And recent DESI data suggests that dark energy is not constant and the universe will experience a big crunch in a little more than double its current age, for a total lifespan of 33 billion years, no need to get wild with the orders of magnitude on years into the future. The infinite expansion to heat death over 10^100 years is looking less likely, 10^11 years should be plenty.
not obvious to me this makes things better as opposed to worse? sure, the time bound helps but in the runup to a crunch won't we get vastly more devices in causal range at an asymptotically increasing rate?
Protons can decay because the distinction between matter and energy isn't permanent.
Two quarks inside the proton interact via a massive messenger particle. This exchange flips their identity, turning the proton into a positron and a neutral pion. The pion then immediately converts into gamma rays.
Baryon number is an accidental symmetry, not a fundamental one. Unlike charge or color, it is not protected by a gauge principle and is just a consequence of the field content and renormalizability at low energies.
The standard model is almost certainly an effective field theory and a low-energy approximation of a more comprehensive framework. In any ultraviolet completion, such as a GUT, quarks and leptons inhabit the same multiplets. At these scales, the distinction between matter types blurs, and the heavy gauge bosons provide the exact mediation mechanism described to bypass the baryon barrier.
Furthermore, the existence of the universe is an empirical mandate for baryon-violation. If baryon number were a strict, immutable law, the Sakharov conditions could not be met, and the primordial matter-antimatter symmetry would have resulted in a total annihilation. Our existence is proof that baryon number is not conserved. Even within the current framework, non-perturbative effects like sphalerons demonstrate that the Standard Model vacuum itself does not strictly forbid the destruction of baryons.
And recent DESI data suggests that dark energy is not constant and the universe will experience a big crunch in a little more than double its current age, for a total lifespan of 33 billion years, no need to get wild with the orders of magnitude on years into the future. The infinite expansion to heat death over 10^100 years is looking less likely, 10^11 years should be plenty.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260215225537.h...
not obvious to me this makes things better as opposed to worse? sure, the time bound helps but in the runup to a crunch won't we get vastly more devices in causal range at an asymptotically increasing rate?
Who’s there doing the counting? I would assume the temperatures at those extremes won’t support life in its known forms.
Perhaps some Adamesque (as in douglas adams) creature whose sole purpose is to collect all unique UUIDs and give them names.
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Protons can decay because the distinction between matter and energy isn't permanent.
Two quarks inside the proton interact via a massive messenger particle. This exchange flips their identity, turning the proton into a positron and a neutral pion. The pion then immediately converts into gamma rays.
Proton decayed!
This destroys a baryon, an operation which is prohibited by the standard model.
Baryon number is an accidental symmetry, not a fundamental one. Unlike charge or color, it is not protected by a gauge principle and is just a consequence of the field content and renormalizability at low energies.
The standard model is almost certainly an effective field theory and a low-energy approximation of a more comprehensive framework. In any ultraviolet completion, such as a GUT, quarks and leptons inhabit the same multiplets. At these scales, the distinction between matter types blurs, and the heavy gauge bosons provide the exact mediation mechanism described to bypass the baryon barrier.
Furthermore, the existence of the universe is an empirical mandate for baryon-violation. If baryon number were a strict, immutable law, the Sakharov conditions could not be met, and the primordial matter-antimatter symmetry would have resulted in a total annihilation. Our existence is proof that baryon number is not conserved. Even within the current framework, non-perturbative effects like sphalerons demonstrate that the Standard Model vacuum itself does not strictly forbid the destruction of baryons.
1 reply →