Did We Just Discover The Universe's Greatest Weakness?

Not only God knows, I know. And by the

end of the semester, you will know.

This is how the physicist Sydney Coleman

would kick off his lectures on quantum

theory at Harvard. Coleman claimed that

he never really liked teaching, but his

enthusiasm was electric and his courses

were considered legendary. Though his

name is not as wellknown as Einstein or

Hawking, he was held in the highest

regard amongst his peers. Indeed,

groundbreaking physicist Sheldon Glashau

once said, "He's kind of a major god. He

is the physicist's physicist."

And yet, arguably, this jovial legend of

physics greatest achievement was

revealing something truly spine-

chilling. For in the late 1970s, Coleman

figured out how to destroy the entire

universe.

The possibility that we are living in a

false vacuum has never been a cheering

one to contemplate. However, one could

always draw stoic comfort from the

possibility that perhaps in the course

of time the new vacuum would sustain, if

not life as we know it, at least some

structures capable of knowing joy.

This possibility has now been

eliminated.

Coleman discovered that our universe is

under constant threat. That at any

moment, at any point in time and space,

reality could begin to change. Change in

a way so unforgiving that nothing could

survive it.

The story of the unraveling of this

mystery will introduce us to some of

science's great personalities. Men and

women who peeled back reality and

created a framework out of which our

universe could appear. But most

importantly of all, this story will pull

us deep into the bizarre world of the

standard model of particle physics and

the one particle that sits apart from

all the others. The one particle with

the power to eliminate everything in

existence. That godamn particle, or as

it's more commonly known, the God

particle.

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As the Trinity Test mushroom cloud

bloomed into the sky on July 16th, 1945,

physicist Kenneth Bainbridge turned to

Robert Oppenheimer and uttered the

immortal phrase, "Now we're all sons of

bitches."

Indeed, after the magnitude of the test

had set in, and the initial flurry of

excitement had dulled down, there was a

palpable sense of unease across many at

Los Alamos. In the initial rush of

adrenaline after the detonation, famed

New York physicist Richard Fineman had

played his iconic bongos on the hood of

a jeep. And in his words, "Everyone had

parties." But quickly the mood would

turn sour. I sat in a restaurant in New

York and I looked out at the buildings

and I began to think about how much the

radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was

and so forth. And I would go along and

see people building a bridge or they'd

be making a new road and I thought,

"They're crazy. They just don't

understand why are they making new

things. It's so useless.

The Manhattan Project had employed over

130,000 people in its prime and 26 of

its scientists already had or would go

on to win a Nobel Prize. It had been the

focal point for much of the physics

community for half a decade. And so

after this long interruption, it was

decided that physicists should gather

together to return to science for

science's sake once again. And in 1947,

Oppenheimer himself helped organize a

conference on Shelter Island.

To quote later Nobel Prize winner Julian

Schwinger, "It was the first time that

people who had all this physics pent up

in them for 5 years could talk to each

other without somebody peering over

their shoulders and saying, "Is this

cleared?

And it would be at this conference that

Richard Fineman and Julian Schfinger

himself would propose some

groundbreaking quantum ideas.

But what does any of this have to do

with Sydney Coleman and the destruction

of the entire universe?

To answer this question, we must take a

journey downwards down into the deepest

layers of reality. down below the scales

of molecules and atoms beyond the pieces

of the atomic nucleus down to what we

think are the ultimate building blocks

of reality. And to a physicist, this

world is written in the language of the

standard model of particle physics.

The standard model is the result of more

than a century of deciphering the laws

of the universe. A world even more

fundamental than the atomic one explored

by the Manhattan Project.

First, there are the Firmians. The

fundamental particles that comprise the

stuff of matter, named after Italian

American physicist Enrico Fermy.

Firmians come in two types, the quarks

and the leptons that feel the

fundamental forces differently. The

quarks feel the strong force and are

bound together by it into composite

particles, collections of two or three.

Indeed, these include the protons and

neutrons that sit at the core of every

one of your atoms. Atoms though circled

by electrons, which as leptons

completely ignore the strong force

and the complement to the firmians are

the Bzons named after the Indian

physicist Chachendra Nath Bose. The

bzons are different as they carry the

fundamental forces between the firmians.

For the strong force we met a moment

ago, the carrier of force is the gluon.

For electromagnetism, the bzon is the

photon, the particle of light. For the

weak force, there are the W and Z bzons.

And for the final fundamental force,

gravity, physicists still aren't sure.

Now the idea of Bzons as force carriers

may seem strange but you have to

remember that particles are not really

particles

and this is key.

The standard model is written in the

language of quantum mechanics where

everything is a wave in a field. An

electron is a ripple in the electron

quantum field. A quark is a ripple in a

quark quantum field. And each Bzon is a

ripple in a Bzon field.

Everything is fields.

In the simplest form, a field is

something that is spread throughout

space. And that something attaches a

number to each point in that space. For

example, think about the temperature in

the air around you. Some spots may be

warmer, some cooler, and at each point,