jts@bu-cs.UUCP (Joe Szep) (08/19/85)
I found this little tidbit I had saved a while back. Makes for interesting thinking. It's an article from the April 16, 1983 Science News: ACCELERATORS WON'T HASTEN DOOMSDAY There seems to be a notion going about that the next generation of particle accelerators could be the end of the world. This idea is cited by Pier Hut and Martin Rees of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. in the April 8-13 Nature. The doomsaying arises from the suggestion of some of the latest theories of cosmology that the universe, or at least our neighborhood of it, may be in some kind of metastable state based on what is called a false vacuum. Vacuum, to a physicist, is the zero energy state. Devoid of matter and energy, it is the lowest possible state of existence, the basis above which all the processes of physics take place. The vacuum should be the lowest imaginable state, but, odd as it seems, cosmologists now suggest that at certain epochs in the history of the universe, physics might base itself on a vacuum level that is not true, not the lowest one possible, a "false" vacuum. The universe could remain in that state for billions of years. If we are in fact in such a false vacuum state - we really don't know whether we are - and if the appropriate trigger should cause the formation of a bubble in which physics observed the true vacuum, that bubble would expand with the speed of light, and - WHOOSH! - we will have had it. [Not even enough time to say "Oh shit..."] The doomsday thought is that extremely high-energy collisions between subatomic particles might cause such a bubble to form and that the next generation of particle accelerators could provide enought energy to do it. Hut and Rees argue that in the past, cosmic rays and possibly other celestial processes have caused much more energetic collisions in our part of the universe than the next generation of accelerators can supply, so there seems to be no danger from that quarter - not yet. This is the sort of thing those yo-yo's at MIT would do as a joke.... Aren't you glad you know this now? =:-x
crm@duke.UUCP (Charlie Martin) (08/22/85)
The false-vacuum-bubble bit made a pretty good story in Analog, too. -- Charlie Martin (...mcnc!duke!crm)