I remember a very cool summer night in 2006 when I gathered around a fire with friends in the mountains of Pennsylvania.. We shared laughs, cold beer, and scary stories.. Mine was about an upcoming event; The beginning of the end. I told them that a big super collider was going to hunt for God. And that an alternate universe may open, or a black hole would be created to swallow us whole.
Years later, and a “God particle” being found too, we didn’t die in a big tremendous bang or even a whimper. Instead, life has gone on.. in some cases that’s been an awful thing for humanity.
But the super collider was just the beginning.. other colliders are coming. Bigger ones.. better ones.. Badder ones. Maybe that black whole we fear may open yet.
Or even this, as Stephen Hawking apparently thinks: The God particle could wipe out the universe! If only I knew that back in 2006 when beers were talking late in the night ..
This is what Hawking believes, according to others who are reporting on it:
The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (GeV).
This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.
A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.
Now imagine that.. the same Hawking that brought us some amazing theories of US and .. aliens.. and all of that, now says that it’s possible—though highly unlikely—that the act of ‘being’ may end..
Now here’s my take, a purely non scientific one at that. Ever since the Higgs Boson was found two years ago I felt things to be off kilter.. that something weird was happening. That time and space were somehow locked in a struggle. And that, in many cases, time slips were becoming more common. I had some actual weird experiences happen in my person life in the final month of 2013. Did the discovery of Higgs Boson do something? Did we all speed up, or .. slow down?
And really, think of this: As silly as my not to intelligent conjecture may seem, would anyone really know if something THAT big was happening anyway? Even Hawking said that if his total end of everything theory happens, it would hit us like a ton of bricks at night. We would never see it coming.
So many if something weird has already started, our bodies can’t see it coming because it would, in all other ways, seem to be ‘normal.’ But nothing is normal.
Actually, everything is amazing.
And we are living through it.
Maybe in multiple ways.