Wednesday, February 20, 2013

We Are All Going to Die

In a couple ten to a hundred billion years. It seems they may have discovered the Higgs Boson sub-atomic particle. This particle has long been on the "must find" list to prove a theory about how/why sub-atomic particles have mass, called the Higgs Field. It is thought that these particles have mass  . . .  basically (I think, I'm way out of my depth here) in the Higgs Field the particles decays, spreading its mass into other particles. . .  oh sweet lord this:

In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson with no spin, electric charge, or color charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. It is a quantum excitation of one component of the four component Higgs field–a scalar field with two neutral and two electrically charged components that forms a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry. The field has a "Mexican hat" shaped potential with nonzero strength everywhere (including otherwise empty space) which in its vacuum state breaks the weak isospin symmetry of the electroweak interaction. When this happens, three components of the Higgs field are "absorbed" by the SU(2) and U(1) gauge bosons (the "Higgs mechanism") to become the longitudinal components of the now-massive W and Z bosons of the weak force. The remaining electrically neutral component separately couples to other particles known as fermions (via Yukawa couplings), causing these to acquire mass as well. Some versions of the theory predict more than one kind of Higgs fields and bosons. Alternative "Higgsless" models would need to be considered if the Higgs boson is not discovered. 

from wikipedia

It seems this particle is inherently unstable and if it makes up the Higgs Field we are all going to die when the Universe suddenly vomits its mass up on to itself and extinguishes itself in one gigantic inter-stellar deathgasm.


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