The Higgs boson may have the right mass to wreck the universe – hurray! Death by Higgs is the simplest way to do away with a paradoxical menagerie of disembodied intelligent beings that shouldn't exist, yet remain in the best cosmological models.
What's more, the end is a comfy 20 or 30 billion years off. "That's quite a few billion; it's not like we should rush out and buy life insurance," says Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who put forward the idea along with Kimberly Boddy, also at Caltech.
The paradox arose a decade or so ago, when physicists realised their models led to a future filled with Boltzmann brains: fully formed conscious entities that pop out of the vacuum. It sounds bizarre, but there's nothing to stop matter sometimes randomly arranging itself in just the right way for this to occur. The problem arises when you add in the universe's accelerating expansion.
This provides limitless time, space and energy for Boltzmann brains to form, even after life as we know it has winked out, causing them to eventually outnumber ordinary consciousnesses. But that would make the brains' experience of the universe more typical than ours, which is a problem as our understanding of the cosmos assumes that we are typical observers.
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