The 2 Most Dangerous Numbers in The Universe are Threatening The End of Physics!

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It’s truly amazing from human perspective when you observe the variables and all the little probabilities that needed to happen so The Universe can exist.

It’s MIND BLOWING!

Maybe, our logic sees this as a really really really (multiplied by infinity) rare chance but in reality it’s all elegantly constructed, like a beautiful MMORPG game with extremely beautiful graphics.

Speaking of the rare opportunity for The Universe to exist, scientists have discovered 2 more variables that make the chance of our existence even smaller.

They call them,

The 2 Most Dangerous Numbers in The Universe

CERN has announced that the LHCb experiment had revealed the existence of two new baryon subatomic particles.

A deeply disturbing and controversial line of thinking has emerged within the physics community.

It’s the idea that we are reaching the absolute limit of what we can understand about the world around us through science.

“The next few years may tell us whether we’ll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe, for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer,” Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at CERN said during a recent TED talk in Geneva, Switzerland.

Equally frightening is the reason for this approaching limit, which Cliff says is because “the laws of physics forbid it.”

At the core of Cliff’s argument are what he calls the two most dangerous numbers in the universe. These numbers are responsible for all the matter, structure, and life that we witness across the cosmos.

And if these two numbers were even slightly different, says Cliff, the universe would be an empty, lifeless place.

 

The 1st Dangerous Number: The strength of the Higgs field

The_2_most_dangerous_numbers The Higs Field

(Shutterstock)
Illustration of the Higgs boson and field.

 

The first dangerous number on Cliff’s list is a value that represents the strength of what physicists call the Higgs field, an invisible energy field not entirely unlike other magnetic fields that permeates the cosmos.

As particles swim through the Higgs field, they gain mass to eventually become the protons, neutrons, and electrons comprising all of the atoms that make up you, me, and everything we see around us.

Without it, we wouldn’t be here.

But there’s something mysterious about the Higgs field that continues to perturb physicists like Cliff.

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity (the science about the incredible large world) and the theory of quantum mechanics (the science about the incredible small world) the Higgs field should be performing one of two tasks, says Cliff:

  • Either it should be turned off, meaning it would have a strength value of zero and wouldn’t be working to give particles mass;
  • Or it should be turned on, and, as the theory goes, this “on value” is “absolutely enormous,”;

But neither of those two scenarios are what physicists observe.

“In reality, the Higgs field is just slightly on,” says Cliff. “It’s not zero, but it’s ten-thousand-trillion times weaker than it’s fully on value — a bit like a light switch that got stuck just before the ‘off’ position. And this value is crucial. If it were a tiny bit different, then there would be no physical structure in the universe.”

Why the strength of the Higgs field is so ridiculously weak defies understanding.

 

The 2nd Dangerous Number: The strength of dark energy

Simulation of large scale structure

(Illustris Collaboration)
The distribution of dark matter is shown in blue and the gas distribution in orange. This simulation is for the current state of the universe and is centered on a massive galaxy cluster. The region shown is about 300 million light-years across.

 

Cliff’s second dangerous number doubles as what physicists have called “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.”

This perilous number deals in the depths of deep space and a mind-meltingly complex phenomenon called dark energy.

“Dark energy should be 10120 times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy,” Cliff said. “This is a number so mind-bogglingly huge that it’s impossible to get your head around … this number is bigger than any number in astronomy — it’s a thousand-trillion-trillion-trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. That’s a pretty bad prediction.”

On the bright side, we’re lucky that dark energy is smaller than theorists predict. If it followed our theoretical models, then the repulsive force of dark energy would be so huge that it would literally rip our universe apart. The fundamental forces that bind atoms together would be powerless against it and nothing could ever form — galaxies, stars, planets, and life as we know it would not exist.

 

What Does This Mean for Physics?

If we could somehow confirm that our universe is just one in a vast multiverse of billions of other universes, then “suddenly we can understand the weirdly fine-tuned values of these two dangerous numbers [because] in most of the multiverse dark energy is so strong that the universe gets torn apart, or the Higgs field is so weak that no atoms can form,” Cliff said.

To prove this, physicists need to discover new particles that would uphold radical theories like string theory, which predicts the existence of a multiverse. Right now, there’s only one place in the world that could possibly produce these particles, if they exist, and that’s the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

And physicists only have two to three years before CERN shuts the LHC down for upgrades. If we haven’t found anything by then, Cliff said, it could signal the beginning of the end of physics.

“We may be entering a new era in physics. An era where there are weird features in the universe that we cannot explain. An era where we have hints that we live in a multiverse that lies frustratingly beyond our reach. An era where we will never be able to answer the question why is there something rather than nothing.”

 

Watch The TED Talk:

 

To Sum Up:

Our Universe exists because it hangs in the balance between 2 forces where one is  being slightly stronger than 0 and the other one is A LOT weaker than it should be.

And even if the Multiverse Theory is correct we may be in the Goldilocks area of The Multiverse.

This is quite the fact to grasp. It means that The Universe we live in and everything in it is a lot more special than we can ever imagine, well, at least from our point of view.

This tells us that balance is the key to everything in this Universe.

Balance is life.

Balance is an Universal Truth.

And we may never understand how or why The Universe is the way it is, but we can learn from it, and we can be grateful to be a part of it.

 

News Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/two-most-dangerous-numbers-universe-194557366.html;

Image Credit: Shutterstock and Illustris Collaboration