Scientists at CERN have announced that everything scientists thought they knew about physics may be entirely false, following the discovery of two new baryon subatomic particles.
“The next few years may tell us whether we’ll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe, for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer,” Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at CERN said in a recent TED talk.
“The next few years may tell us whether we’ll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe, for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer,” Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at CERN said in a recent TED talk.
Yahoo News reports:
Equally frightening is the reason for this approaching limit, which Cliff says is because “the laws of physics forbid it.”
At the core of Cliff’s argument are what he calls the two most dangerous numbers in the universe. These numbers are responsible for all the matter, structure, and life that we witness across the cosmos.
And if these two numbers were even slightly different, says Cliff, the universe would be an empty, lifeless place.
Dangerous No. 1: The strength of the Higgs field
he first dangerous number on Cliff’s list is a value that represents the strength of what physicists call the Higgs field, an invisible energy field not entirely unlike other magnetic fields that permeates the cosmos.
As particles swim through the Higgs field, they gain mass to eventually become the protons, neutrons, and electrons comprising all of the atoms that make up you, me, and everything we see around us.
Without it, we wouldn’t be here.
We know with near certainty that the Higgs field exists because of a groundbreaking discovery in 2012, when CERN physicists detected a new elementary particle called the Higgs boson. According to theory, you can’t have a Higgs boson without a Higgs field.
But there’s something mysterious about the Higgs field that continues to perturb physicists like Cliff.
According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics — the two theories in physics that drive our understanding of the cosmos on incredibly large and extremely small scales — the Higgs field should be performing one of two tasks, says Cliff.
MORE:
www.corespirit.com/scientists-admit-everything-know-physics-likely-wrong/