"I knew that Higgs guy was evil..." Topic

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"[The end of the universe] will come at you at the speed of light."—from the article.

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."— "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke.

Higgs Boson is an Anglo-Bulgarian Bond villain.
I have said it all along, but no one would listen to me!

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Can't we talk and reason with it? get it to be less unstable? mabye a intervention, get to to calm down.

I find the fact that the universe will end to actually be quite comforting. That way nothing I can do will matter all that much.

I find the fact that the universe will end to actually be quite comforting.

Except that the linear, one-way progression of time we experience is a factor of the Universe's nature, not a factor of time itself. If there is an "Extraverse," to coin a phrase (© and TM, me), then time in that Extraverse goes both ways. So your "past" isn't gone at all— it's happening (or "unhappening?") merely in the opposite temporal direction. So everything you do continues to exist in the Extraverse even after (before?) the end of our Universe. Or, one could say that all you have done and all you will do and all you are doing are happening all as part of one huge Extraversial Temporal Phenomenon— Past, Present and Future in the Extraverse would merely be defined as Now.

We're doomed, Dooooooooooomed I tell you!

If the Higgs Field disintegrates tomorrow, that will mean that I won't have to pay some bills.
However, I will miss Season Three of Game of Thrones on HBO, and some serious boobage.

I am torn.

They are not taking into account strangelet generation which really explains Fox News.

What a dreadful headline. It's not the "find" that "spells doom for the universe", as if we could somehow lasted forever in blessed ignorance. If the mass of the particle does mean that the universe will end in some sort of unspecified catastrophe, it will do so regardless of whether we know about it or not.

And it's only a few billion years off !

What a dreadful headline.

It does make you think that we aer one OOOOPS! moment away from catastrophe at CERN, doesn't it? Someone spills a coke on the control panel…

Both articles that were linked to are pretty poor. The journalists never bothered to ask the scientists why the presence of the Higgs will cause a catastrophe. Is it because the additional mass of these particles will cause a gravitational slowing of the expansion, and actually produce a gravitational collapse? The Big Crunch.

Either way the Universe is ending. Either with a bang (The Big Crunch) or with a whimper (Latent Heat Death). How does the Higgs Boson fit?

Bowman, I understood from the Beeb that it doesn't cause the effect, just that if what they are currently looking at is the Higgs then it provides data that takes the theory one way, not another. I thought it was a good article.

Well, the BBC article is better than the Fox one (go figure). I thought the precipice for endless expansion and resulting heat death, or a or big crunch depended on how much dark matter exists, and what it is made off.

That Dark matter has mass, (thereby having a Higgs field) is already well known as it explains gravitational lensing and the movement and rotation of galaxies.

How does the presence of the Higgs Boson alter the eventual outcome which is dependent on a material we don't know much about, despite comprising 84% of all existence? Have to wait for the Sci-Am article, I guess.