George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe
Hawking: "...unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."
Osborne: "See, I told you we needed those austerity measures!".
Once upon a time, Stephen Hawking was so sure the Higgs Boson was a fantasy that he bet $100* against its discovery. But now the British boffin has dramatically changed his mind, warning that the so-called god particle could go rogue and destroy the entire universe. Clearly annoyed that Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence …
... in other news, another Al-Qaeda splinter group, calling itself Al-Qaeda-with-an-interest-in-science-in-order-to-beat-the-Infidel-at-their-own-game, announced on Twitter that it has launched a programme to kidnap any scientist with the slightest clue about time travel in order to perpetrate a 'dead cert' investment fraud to raise the massive funding needed to create a particle accelerator big enough create the Ultimate Suicide Bomb, thus cleansing the entire universe of the accursed Infidel, Jews, the Danish, competitors and all temptations at a stroke.
Has Al-Qaeda-with-an-interest-in-science-in-order-to-beat-the-Infidel-at-their-own-game commenced a "Kickstarter" account? If £20 gets you 46 virgins, stick me down!
Oh, wait - what's that ominous "chop chop chop" I hear in the sky above my house?
Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe
"...If £20 gets you 46 virgins, stick me down!.."
OK, infidel:- but you do not get to choose the gender of the virgins.
Or the species.
Any quantity of virgins over 3 is unlikely going to be *heaven* anyway. Anyone who has a few sisters knows that the recipient is not going to enjoy himself very much..
@Andus McCoatover
Aiieeee Andus! Verily you are blessed to support the cause, and your generosity shall be rewarded in the afterlife! For which we will throw in an 'early adopter' five-virgin bonus pack, a copy of our handy guide "Wahabbi Fundamentalism for fun and profit in 42 easy steps (Lite version) - the sceptics edition", and a subscription to our house monthly magazine "Jihadi Kewl" which is packed full of helpful tips on Fundamentalist fashion, misogyny, lobotomy and subverting scientific know-how to defeat the infidel!
PS - Don't worry those are OUR helicopters!
Hawking: "...unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."
Fortunately, said funding has already been provided, courtesy of many millions of neutron stars and those pesky supernovae.
I stand here, before you now, truthfully unafraid. Why? Because I believe something you do not? No, I stand here without fear because I remember. I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me but because of the path that lies behind me. I remember that for 13 billion years we have fought these machines, errr, survived such energetic events. And after Hawking's pronouncement, I remember that which matters most... We are still here!*
*Liberally mutilated from a stolen passage from the Matrix Reloaded.
If some particle collision can trigger such an intergalactic doomsday, then it should already have happened, since the universe contains objects like black holes, supernovas, magnetars etc that spout more energetic particle beams than we can ever hope to generate. So I'm not worried.
Mmmm....you forgot to take into account the expansion of the universe so although the effect is moving at the speed of light, the expanding affected zone itself is moving away from us by whatever the universe expansion rate is. By my estimates, that will be next Tuesday rather than tomorrow.
Maybe it already has. It then expands outwards at the speed of light
And thanks to the accelerating expansion of the universe, which is not limited by the speed of light, odds are such a bubble expanding at the speed of light will never reach us.
That expansion will eventually rip every atom in the universe to shreds, but you can't get everything.
But, more to the point, the fact that the universe still exists means that Hawking is wrong. The universe carries out these high-energy experiments at billions of neutron stars and black holes every instant.
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how would one calculate the velocity needed for a grain of sand to destroy a planet?
The simplest way is to ask Randall Munroe. He's an expert on doomsday mathematics.
"I'm sure we have noticed - how do you think our universe popped into existence...."
No, I think you'll find that was the Universe Mark 1. Current estimates are that we're now up to at least Mark 9 - why else do you think life seems to get even more bizarre and inexplicable as time goes on?
And the size relative to the Earth or our current budgets affects more advanced dyson sphere building (*) civilisations building one how? Admitedly we can't do much about it if they do.
(*) example only, the practicalities of that is a separate discussion.
Seriously, shut the fuck up, Prof.
Rehashing old physics ego-vertisements, Might/Could/Bes and pulling random energy levels out of the hat just doesn't cut it.
Peter Woit, February 21, 2013:
At the AAAS 2013 meeting in Boston this past week [Feb. 2013], a press conference was held to update the media on the Higgs. What the media got from the press conference was the news that the Higgs may spell doom, unless supersymmetry saves us. This isn’t just doom for HEP physics research, it’s doom for the entire universe:
“At some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to be wiped out…. The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realise that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us,” Lykken said at AAAS.
This is based on a renormalization group calculation extrapolating the Higgs effective potential to its value at energies many many orders of magnitude above LHC energies. To believe the result you have to believe that there is no new physics and we completely understand everything exactly up to scales like the GUT or Planck scale. Fan of the SM that I am, that’s too much for even me to swallow as plausible.
If you are being kept awake by the Higgs metastability issue, you’ll want to know the Higgs mass as accurately as possible. The rumor from ATLAS is that the difference in best fit masses between the gamma-gamma and ZZ channels has narrowed, with gamma-gamma moving up slightly to 126.8 GeV, ZZ quite a bit, to 124.3 GeV.