🚀 go-pugleaf

jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
:sarfatti@well.sf.ca.us (Jack Sarfatti) wrote:
:> Our vacuum state is not absolutely stable only meta-stable.  It is
:> conceivable that some of our high-energy physics experiments could be
:> dangerous by inadvertently triggering a vacuum instability.

:This one has always struck me as a really neat gift to the jaded worrywort.
:  ....  you can now lie awake at night sweating at
:the thought that somebody at CERN might set off an interaction that de-
:metastabilizes the vacuum for the entire universe.  Ice-Nine with knobs on.

:Can accelerator experiments really provoke interactions the vacuum doesn't
:fluctuate into by itself all the time?  I wouldn't have thought so,
:particularly since cosmic rays reach energies far beyond anything
:accelerators can produce.  What are the statistics on this?

There's an anecdote about Yakov Zeldovich calculating in a frenzy
to figure out if a CERN experiment that was coming on line could create
a domain wall that would blow us all out of existence ... the
answer was no, I believe.

Cosmic rays up to 20 TeV are whacking into the atmosphere even as we
speak, and I haven't seen any inflationary bubbles or domain walls
recently.  Except after I have a few beers.