Posted by Since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. – C. M. Burns
There’s no need to stop at the Sun, though. Since yesterday was Earth day, I thought it was only appropriate to spend today telling you how not only to destroy the Earth, but to effectively destroy the entire Universe. To tell you this story, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, to just before the big bang.
The big bang was when the Universe was hot, dense, full of energy, and expanding very quickly. The Universe was also spatially flat and the same temperature everywhere, and full of both matter and antimatter. It may have looked something like this:
Image credit: Stephen Van Vuuren, created from a simulation of 80,000 star images.
The thing is, we need something to make the Universe this way; we need something to set up the big bang. What makes the Universe flat? What forces the Universe to be the same temperature everywhere? What creates the fluctuations that allow stars, galaxies, and clusters to form from gravitational collapse? What pushes all the weird stuff that might have existed before the big bang away?
The best theory is cosmic inflation, or a theory that says that the Universe went through a period where space expanded exponentially fast. That expansion pushes everything that existed before away, removing it from what we know as our Universe. It takes whatever shape space is and stretches it flat. It takes a small, uniform area and stretches it, giving every point in our Universe the same temperature. And it takes tiny, quantum-scale fluctuations and stretches them across the Universe, creating those fluctuations that allow the formation of stars, galaxies, and clusters. It even gave the correct predictions for the amplitude and spectrum of those fluctuations, more than a decade before we were able to measure them!
So to destroy the Universe, all we have to do is make one tiny point near us expand exponentially fast again, even just for a tiny fraction of a second (~ 10-30 seconds), and that will remove everything we know of entirely, creating a new Universe in its wake. Kind of like a Phoenix (left).
Some of you may object. You may say that it’s wrong to do this; that this would be playing God. Look, people, if you want to destroy the Universe, there are some things you’re just going to have to suck up.
So how do we do this? In some sense, it’s as simple as pushing a ball up a hill; you just need enough energy. All we have to do is make the particle that causes inflation, called an inflaton, with enough energy to make the Universe inflate again. For instance, if we made an inflaton at the low energies we’re used to in big accelerators (you know, like 1012 Electron-Volts), we couldn’t get it out of the bottom of the valley that it’s stuck in, like this:
In fact, supermassive black holes produce cosmic rays that are about 1020 Electron-Volts, so we know we need more energy than that. But if we can get up to about 1026 Electron-Volts, we’re sure to do it. “Do it” means push that inflaton up the hill; push it up high enough, and you get inflation! And that’s how you destroy the Universe!
All you need is a bigger particle accelerator or stronger magnetic fields. We can get up to 1012 eV with a ring with 4 Tesla magnets and about a 1 km radius. So we’d really need a ring with a 1014 km radius (and the same magnetic field) to do this, or an accelerator ring about the radius of our distance to the nearest star. So support your particle physics research and the development of stronger magnetic fields, otherwise we’ll be doomed to celebrate many more Earth days!
Interesting note: Some of you were upset by my post that said string theory is untestable in principle. All you have to do is build a powerful enough accelerator. Guess what, the energy it takes to destroy the Universe like this is less than the energy it takes to test string theory (which is 1028 Electron-Volts). Have a nice day!
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