"God Particle" Could Wipe Out The Universe, Says Steven Hawking

[Piorn]

I'd claim the media's insistence on calling it the "God Particle" is an indicator of a much greater threat to the universe than any hypothetical cataclysm.
Did you guess the threat? It's Human Nature.

 

[CaitSeith]

I'd claim the media's insistence on calling it the "God Particle" is an indicator of a much greater threat to the universe than any hypothetical cataclysm.
Did you guess the threat? It's Human Nature.

That combined with the insistence of pseudo-intelectuals that have no professional connection with the scientific community on demanding to stop giving an easier name to remember than Higgs-Boson because it has the word *gasp* "God" in it.

It's like mixing acids and bases.

 

[renegade7]

There is also an ontological problem that it invokes, namely, that most permutations of this interpretation of the standard model hinge on the many worlds hypothesis being true, in which case we are all subject to subjective immortality and wouldn't need to worry about dying in any way, let alone vacuum collapse, anyway.

So in conclusion, in terms of things that could kill you, worry more about falling down your stairs or getting in a car accident before worrying about the consequences of quantum field theory.

Your entire post reminds me of Welcome to the Night Vale. Instead of being set in a world where every conspiracy is true, your post is set in a world in which every offbeat possibility and half-thought hypothesis of physics is true.

If you were to stick to only theories with a shred of evidence behind them, your post would be a lot more dry.

Subjective immortality is only a result of a thought experiment that gets brought up as a result of the paradox that results from asking whether it's possible to "die" due to the universe destroying itself, because this interpretation depends on the universe being a superposition of states. Sort of like the Schrodinger's Cat experiment from the cat's point of view: if the universe exists in all possible states at the same time until something attempts to analyze it and a sensory apparatus within it can't be aware of the states that resolve into that device's inability to be aware of them, do you continue to exist, since our interaction with the world is nothing more than the the input from our sensory organs? Barring the existence of an afterlife, one would think that you'd just become really, really old. But that's a paradox and a thought puzzle related to the issue that I thought people who are into this kind of physics would find interesting, not a scientific theory or validated hypothesis (being impossible to test).

As for the rest above that aside, how much did you actually read? None of that was "off-beat half-thought hypotheses". That was using established science to explain why we shouldn't be concerned about the off-beat, half-thought hypothesis being presented here in this news article as a legitimate threat to our existence and something to actually be concerned with:

-For vacuum collapse to be possible, we have to assume that we exist in a universe with an unstable vacuum state, which there is no reason to believe as of now. That is, the first strike against this story is that no one's actually sure if it's even possible.

-We have to also take it to be possible to even generate enough energy at one point to provoke a bubble nucleation. Cosmic rays strike particles in the atmosphere with millions of times more energy than what is produced in the LHC or any collider that could be built in the near future. Active black holes, in particular quasars and blazars, as well as other events like gamma-ray bursts, are more energetic still. And this is all going on with the conspicuous lack of universal implosion.

-Culminating in the final argument that, between something that will happen once in 10^100 years IF a vacuum collapse is even possible (divide 76 by 10^100. That's the chances of you dying this way in any given year of your life), you're better off worrying about much more mundane hazards to your continued existence.

What part of that is "off-beat and half-thought"?