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Daily Mail
23 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Is THIS how the world will end? The universe has a 'self-destruct button' that could WIPE OUT life in an instant, scientists warn
From the Big Crunch to the heat death of the universe, it seems that science is always finding new ways the cosmos might come to an end. But physicists have now revealed the most devastating doomsday scenario possible. Experts believe the universe may have a built-in 'self-destruct button' called false vacuum decay. If this was ever triggered, every planet, star, and galaxy would be wiped out and life as we know it would become impossible. The basic idea is that our universe isn't currently in its most stable state, meaning we are in what scientists call a 'false vacuum'. If any part of the universe is ever pushed into its stable state, a bubble of 'true vacuum' will expand through the universe, destroying everything it touches. Professor Ian Moss, a cosmologist at Newcastle University, told MailOnline that the universe is like 'a table-top with many dominoes standing on their side.' Professor Moss says: 'They can stay upright unless some small disturbance topples one, and triggers all of them to fall.' What is a false vacuum? All objects contain a certain amount of energy and the amount of energy it contains is called its 'energy state'. The lower the energy state, the more stable the object becomes. If you think about a lump of coal, it has a very high energy state because it contains lots of potential energy, which means it's unstable and could catch on fire. Once that coal has been burned and the energy released as heat, the remaining ash has a very low energy state and becomes stable. Everything in the universe, from lumps of coals to stars, wants to get to its most stable state and so always tends towards the lowest energy state possible. We call the lowest energy state an object can have its 'vacuum' state, but sometimes objects can get trapped in something called a 'false vacuum'. Dr Louise Hamaide, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Naples, told MailOnline: 'A good analogy for a field in a false vacuum is a marble in a bowl on top of a stool. 'The marble cannot leave the bowl unless it is given some energy in the form of a push, and if it does it will fall all the way to the ground.' Being on the ground is what we would call the vacuum state, whereas the bowl is merely a false vacuum which prevents the marble from falling to the ground. What makes this idea worrying is the possibility that a fundamental part of the universe's structure could be stuck in one of these false vacuums. All it needs is a little push, and the structure of reality itself will come crashing down to the ground. The universe's self-destruct button The idea of a false vacuum gets really scary when we apply it to our current model of reality. The universe and everything in it is made of subatomic particles such as electrons, photons, and quarks. But according to quantum field theory, all of these particles are actually just disturbances in an underlying field. What is false vacuum decay? One of the fundamental concepts of the universe is that things are moving from a state of high energy to a more stable 'ground' state, of lower energy. This fundamental concept holds true even in the strange world of quantum mechanics, with particles trying to reach their ground, called their vacuum state. The concept takes a stranger turn when it comes to the Higgs field – the quantum field which gives particles throughout the universe their mass. It is thought that this field is in its lowest energy state, but one theory states it may not be as stable as it seems. With the right kick, the Higgs field could careen towards its true lower energy state, sparking a chain reaction which would spread in all directions. Dr Alessandro Zenesini, a scientist at the National Institute of Optics in Italy, told MailOnline: 'The basic idea of quantum field theory is to represent reality only with fields. 'Think of a water surface. When flat, it is an empty field. As soon you have a wave, this wave can be seen as a particle which can interact with another wave.' Just like everything else, these fields have energy states, and want to get to their lowest energy state possible like a body of water becoming flat and calm. In the first few seconds of the Big Bang, so much energy was released that it pushed all the fundamental fields down into their vacuum states. But scientists now think that one of the fields might have gotten stuck along the way. Some researchers believe that the Higgs field, the field which makes the elusive Higgs Boson, is stuck in a false vacuum state. This essentially means that the entire universe could be rigged to blow at any moment. What would happen if a false vacuum collapsed? If the Higgs field is ever pushed down to its true vacuum, the resulting 'phase shift' will release a vast amount of energy. This energy is so concentrated that it will force nearby areas of the field out of their false vacuum, dropping their energy level and releasing even more energy. The resulting chain reaction would spread through the universe like the flames from a match dropped into a lake of petrol. A bubble of true vacuum would then spread out in a sphere from the starting point until it consumes the entire cosmos. At its edge, between the true and false vacuum, the energy would collect into a thin wall of incredible power. Dr Hamaide says: 'That kinetic energy of the wall is so high, even though the Higgs carrying this energy is a very heavy particle, it would move at the speed of light. 'So we would never see the wall coming, because light couldn't reach us before the wall did.' If the wall hit the solar system, Dr Hamaide says it would have so much energy that 'it would instantaneously destroy any star or planet its path'. However, what would be left behind after the initial destruction is perhaps even more terrifying. The interaction between the fundamental fields is what gives particles their properties and determines how they interact. This, in turn, determines everything from the physics that holds planets together to the chemical reactions taking place inside our cells. If the Higgs field suddenly takes on a new energy level, none of the physics we are familiar with would be possible. Dr Dejan Stojkovic, a cosmologist from the University at Buffalo, told MailOnline: 'As a consequence, electrons, quarks and neutrinos would acquire masses different from their current values. 'Since the structures that we observe around us are made atoms, whose existence depends on the precise values of the parameters in the standard model, it is likely that all these structures would be destroyed, and perhaps new ones would be formed.' Scientists have no idea what the world left behind by false vacuum decay would be like. But we do know that it would be absolutely incompatible with life as we now know it. What could trigger the end of the world? To trigger false vacuum decay, you would need an extremely powerful force to pack a huge amount of Higgs particles into a tiny space. In the current universe, places with this much energy might not even be possible but the bad news is that the early universe might have been violent enough to do it. In particular, scientists think that dense regions of matter might have been crushed into tiny primordial black holes in the first few seconds of the Big Bang. These are ultra-dense points of matter no larger than a single hydrogen atom but containing the mass of an entire planet. As these black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation, some researchers believe they could trigger false vacuum decay. Professor Moss says: 'Condensation is a similar process to vacuum decay, the condensation of water vapour into clouds is triggered by tiny grains of dust or ice crystals. 'Tiny black holes seed vacuum decay in the same way.' Is the world already over? Perhaps one of the strangest implications of false vacuum decay is that it might have already started somewhere in the universe. Dr Hamaide says: 'Under some very specific assumptions, we showed these bubbles are 100 per cent likely to occur.' According to some calculations, one primordial black hole in the universe would be enough to trigger the universe's self-destruct process. Likewise, due to small fluctuations at the quantum level, known as quantum tunnelling, it is possible that the parts of the universe might randomly jump into the lower energy state at any time. That could mean that a bubble of true vacuum is already out there somewhere in the cosmos, racing towards us at the speed of light and annihilating everything it encounters. The comforting news is that, even at the speed of light, it could take billions of years for a true vacuum bubble to reach us. If the bubble starts far enough away, the expansion of the universe might even mean it never reaches us at all. Dr Hamaide and Professor Moss suggest that the fact we aren't already dead is evidence that there aren't any primordial black holes out there in the first place. We also don't know what effects dark matter and dark energy could have on the energy state of the universe. It might be possible that these mysterious substances reverse any bubble expansions as soon as they occur to keep the universe stable. However, until a bubble of true vacuum does tear our reality apart, there might not be any way to know who's right. The theories and discoveries of thousands of physicists since the 1930s have resulted in a remarkable insight into the fundamental structure of matter. Everything in the universe is found to be made from a few basic building blocks called fundamental particles, governed by four fundamental forces. Our best understanding of how these particles and three of the forces are related to each other is encapsulated in the Standard Model of particle physics. All matter around us is made of elementary particles, the building blocks of matter. These particles occur in two basic types called quarks and leptons. Each consists of six particles, which are related in pairs, or 'generations'. All stable matter in the universe is made from particles that belong to the first generation. Any heavier particles quickly decay to the next most stable level. There are also four fundamental forces at work in the universe: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They work over different ranges and have different strengths. Gravity is the weakest but it has an infinite range. The electromagnetic force also has infinite range but it is many times stronger than gravity. The weak and strong forces are effective only over a very short range and dominate only at the level of subatomic particles. The Standard Model includes the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces and all their carrier particles, and explains well how these forces act on all of the matter particles.
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Unless you see it, you can't believe how bad it is': the peer demanding a minister for porn
When the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin arrived for a meeting with the the science and technology secretary, Peter Kyle, earlier this year she startled him by laying out an array of pornographic images across his desk. 'They were screengrabs showing little girls, their hair in bunches, and massive, grown men grabbing little girls' throats,' she says. She had selected images which appeared to depict child abuse, and yet were easily and legally available on a popular website. 'Unless you see it, you can't quite believe how bad it is.' The minister appeared shocked and upset by the images, she recalls, so she quickly tidied them away and later shredded them. Bertin has noticed that her desire to talk frequently and openly about extreme pornography is not shared by all her Westminster colleagues. 'I've definitely seen people swerve at lunch, not wanting to sit next to me for fear of what they're going to hear coming from my mouth,' she told fellow delegates at the launch meeting of her pornography taskforce this week, prompting a flutter of sympathetic laughter. Since being appointed by the former prime minister Rishi Sunak to lead an independent review into the regulation of online pornography in December 2023, Bertin has observed how a double taboo has made most politicians extremely reluctant to engage. Some simply find the subject hugely embarrassing; others stay silent because they do not wish to appear prudish by criticising the proliferation of extreme and often illegal pornographic material online. She is frustrated by this reticence. 'You can't leave the pitch on this stuff just because you're worried about being accused of being too strait-laced,' she says. The government needs urgently to appoint a minister for porn, she recommends, to ensure that the issue gets the attention it deserves, rather than being passed reluctantly between the Home Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. A former adviser to David Cameron, Bertin has gathered cross-party support for her work and says she emails Keir Starmer so regularly about the issue that she has 'practically become his pen pal' (if you can have a pen pal who delegates to officials the responsibility of replying). 'We're really British about it so we don't want to have a graphic conversation about sex and porn,' she says, in an interview in the Westminster office she shares with several other peers. 'But you've got to shout about it as loudly as possible. The reason why we've got into this mess is because nobody has really wanted to talk about it.' By mess she means a situation whereby online pornography (which is viewed by an estimated 13.8 million UK adults every month) is not regulated to the same degree as pornography watched in cinemas or videos, despite the fact that videos have been redundant for decades and vanishingly few people now visit cinemas to watch porn. The absence of scrutiny has created an environment where much of the content created is, she says, 'violent, degrading, abusive, and misogynistic'. She also means a situation where a member of her own party had to resign after twice watching porn (perplexingly tractor-themed) on his phone, as he whiled away time on the green benches in the House of Commons. 'People have slightly lost the plot on porn. Would someone 20 years ago have just taken Playboy into the Commons, and had it lying on their lap? It just shows what an extraordinary place we've got to,' she says. 'You can do what you like in your private life – I don't have a problem with that – but you can't watch porn in the House of Commons, and you shouldn't be watching porn at your desk. There's a place for these things and it's not in the office.' Her review, published in February, made 32 recommendations. Last week the first of these became government policy, when officials announced that pornography depicting strangulation would be made illegal. Her new taskforce of 17 people, bringing together representatives from the police, the advertising industry, anti-trafficking organisations and violence against women charities, will focus on how to ensure harmful online content is better regulated, trying to bring parity between the scrutiny of offline and online content. She pays tribute to the 'hugely innovative side' of the porn industry, which has long driven technological advances in webcams and internet speeds, fuelled by the sector's enormous capacity to turn profit, but she has not invited any representatives on to the taskforce, wary of anything that might let the industry 'mark their own homework'. This week Ofcom announced that major online providers, including the UK's most popular pornography site, Pornhub, had agreed to implement stronger age-verification measures in compliance with the Online Safety Act, to prevent under-18s from accessing adult material. Those platforms that do not comply with the measures face being fined 10% of global turnover or being blocked in the UK. Ofcom is also responsible for monitoring whether sites distributing user-generated pornography are protecting UK viewers from encountering illegal material involving child sexual abuse and extreme content (showing rape, bestiality and necrophilia, for example). However, other forms of harmful pornography that are regulated in physical formats are not subject to similar restrictions online. It is this grey, unscrutinised area that Bertin's panel will focus on, as well as calling for better processes to respond to stolen content, working out how people depicted in pornographic videos can request that the clips be removed from sites, and how to build safety mechanisms into AI tools that create sexually explicit content. Officials at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) guided her through short clips of extreme material to help her understand the nature of easily available harmful content. She remains disturbed by the material she saw – content designed to appear to be child sexual abuse, set in children's bedrooms – roles played by young girls, who may be over 18 but are acting as children. 'The titles are very problematic, things like: 'Daddy's going to come home and give his daughter a good seeing to' or 'Oops I've gone too far and now she's dead' or 'Kidnap and kill a hooker.'' This content would be prohibited by the BBFC in the offline world, but is unregulated online. During research for her review, she met representatives from global tech companies, and told them how when Volvo invented the three-point safety belt they gifted the patent to the rest of the industry because staff realised the innovation was so vital to raising safety standards. 'My pitch was that they have a duty and responsibility to double down on trying to get technology that can clean up these situations, and they should share that technology,' she says. 'Taylor Swift can whip a song off a website as soon as anyone tries to pirate it. There's no reason why the firms can't come up with technology to sort this out.' Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Posing for photographs, she edges away from a watercolour of Margaret Thatcher hung on the wall by one of her colleagues. 'Let's do it without Thatcher in the background. That's not my doing by the way – I share the office,' she says semi-apologetically, before rapidly adding: 'I mean I love Thatcher, obviously.' But she may be making an important distinction. In a 1970 Woman's Hour interview, Thatcher said the rise of pornography was a 'frightening' manifestation of a newly permissive society that she believed was undermining family life. Bertin describes herself as a liberal conservative and wants to be clear she is neither anti-porn nor running a moral crusade. 'Consenting adults should be able to do what they want; I have no desire to stop any kind of sexual freedom. But restricting people from seeing a woman being choked, called a whore, and having several men stamp on her – for example – is not ending someone's sexual freedom. This is the kind of content we want to end.'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Tom Holland, Jacob Elordi and Harris Dickinson at top of James Bond wishlist
Tom Holland, Harris Dickinson and Jacob Elordi are rumoured to be at the top of Amazon's James Bond wishlist, according to a new report. Variety has learned from insiders that the new iteration of 007 would be under 30 and the three actors could be fighting it out for the role. No meetings have taken place and Amazon has yet to confirm anything. The report emerges days after the Dune and Arrival director Denis Villeneuve was announced as the first director of Bond's new era under the Amazon-MGM banner. The French-Canadian film-maker, now working on the third Dune movie, reportedly beat out Conclave's Edward Berger, Westworld's Jonathan Nolan, Paddington's Paul King and Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright for the role. 'I intend to honour the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come,' Villeneuve said in a statement. 'This is a massive responsibility, but also, incredibly exciting for me and a huge honour.' Early rumours had suggested the Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón would step up, having worked with Bond's new producer David Heyman before, but he removed himself from the race. Cuarón is set to work on the darkly funny drama Jane with Charlize Theron instead. Holland, best known for playing Spider-Man, has also starred in the video game hit Uncharted and Apple series The Crowded Room. He'll next be seen in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey before returning for the fourth Spider-Man movie. The 29-year-old actor once tried to pitch a 007 spin-off to Sony. 'I had a meeting after or during Spider-Man 2 with Sony to pitch this idea of a young Bond film that I'd come up with,' he said in 2022. 'It was the origin story of James Bond. It didn't really make sense. It didn't work. It was the dream of a young kid, and I don't think the Bond estate were particularly interested.' Dickinson, known for Triangle of Sadness and Babygirl, recently received rave reviews for his directorial debut Urchin at the Cannes film festival. 'I mean, listen, man, you'd be a fool to not entertain that role,' he said when asked about playing Bond in 2023. 'I'm loving seeing the development of James Bond and seeing how it changes over the years. I think Daniel Craig was such a good Bond that I'd almost be quite frightened to try … Who knows what they're doing with Bond? I'm intrigued.' Elordi is the only Australian of the bunch, but could follow in the footsteps of George Lazenby who played Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The actor, best known for his role in TV drama Euphoria and Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, will soon be seen in Emerald Fennell's unconventional adaptation of Wuthering Heights with Margot Robbie. In 2023, Elordi called rumours that he was being linked to the role 'beautiful' and added: 'I just like that people maybe want to put me in their movies. That makes me really glad.' The release date for the next film is yet to be announced, but Variety is claiming that anything sooner than 2028 would be impossible. The 26th Bond film will follow Daniel Craig's final outing No Time to Die which made over $774m at the global box office. Earlier this year, in a reported $1bn deal, Amazon MGM bought the rights to gain 'creative control' of the franchise. In March, producers Amy Pascal and David Heyman were hired to take charge of the new film.
