You said that physicists are sure that we live in a true vacuum which could be changed into a false vacuum.
But the fact is we don’t know whether we live in a true vacuum or a false vacuum, and that you can’t change a true vacuum into a false vacuum.
If anyone is wondering what the reference is, see here: link
Well; in my layman’s understanding you probably could, at least in theory. But it would take huge amounts of energy I’d think; and unlike the false-to-true vacuum transition it wouldn’t spread or even last, because it’s less stable not more. To use an analogy, you’d basically be pushing the vacuum in that region up a steep hill, instead of giving it a nudge and letting it roll downhill. It would take much more work, and as soon as you stopped “pushing” it upwards, down it would go again.
Thats my story and I am sticking to it 
Isn’t all this just a fancy way of saying that it may be physically impossible to create a Higgs boson under these particular circumstances? Even in classical mechanics, we have postulates that, if they could be violated, would allow all kinds of crazy instabilities that would make it impossible for the universe to exist in its present form. So you can’t, for instance, build a perpetual motion machine or a plate that gets thicker when you squeeze it. Someone with no knowledge of these postulates who tries to build a perpetual motion machine finds that he can’t do it because of “bad luck” - his surfaces are just a little too rough, his magnets are not quite powerful enough, his insulation leaks in just the wrong place. Then his physicist friend comes along and explains that it’s not bad luck, it’s the laws of physics. The “bad luck”, like all ordinary bad luck, indicates a lack of knowledge of causes and effects, not inherent uncertainty.
I have to assume that the process of Higgs boson production is somewhat mysterious to physicists, just as the laws of thermodynamics might be mysterious to an amateur mechanic, or else they wouldn’t need to build this very expensive collider in order to see if their theory is right. So their theory of Higgs boson production could be just as wrong as the amateur’s conception of thermodynamics.
We don’t say that the universe is reaching back from the future to prevent the construction of a perpetual motion machine in order to forestall its own destruction. We just say that the laws of mechanics prevent it. Physicists are too mystical for their own good sometimes.
Quantum mechanics is a whole 'nother beastie than the laws of Newtonian mechanics. You simply cannot compare the two. You even more certainly can’t make claims about quantum mechanics based on Newtonian mechanics.
Sort of the certainty of uncertainty?
Then he tells his physicist friend “No, that’s not right, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” and sets up a website.
Of course you can compare the two, and many people have. Trajectories predicted by Newtonian mechanics are members of the ensemble of trajectories predicted by the classical limit of quantum mechanics, blah blah blah. Plus, there is much more to classical mechanics than Newtonian mass-point mechanics. But that is neither here nor there.
I’m not talking about the laws; I’m talking about the phenomena. To a person who does not understand the laws, the phenomena appear to follow no law. When the perpetual motion machine project fails, the amateur chalks it up to bad luck, whereas the expert explains it as having been impossible according to the accepted laws of physics. Analogously, since we don’t fully understand the quantum explanation of Higgs boson production, we have to allow for the possibility that our hypothesized explanation is wrong. Isn’t that more palatable than teleological backwards-time-traveling universes? Occam’s razor and all.
Changing true vacuum to false vacuum is what happened immediately prior to the big bang. A Higgs boson spontaneously materialized with such properties that it caused the false vacuum. The false vacuum explosively inflated, creating energy and spacetime as it did so. (Yes, energy can be created.) It continued to inflate, but pockets within it started to fall to the more stable state of true vacuum. One such pocket was our universe, and its nucleation site was our big bang. A true vacuum won’t “turn” into a false vacuum directly or do other things someone might have thought I meant, but the magical God particle can always reappear. Its inflation would wipe out our universe. In that sense we can still fear the false vacuum.
So wait. By that logic, if I were to set up an experiment where I’m the cat in the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment (my life being determined by a quantumly random experiment), I would always come out unscathed?
Whoa, dude, whoa.
No, you’ve missed the point that Hyperelastic is making; the discussion is in terms of the Universe “preventing” itself from being tampered with in a non-causal fashion (“Higgs boson…might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather,”) rather than that such a condition would make for an unstable condition which would not result in a workable Universe to begin with, and thus, no mysterious “self-censorship” behavior need be applied to explain why we don’t see Higgs bosons. In other words, it doesn’t work that way because if it did the Universe never would have gotten to this point, and we wouldn’t be here to answer the question. It is the Universe’s own form of selection bias. Hyperelastic’s point is that you can concoct similar seemingly paradoxical scenarios in Newtonian mechanics, which is completely unmystical, aside from this whole “gravity” thing which keeps working even though we don’t pay the bill and can’t figure out where the switchbox is.
All of the high strangeness we perceive about quantum mechanics may (and in fact probably does) stem from two connected issues: one is our lack of a Big Picture of what is going on beyond the veil of indeterminacy, i.e. is there really a deterministic system governed by hidden variables, and are these variables predetermined and completely inaccessible, or connected together in some nonlocal fashion which doesn’t square with our current understanding of causality and relativity. (Bell’s inequality strongly suggests the latter.) Or is there some other phenomena, like multiple, interwoven “universes” where all possibilities exist concurrently, and we simply perceive the one that we are “in phase” with? The second is our lack of language, and therefore abstract conception, of phenomena that occur on the quantum level. For instance, there is often talk of the “particle/wave duality” at the level at which quantum behavior dominates, but in fact, the particle doesn’t literally switch back and forth between being a solid, discrete particle and a smeared out probability wave; it is just that in some interactions we can model it as behaving discretely, and in others it is clearly probabilistic. The supposed paradox stems from the issue that we’re trying to apply our everyday sense of the world to things that behavior in a way that is innately counterintuitive.
Well, the sort of physicists that get quoted in pop science articles, perhaps, but most physicists beyond the third year of undergraduate training have learned that we just don’t have the tools to even raise intelligent questions about these things, much less provide an answer. This generally comes either out of an exhaustive exploration of all mystical hypotheses without satisfaction, or more frequently, been sufficiently lobotomized by blunt trauma applications of post-calculus mathematics that they no longer have any desire to ask such painful questions. “Shut up and calculate!” indeed.
Stranger
Actually, if you were the Cat, this would be exactly the case. You would personally see a bias in the decay event probability that would always make the particle not decay for however long you stayed in the box, even at extreme odds. Of course, this is because any line of causality that resulted in particle decay would eliminate your ability to perceive a decay event, along with, of course, eliminating your ability to exist. (I’m discounting the possibility of ghosts and postmortem consciousness as de facto supernatural phenomena.)
All other observers, of course, would see the 50% chance of life or death, but that’s because they don’t care about cats.
Stranger
The philosopher Donald Davidson once argued (speculated may be more accurate here) that this means each of us is guaranteed to experience practically immortality–to last at least as long as the universe itself in any case. For however a person might die, there is always some incredibly improbable course of events that lets that person survive the event.
Unfortunately, this can’t be cause for celebration. For one thing, each of us would see each of his friends die, and eventually all of humanity and even all of life in the universe except himself. Second, the existence post “death-event” is likely to be full of physical suffering. Just because you survive the event doesn’t mean you survive comfortably or well. And once you get to the point where the sun explodes or whatever, you’ll still feel the burning, possibly for millions or billions of years.
Alex, as soon as you start saying anything about “just before the Big Bang”, you’ve left the bounds of physics, and entered philosophy. You also seem to be under the misapprehension that the “God particle” got its nickname for being somehow involved in the origin of our Universe. Really, though, it’s actually short for “God-damned particle”, a nickname physicists have given it out of frustration at not being able to produce one.
Der Trihs is correct: Not only would it be very difficult to transition from the true vacuum to a false one, such a transition wouldn’t spread. Picture an array of dominoes: It seems stable enough, until some perturbation occurs that’s big enough to knock over one of them. When that happens, they all fall down. And even if you go to the trouble of picking one of them back up, that’s not going to cause all the others to get back up, too.
Not to do witnessing in GQ, but the whole “Why does God permit people to go to Hell?” bit that exercises people so much in debates about the putative afterlife may be much more understandable with the concept given here. If the psychological effects of existence after a “death event” inevitably include suffering (as noted above), the idea that God’s salvific actions are not punitive, sentencing people to Hell, but rather rescuing people from it, becomes much clearer to the listener with a physical-law-based worldview. (It’s worth discussing this further in GD if someone feels so inclidned – I’m just noting the concept’s connection with the non-religious perceptual view that Frylock outlined here.)
Sounded interesting, so I just went to the library and checked it out.
Well there’s an idea called quantum lottery, or quantum suicide or something. Basically the idea is if many worlds theory is true there’s a way for you to win the lottery guaranteed. Basically you buy a ticket using a random number, from quantum decay or something. If your number is correct you go collect your money, if not you blown your brains out. That way you’re guaranteed to live in only universes where you won the lottery, because the number being random will match up in some splinter universes.
I don’t think this is right. While I believe it’s true that it was originally hypothesized that the Higgs field was what drove the universe’s inflation, this isn’t the same as a Higgs spontaneously materialising and expanding; besides, it’s since become widely accepted that the inflaton can’t have been the Higgs. And I don’t think there’s any meaning to equating the state ‘before’ the Big Bang with a true vacuum state, and certainly, the Big Bang wasn’t the nucleation of a false vacuum, as that wouldn’t spread, but instantly collapse back onto itself – the exponential expansion of a vacuum bubble only happens if the vacuum inside the bubble is a lower state, since then, the expansion of its radius lowers its potential energy (roughly); contrariwise, a bubble of a higher vacuum state would require energy to be expanded at all, as has already been pointed out.
So we only have to fear vacuum metastability events if we, right now, actually live in a false vacuum, because then, the nucleation of a bubble of true vacuum – or a lower state of false vacuum – leads to its exponential expansion. There’s not necessarily a Higgs involved in that, either, any old high energy (really, really high energy since it obviously hasn’t happened yet) particle interaction – or just some particle tunneling through the barrier – would suffice.
As for the paper being discussed, it strikes me as somewhat fanciful to imagine that the universe’s reluctance to create Higgs particles should manifest itself in such complex events as breaking magnets and funding committee decisions; even if one accepts the conclusion that universes in which Higgs bosons are created simply never come to pass (which I think is a more reasonable way to think about it than saying that the Higgs somehow reaches back in time and undoes its own creation), why wouldn’t that merely lead to the reaction channels for Higgs creation being so suppressed as to never actually occur? It’s completely plausible to smash protons into each other without producing a Higgs, despite its production being a theoretical possibility. So why should the universe diverge from a Higgs-producing course on such a macroscopic scale, when it would appear to be a much smaller divergence to just never make any Higgses?
Also, much higher energy interactions occur all day long in the upper atmosphere, and in a gazillion other places in the universe. If the universe goes to such great lengths to make it impossible for us to contribute a tiny fraction of comparatively low energy events to this total, then why doesn’t it do anything about all of those others? I don’t think that our efforts constitute so much as an immeasurably tiny bump in the universe’s overall probability of producing a Higgs somewhere.
Oh. I was getting my info from the Elegant Universe, which admittedly isn’t a recent book.
Ok, you’ve totally garbled, again, what I (and Elegant Universe) was saying, but I guess there’s no point setting things straight.