Could we manipulate the Higgs field?
If the discovery of the Higgs boson particle pans out, will even more mind-bending technologies result? Theoretically, it’s possible, says Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss; but practically, it’s unlikely. “If you could manipulate the Higgs field locally, you’d have a great ‘Star Trek’ device.
What exactly is the Higgs field?
The Higgs field is a field of energy that is thought to exist in every region of the universe. The field is accompanied by a fundamental particle known as the Higgs boson, which is used by the field to continuously interact with other particles, such as the electron.
What would happen without the Higgs boson?
Without the Higgs field, quarks would have no mass and consequently the proton would be heavier than the neutron, since all their mass would come from their respective binding energies.
Is Higgs boson heavier than proton?
After analysing most of the data collected in 2011, both experiments see tantalising hints consistent with making Higgs bosons with a mass of around 125 times as heavy as the proton.
What is Higgs boson particle in plain English?
The Higgs boson is the particle associated with the Higgs field, an energy field that transmits mass to the things that travel through it. When they collide, they create super-high-energy mash-ups that spew out subatomic particles. From time to time, a Higgs boson might be one of those particles.
How does Higgs boson destroy universe?
The Collapse of the Universe: The Bad News When scientists discovered the Higgs boson, what they really did was discover a particle with the right characteristics that matched their theoretical Higgs boson particle. Its mass is just right—126 time the mass of a proton—for making the universe inherently unstable.
Can the Higgs field collapse?
False vacuum decay may occur in 20 to 30 billion years if the Higgs boson field is metastable.
Can universe be destroyed?
Theories about the end of the universe. The fate of the universe is determined by its density. The preponderance of evidence to date, based on measurements of the rate of expansion and the mass density, favors a universe that will continue to expand indefinitely, resulting in the “Big Freeze” scenario below.
What did CERN do in 2012?
Geneva, 17 December 2012. This morning CERN1 completed the first LHC proton run. The remarkable first three-year run of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator was crowned by a new performance milestone. The space between proton bunches in the beams was halved to further increase beam intensity.
Can the hadron collider create a black hole?
The LHC will not generate black holes in the cosmological sense. However, some theories suggest that the formation of tiny ‘quantum’ black holes may be possible.
Is physics a dead end?
Physics is dead, a Nobel-prize winner had asserted, because most of the relatively easy problems have been solved, and significant further progress now often demands extremely complex and expensive apparatus — the Large Hadron Collider at CERN being the most recent example.
Who invented supersymmetry?
Zumino
Is string theory right?
Many physicists consider string theory our best hope for combining quantum physics and gravity into a unified theory of everything. Yet a contrary opinion is that the concept is practically pseudoscience, because it seems to be nearly impossible to test through experiments.