higgs Boson, physicists would not be able to explain how the Universe–containing such wonderful things as galaxies, stars, planets, moons, chunky pieces of rocky-icy space stuff, and living creatures such as ourselves–can exist. A seething gaseous incandescent golden ball like our Sun, the swath of blackness that is our cloudless midnight sky splattered with silvery star-fire, and creatures like ourselves who love to look at such wonderful, mysterious, and beautiful sights, cannot be explained without the Higgs Boson and its accompanying Higgs Field!

A photon can be compared to the Higgs Boson. Photons are particles of light, but they also carry the electromagnetic force. The Higgs Boson, likewise, carries a force. According to the theory, every tiny, tiny lepton and quark, rolls through this very sticky (like molten caramel) field, thus gaining mass. This mass is what enables the particles to interact with one another, eventually clinging together to form atoms and molecules that create the galaxies, stars, planets, moons, us, and other good things partying around our very bewitching Cosmos! Without the Higgs Boson, scientists are at a loss to provide a physical explanation for why we exist.

In July 2012, a Higgs Boson candidate was uncovered at the world’s largest particle accelerator–the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The subatomic particle may indeed be the long-sought and elusive Higgs.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN’s) LHC is an enormous scientific instrument that spans the border between Switzerland and France, and is about 100 meters underground. The LHC is used by physicists to investigate the smallest of all known particles–the basic building blocks of all things.

Two beams of subatomic particles called hadrons–either protons or lead ions–zip in opposite directions within the circular accelerator, and they acquire more and more energy with every lap. Physicists use the LHC in their efforts to recreate the conditions immediately following the Big Bang. They do this by colliding the two beams together in head-on smash-ups at extremely high energies.

Two experiments conducted at Europe’s LHC, constructed to study the fundamental particles and forces of Nature that are the basis of our physical reality, separately found evidence for the particle’s existence. Both the ATLAS and the CMS experiments reported a 5-sigma statistical confidence level that the candidate particle had at last been found–this translates into a 100% certainty that a new particle exists.

“This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson, and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” commented CMS spokesperson Dr. Joe Incandela to the press on July 4, 2012.

The teams of scientists first spotted intriguing clues in the fall of 2011. Since then, the LHC has continued to collide many more particles to see what shows up in the collisional debris.

The new boson weighs-in at what theoretical predictions said the Higgs should weigh, according to both CMS and ATLAS. It is about 125-126 gigaelectronvolts, or roughly 130 times heavier than a proton. The LHC was able to uncover the boson by accelerating protons to incredibly high energies through its immense construction of tubes–smashing the protons together. Mass and energy are the same thing, so when the protons display very high energies, this means that they are very large. The protons blast themselves to smithereens when they smash into each other, and physicists then search for tinier constituent particles in the debris. That’s where they spotted the boson.

The mass of the newly discovered boson is a key ingredient in a calculation that predicts the future of the Universe–and how it may end.

Cosmic Bad News

The boson discovered in the proton smash-ups at the LHC may hint that Space and Time are doomed to a tragic end, researchers announced in February 2013. “This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe,” Dr. Joseph Lykken announced on February 18, 2013 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Lykken is a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. He added that “It may be the Universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out.” Dr. Lykken is a collaborator on one of the LHC’s Higgs-hunting experiments.

To confirm the newly discovered boson’s true identity, more data are necessary. However, many scientists believe that the Higgs truly has been found.

So far, physicists have discovered nothing to indicate that the boson spotted in 2012 at the LHC is not the elusive Higgs. However, its mass of about 126 billion electronvolts is a critical number when it comes to the fate of Space and Time. This critical number is just about what is necessary to make the Universe fundamentally unstable, in a way that would doom it to end catastrophically in the very, very remote future. This is because the Higgs Field is literally everywhere, and it influences all of Space and Time. Interestingly, if the Higgs mass were just a few percent different, the Universe wouldn’t be doomed.

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” Dr. Lykken commented in the February 19, 2013 Discovery.com News. He continued to explain that “It may be that the Universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself.”

Billions and billions of years from now, in the event that this Cosmic Doomsday truly does occur, any living creature still hanging around our Cosmos will be fortunate in one sense, anyway–the doom will come at the speed of light, and so nothing alive will actually see the Universe go out–bang!–just like a candle!