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The 2 most dangerous numbers in the universe could signal the end of physics

Jessica Orwig
Jan 17, 2016, 3:00 PM 

“The next few years may tell us whether we’ll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe, for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer,” Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research — better known as CERN — said during a recent TED talk in Geneva, Switzerland.

Equally frightening is the reason for this approaching limit, which Cliff says is “Because the laws of physics forbid it.”

Dangerous Number 1: The strength of the Higgs field ShutterstockIllustration of the Higgs boson and field.

The first dangerous number on Cliff’s list is a value that represents the strength of what physicists call the Higgs field, an invisible energy field not entirely unlike other magnetic fields that permeates the cosmos.

Without it, we wouldn’t be here.

We know with near certainty that the Higgs field exists because of a groundbreaking discovery in 2012, when CERN physicists detected a new elementary particle called the Higgs boson. According to theory, you can’t have a Higgs boson without a Higgs field.

But there’s something mysterious about the Higgs field that continues to perturb physicists like Cliff.

Either it should be turned off, meaning it would have a strength value of zero and wouldn’t be working to give particles mass, or it should be turned on, and, as the theory goes, this “on value” is “absolutely enormous,” Cliff says. But neither of those two scenarios are what physicists observe.

“In reality, the Higgs field is just slightly on,” says Cliff. “It’s not zero, but it’s ten thousand trillion times weaker than its fully on value — a bit like a light switch that got stuck just before the ‘off’ position. And this value is crucial. If it were a tiny bit different, then there would be no physical structure in the universe.”

Why the strength of the Higgs field is so ridiculously weak defies understanding. Physicists hope to find an answer to this question by detecting brand new particles at the newly-upgraded particle accelerator at CERN. So far, though, they’re still hunting.

Dangerous Number 2: The strength of dark energy 

Cliff’s second dangerous number doubles as what physicists have called “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.“

This perilous number deals in the depths of deep space and a mind-meltingly complex phenomenon called dark energy. Dark energy, a repulsive force that’s responsible for the accelerating expansion of our universe, was first measured in 1998.

Still, “we don’t know what dark energy is,” Cliff admits. “But the best idea is that it’s the energy of empty space itself — the energy of the vacuum.”

If this is true, you should be able to sum up all the energy of empty space to get a value representing the strength of dark energy. And although theoretical physicists have done so, there’s one gigantic problem with their answer:

“Dark energy should be 10120 times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy,” Cliff said. “This is a number so mind-boggling huge that it’s impossible to get your head around … this number is bigger than any number in astronomy — it’s a thousand trillion trillion trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. That’s a pretty bad prediction.”

On the other hand, it’s extremely frustrating that we can’t use our current theories of the universe to develop a better measurement of dark energy that agrees with existing observations. Even better than improving our theories would be to find a way that we can understand why the strength of dark energy and the Higgs field is what it is.

Getting answers could be impossible YouTube/Perimeter InstituteIllustration of a multiverse.

If we could somehow confirm that our universe is just one in a vast multiverse of billions of other universes, then “suddenly we can understand the weirdly fine tuned values of these two dangerous numbers [because] in most of the multiverse dark energy is so strong that the universe gets torn apart, or the Higgs field is so weak that no atoms can form,” Cliff said.

To prove this, physicists need to discover new particles that would uphold radical theories like string theory, which predicts the existence of a multiverse. Right now, there’s only one place in the world that could possibly produce these particles, if they exist, and that’s the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

And physicists only have two to three years before CERN shuts the LHC down for upgrades. If we haven’t found anything by then, Cliff said, it could signal the beginning of the end.

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astronomy multiverse physics sai science space
