Dangerous Physics

I have thought a little about the possibility of a physics experiment destroying the Earth or the Sun. It would make a good short story. A powerful particle accelerator might create a black hole and if it doesn’t evaporate through Hawking Radiation, it might grow up and quickly swallow the Earth. (See the great lost classic movie The Magnetic Monster. The Magnetic Monster -the thing that came alive, is not a lurid monster movie but a thoughtful science fiction suspense mystery.) It could be that civilizations never develop beyond a certain level because every time a scientist tries a simple experiment and their civilization goes poof!

Here’s one I like. It is speculated that an experiment could destroy all space-time.

There have been speculations that future high-energy particle accelerator experiments may cause a breakdown of a metastable vacuum state that our part of the cosmos might be in, converting it into a ‘true’ vacuum of lower energy density. This would result in an expanding bubble of total destruction that would sweep through the galaxy and beyond at the speed of light, tearing all matter apart as it proceeds.

Of course, if this could happen, it would have happened somewhere already and very likely we would not be here. In any case we would not see it coming because it travels at the speed of light. We would not feel anything or be aware of our deaths. It would be like turning off a light switch.

It is also possible that the current state of the universe is the result of an experiment gone bad in a previous universe. The last words prior to the Big Bang might have been from a physicist who said: “Ok, turn it on and see what happens”.

John’s speculation that we are a computer simulation might protect us from this, but is also possible that we could create a cellular automaton at the quantum level that would have the same effect on the our simulated world as a black hole might have in a real world.

One Comment

  1. JimShannon wrote:

    I like the particle accelerator one. Is Cern online yet? :-)

    Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 10:43 pm | Permalink