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The universe may be more unstable than you think

#1
C C Offline
https://astronomy.com/news/2022/12/the-u...-you-think

EXCERPTS (Paul Sutter): The nature of that unified force remains a mystery, but as the universe expanded and cooled from initial state, the forces peeled off from each other. First came gravity, then strong nuclear, and lastly electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force split from each other...

[...] Each time the forces divided, the cosmos underwent a radical phase transition, populated by new particles and forces. For example, the unified electroweak force is carried by a quartet of massless particles, but the electromagnetic force is carried by a single massless particle, the photon, while three massive particles carry the weak nuclear. If those two forces hadn’t split, then life as we know it, which depends on electromagnetic interactions to glue atoms together into molecules, simply wouldn’t exist.

The universe has not undergone such a reshuffling of fundamental forces in over 13 billion years, but that doesn’t mean it’s not capable of playing the same tricks again.

[...] When physicists first calculated the stability of the universe, as determined by the Higgs boson’s ability to maintain the separation of the electroweak force, they didn’t know the mass of either the Higgs itself or the top quark. Now we do: The top quark weighs around 175 GeV, and the Higgs around 125 GeV.

Plugging those two numbers into the stability equations reveals that the universe is… metastable. This is different than stable, which would mean that there’s no chance of the universe splitting apart instantly, but also different than unstable, which would mean it already happened.

Instead, the universe is balanced in a rather precarious position: It can remain in its present state indefinitely, but if something were to perturb spacetime in just the wrong way, then it would transform to a new ground state.

What would that new state look like? It’s impossible to say, as the new universe would feature new physics, with new particles and new forces of nature. But it’s safe to say that life would be different, if not completely impossible.

What’s worse, it may have already happened... (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Kornee Offline
This one gets recycled regularly. Given extreme ultrarelativistic cosmic ray collisions, which happen very often and everywhere, or end stages of neutron star-neutron star collisions, haven't managed to trigger the apocalyptic transformation anywhere near us by now, something may be amiss with the underlying assumptions.
For instance, some avant garde theories postulate a hierarchical family of Higgs bosons - not just one.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
I’ve been noticing it’s a little rickety lately. Like we’re a game tile in the middle of the Jenga stack.
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