Mentally grasping the size of the universe in its ever-expanding vastness is no easy feat for a human being, but to know that one day it may have an ultimate and unavoidable end may be even harder to grasp.
Now, less than a year after its discovery at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, scientists are claiming the long sought Higgs boson may answer questions of how the universe came to be and how it will eventually end.
Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. and a lead scientist at the LHC, announced the doomsday prediction while presenting his data at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.
“It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable,” Lykken said during the meeting. “At some point billions of years from now, it’s all going to get wiped out.”
The discovery of the Higgs boson particle has yet to be confirmed by CERN, as calculations are still ongoing. But, so far, they are heading in the right direction. The Higgs boson is a particle scientists have long believed gives matter its mass. If confirmed to be a Higgs boson, it would validate the widely used Standard Model of physical particles and the possible end to our cosmos. In order for the calculations to be correct and valid, the mass of the Higgs particle must be within 1 percent, along with the precise mass of other relevant subatomic particles.
“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there’ll be a catastrophe,” Lykken explained, “A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative’ universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us.”
Lykken’s predicted end would occur at the speed of light, but Earth will likely not exist at the time of the event. Physicists predict that in 4.5 billion years, the sun will expand into a Red Giant that will engulf the Earth along with its history. From there, our particles will be recycled into the universe and take many new forms before the end.
CERN’s LHC is currently shut down for repairs and enhancements, but is scheduled to reopen again in 2015. We may know the true fate of our universe before then. Some may view this prediction as a morbid outcome, knowing that nothing can last infinitely. However, this end can be seen in a different light, one where humans will share the same, predestined end as the cosmos that granted our existence and consciousness.
