Could the universe collapse TODAY? Physicists claim that risk is ‘more likely than ever'

reply to post by brace22


Well if the process started we can currently view billions of light years. So if we saw galaxies disappearing in only one place in the sky. Good news it would take longer to get here then life on earth will exist. If it happened in our space it be over so quick we wouldnt know it so id say little to worry about.

reply to post by openminded2011

Quite right, I've heard about it as well.
Sometime ago I saw a morgan freeman video on the tube
narrating this scenario.

CJCrawley
Relax everyone - it's a Daily Mail article.

This should be in the hoax bin.

Yes, it is a DM article, so much of what they added to it can be thrown in the bin - however, the actually Scientists involved and their work is real so don't totally discount it.

It is totally theoretical work, building on work done into the Higgs Boson, but it isn't worth any more or less than the myriad other theoretical's out there for what will happen to our Universe, so for all those arguing against such a thing because of the "Big Rip" or heat death are simply arguing that their own theory is better than this one, when to be truthful no one knows and they are all just postulations based on some very funky maths.

as long as everyone and everything goes with me, i'm fine.

reply to post by brace22


So we might be squished into a micron sized mud-ball in 4.5 billion years. That's about the time I will be allowed to retire with full benefits.

Kratos

Sorry for being away for a while guys! Been busy!


I think there are a few things we should discuss after reading the replies.


1) This is a theory, IE, they just put their math and what not to the test and they got a speculative answer. As we don't know anything about the universe, this could potentially be BS

(I hope it is BS, I don't want to fold in on myself to be honest)

2) It is from the Daily Mail, so it maybe a little glorified.

3) Science is based on facts. When we can't confirm facts, it becomes best guess. Science is best guess. IMHO



Now, to move forward with this. I did read a very compelling reply that said about how we would not notice all of this happening, as we would be on a different scale. When I read this, I instantly thought of one of them expandaballs! Imagine that, if the universe was literally and expandaball!

Blue Shift
Don't worry. The universe isn't going to collapse as long as I'm alive. The second I'm dead, however, you're on your own.

(Not really. You won't exist either.)

I am wearing a T-shirt that says "As a matter of fact the world does revolve around me."

But imagine, if we have imagined our own world and it does in fact revolve around us who have imagined"

Like when we are little we are good at imagining, as we get older we have trained, by being good at imagining things as a child, when we get older, the things we imagined when we were little seem stupid, as our conscious matures things make more sense than some scary monster under our our bed..

Maybe the monster become our controllers(TPTB I would say the powers to be are already here).

Maybe we should all imagine they do not exist from here on now. hehe lol.

reply to post by brace22


After reading that article I think I got a bit dumber.
3rd line

reply to post by TrueBrit


Well, the big bang started from a place in time and space that did not exist until the explosion, which came from such a tiny speck of super super super dense matter that could not be seen, even by god, so who knows?

OBVIOUSLY;

the universe will "end" at some date...this is nothing new and many theories exist about the birth and the end of the universe.

It can very well be that their theory of the phase-shifting field is a "normal" process.

When universes are born (which our mainstream scientists obviously assume)...then I personally also believe that THIS OUR universe is not necessarily the 1st universe ever born, it could be one universe in an infinite series of universes which for all eternity are born and at some date also vanish again.

(It would be far more unrealistic to believe the universe lasts "forever").

But let's just assume this theory of the phase-shifting higgs field which could happen "any time somewhere in the universe".

The OBSERVABLE universe is a sphere of 46billion LY. This is what we can see. Theories say that the "size" of the universe may very well be infinite.

If such a bubble would happen anywhere from 5-30 billions of LY away...let's put it that way...it would still take a long, long time til the collapse would reach us (Earth is 4.5B years old). We also know that the Sun etc. won't shine forever also.

Here is another thought: If the universe is indeed infinite in size, and this theory applies....then chances are also INFINITELY LARGE that such a bubble already happened SOMEWHERE in the universe and the collapse already started and spreads. It could be 100 bil LY away.....10000 bil LY...or whatever insane distance since the size of the universe is "infinite".

It's also thinkable that the "death" of an universe is leading to the birth of a new one...that your existence, THIS universe results from the death of another. The collapse leading to a Big Bang "somewhere else".

In all honestly, the theory of ONE single universe which magically came about from ONE Big Bang "out of nothing" does not make sense (outside of religion of course)....but the idea of universes being born, collapsing and others being born again makes more sense to me.

openminded2011
reply to post by brace22

 

There is a postulation that the vacuum is just on the edge of stability, and if it goes unstable, we could literally have something akin to a new big bang inside our present universe, which would literally expand out at the speed of light and destroy everything in its path. So since its approaching you at the speed of light, the only warning you would get would be your own disintegration, it a nanosecond timescale. Probably quite painless, as you would cease to exist in less time than pain impulses could be created by the event.

cool!

when will it come and take me away?

If true, it could take millions upon millions of years before it hits us. We'll be long gone by then I'm sure.

I kinda imagine a huge, vast white table with thousands of little black balls like marbles just sitting randomly about. That white table is what exists beyond our universe, those black balls universes that have already collapsed, containing countless lives, civilizations and technology long lost.

As Bender Rodriguez would say, "Neat" *takes photo*.

I'm a theoretical physicist is another way of saying "i'm nuts".

reply to post by spartacus699


Hardly!

Theoretical physics is a field that requires massive amounts of raw mathematical ability, imagination, logic and critical thinking, as well as lateral thinking and a whole host of other crucial mental gymnastic abilities. The people who get involved with this bastard child of science and mathematics, have to be staggeringly intelligent in order to allow them to conceptualise the universe in a useful manner, without being able to directly observe the variables which affect the accuracy of their work.

They also have to be grounded when they are working, because otherwise they would surely go completely bonkers. I love physics, but I have to confess, my mathematical ability is somewhere between sub par, and non existent. I love the conceptual and imaginative leaps that show up in the field, but I cannot get involved with the raw calculus, because my brain does not work that way. I can see a galaxy form around my plughole in the bath, but I cannot mathematically describe it, and doing so requires far more discipline and aptitude than I possess.

I am probably insane, but the people that actually pick apart the cosmos on blackboards generally speaking, are far from mentally deficient.

brace22

The universe could be about to collapse and everything in it - including us - will be compressed into a small, hard ball.

The process may already have started somewhere in our cosmos and is eating away at the rest of the universe, according to theoretical physicists.

The mind-bending concept has been around for a while, but now researchers in Denmark claim they have proven it is possible with mathematical equations.

These idiots think that they can gin up a math equation and define actual reality with it as long as it balances out without leaning on an infinite sum for resolution. Reality isn't like the kind of math these boobs are playing with. Reality isn't free of contextual contamination, and it's not based on the existence of symmetries. In fact, if Reality were based on symmetries, nothing would physically exist, since symmetries are static - another word for dead, lifeless.

I try to imagine being so completely lost that you actually believe that making a claim like this won't expose you as being a total idiot, but there's just so much my own imagination can achieve. 21st century physics is really turning out to be an epic and historic phase of scientific revelation in its own unique sense of what that phrase can potentially suggest.

There is a lot of fascinating reads on that topic.

At least ONE scientist and some critics of the experiments with the Large Hadron Collider theorize that by 2150 we may have reached ways to generate energies with the colliders WHICH EXCEED THOSE BEING OBSERVED in the universe, eg. by natural occurring cosmic ray collisions.

Those energies *could* trigger such a phase-shift, in other words it could literally wipe out the entire universe!! Obviously, most scientists reject this idea..but who knows for sure?

SEE: en.wikipedia.org...

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. Such an event would be one possible doomsday event.

In theory, either high enough energy concentrations or random chance could trigger the tunneling needed to set this event in motion. However an immense number of ultra-high energy particles and events have occurred in the history of our universe, dwarfing by many orders of magnitude any events at human disposal. Hut and Rees[19] note that, because we have observed cosmic ray collisions at much higher energies than those produced in terrestrial particle accelerators, these experiments will not, at least for the foreseeable future, pose a threat to our current vacuum.

Particle accelerations have reached energies of only approximately eight tera electron volts (8×1012 eV). Cosmic ray collisions have been observed at and beyond energies of 1018 eV, a million times more powerful – the so-called Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit - and other cosmic events may be more powerful yet.

Against this, John Leslie has argued that if present trends continue, particle accelerators will exceed the energy given off in naturally occurring cosmic ray collisions by the year 2150. Fears of this kind were raised by critics of both the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider at the time of their respective proposal, and determined to be unfounded by scientific inquiry.

Now, I am not a nuclear physicist....but even as a layman I can grasp the idea of an "unstable universe". The shocking thing is that such a speculation about "wiping out the entire universe", as shocking and unbelievable it may sound is possible assuming of course that all the current data proves right, that we are INDEED in a "meta-stable" universe which could at any time "flip" into its true state of "true vacuum" once triggered by a random or not-so-random event.

On a side-note, I already saw Star Trek episodes which seemed far-fetched...anyone remember this episode with the shrinking universe? However reality again proves again that it's even more bizarre than science fiction can ever be!

Daily Fail?

Please....

If the entirety of reality were on the brink of collapse the insignificant bacteria that is humanity would have not the slightest idea of the impending doom.

These are the same morons that kill themselves for no reason for resources that they themselves control to make a profit.

Vasa Croe
reply to post by brace22

 

If we are all going to die I would say that may be one of the most interesting ways to go....being able to watch the entire universe collapse in on us.

Unfortunately this theory indicates that the collapse would occur at the speed of light. You wouldn't see it coming. It would follow right behind the last light reaching your eyes. The researches who have described this say its the inevitable end. Forget gravity...this is the quantum fabric of space dissolving in a cascade. It won't matter if the universe is expanding or not.

Oh my, the ultimate doom.

I am waiting for this television to be turned off. Because we're in a holographic universe, akin to a television screen and if its over, we're all going home. That is precisely what I;m waiting for. That's the good times. The biggest and best thing that will happen.

I''m ascared.
Not so much about "reality" though. Just more practical matters.

Asteroids and mortgage payments and suchlike.