First the big bang and black holes, now all this bubble business
View(s):These days, I’ve been thinking a lot about Robert Frost’s insightful poem Fire and Ice. I have quoted this marvellous offering from a master’s pen so often that I wouldn’t be surprised if my editor muttered something rash and unintelligible under her angry breath while she trashed my piece.
In which case, gentle reader, you wouldn’t know about it. Would you, dear? How could you, innocent!
But since your favourite Sunday rag is in your hands and my repetitive Frosting has somehow survived the Ed’s basilisk glare, let me play with fire – and ice – for just one more week. Here is the article of the first part… namely, Old Man Frost’s superlative juxtaposition of the two most common human emotions:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great And would suffice.
These days the end of the world has been on my mind maybe a bit more than usual for a plethora of reasons. That panoply of usual suspects spans the gamut from sudden death that is so common on Sri Lanka roads (tragic) to the diverse conflicts and conflagrations spanning the big blue globe we call our planetary home (tiresome). No war has occupied my waking moments more perhaps than that being provoked and fuelled by the US media-beheading carpet-baggers who are calling for the restoration of their erstwhile caliphate. (Now keep your head, chum.)
I am kept awake most at night by the prospect of radioactive fissional material falling into the wrong hands at the wrong time. We can be sure it has not escaped the attention of savvy diplomats and suspicious nuclear agencies at the apex of the international military industrial complex.
Now there is one more thing to be an insomniac about.
Earlier this week, the incomparable super-physicist Stephen Hawking speculated that the super-particle known as the Higgs Boson could end not just the world, but the cosmos, while we slept. Confined to a wheelchair since he was diagnosed with ALS – or Motor Neurone Disease, as it is known in the UK – over 50 years ago (and then condemned to die of it in less than two), the 72-year-old Hawking has probably nothing better to do than conjecture how the universe will call it day and bid us all – to say nothing of itself – adieu. When incendiary writers of the ilk of Stephen King suggest that the world we see will pass away in an orgy of guts and glory, we might sigh… and visit the book store – or pick up our Kindle to tap in to horror and trap this phantom. But imaginative theoretical scientists of the calibre of Stephen Hawking are another cauldron of phantasmagorical trouble altogether.
The charismatic quadriplegic has speculated that there’s a good to great chance that the once-elusive particle (Hawking once bet US$100 that it would not be discovered) could suddenly and spontaneously create conditions eventuating in the death of the cosmos. This “Higgs Doomsday” as the media are calling it would be a cataclysm on a universal scale which puny humans like you and I and Bobby Frost would be incapable of stopping – or predicting.
Ironically, although Hawking himself said that theoretical physics had become boring following the discovery of the Higgs’ Boson – or the so-called ‘God Particle’ – he now finds it potentially the most interesting piece of matter around. His interest spins off from the mass of this fascinating particle which has a mass about 126 times the mass of the proton – and which turns out to be the exact mass needed to keep the cosmos we know and love intact. While physicists have suspected (in Christopher Hitchens’ memorable phrase) that “there’s a good deal of nothingness headed right for us, right now”, that the delicate state of the God particle – known as the Higgs potential, or field – would lead to its eventual decay, they surmised it would take uncountable eons to affect us in this backwater of the universe.
Hawking, however, loudly and worryingly begs to differ. Here’s his hypothesis in a nutshell:
“The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become meta-stable at energies above 100 billion giga-electron-volts (GeV). … This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of a true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen anytime and we wouldn’t see it coming.”
A little like the kind of unexpected power and water cuts that we experience from time to time… But a lot larger and a lot deadlier – if you know what I mean… Although the point I want to make is that in general, we don’t see the nothingness coming – power or water cut, or doomsday bubble – until it hits us.
Which is where we came in, isn’t it. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Unlike Frost, from what I’ve tasted of being desired and being despised, I’d eschew both as a way of ending the world. If only Hawking was generally more intelligible, we might all prefer the quick and easy exit of the bubble bursting before the light waves/particles announcing the demise of the universe reached us. Unless the drought or downpours kill us all first.