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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Both interesting and terrifying if this is true. The idea sounds a lot like Vonnegut's ice-nine, only for space instead of water.

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It's exactly like ice-nine. The universe exists in some sort of meta-stable state. The usual argument against this sort of thing happening is that we'd already be dead. Cosmic ray interactions happen all the time at very high energies, so these interactions have already been seen in the universe. The LHC, however, pushes the energy limits towards unexplored territory -- due the fact that it is a collider, the center of mass energy of the LHC may exceed the highest ever cosmic ray collisions.

The LHC collision energy is around 7 TeV. GZK limit (theoretical maximum cosmic ray energy) is about 50,000,000 TeV. Particles have been observed with energies above the GZK limit.

You know the Higgs Boson as the "god particle". Well, there's also the "oh my god particle", which was a cosmic ray with observed energy on the order of 300,000,000 TeV.

for reference, the single particle had about as much kinetic energy as a pitched baseball, consider that trillions of photons and other particles normally hit you every second.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_my_god_particle

However, only a small fraction of this energy would be available for an interaction with a proton or neutron on Earth, with most of the energy remaining in the form of kinetic energy of the products of the interaction. The effective energy available for such a collision is the square root of double the product of the particle's energy and the mass energy of the proton, which for this particle gives 7.5×1014 eV, roughly 50 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider.

So, still not an issue, but not quite as far from omg collision energy's. And still no where near what can happen in and near black holes.

But the center of mass energy for a GZK proton colliding with a proton in the air is something like 100 TeV - 1 PeV. So still quite a bit higher than the LHC, but not by a factor of 10^7.

If the highest energy cosmic rays are nuclei, the energies available for particle production are comparable.

Video that explains it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTBvPxQIFts

Just to be clear, none of the people in this article are claiming that producing Higgs boson particles is going to cause collapse of a (hypothetical) false vacuum. They're using the new data about the Higgs to learn about the existing state of the universe.

If there's nothing you can do about it, and no discernible consequences (we'd all cease to exist if it were to happen) why get upset?

Because as a matter of fact it happens to be so tha

Well that was quick.

A comment that survives the end of the universe? Shit what kind of computer are you using? And more importantly, don't ever let it fall into the hands of a spammer...

Well, it's not going to happen during our lif

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