From: Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Sep 16 1996 - 09:03:01 MDT
On Wed, 11 Sep 1996, Chris Hind wrote:
> I've read about past fears that building increasingly powerful particle
> accelerators have the potential to create strange matter which is a more
> stable form of matter that would instantly convert all matter around it into
> this new form. Is there any potential of this occurring?
Well, the main fears have been that our vacuum state is a false vacuum with
higher energy than "true vacuum". A fluctuation might cause it to tunnel into
true vacuum in a small region, releasing immense amounts of energy, changing
the parameters of our physics and spreading with the speed of light (i.e. A
Bad Thing).
Fortunately this appears unlikely, since supernovae and black holes
doesn't seem to have broken the vacuum, and they are much more energetic.
If this is possible, it probably requires either absurdly large amounts
of energy or clever "sabotage" (reminds me of _Rymdväktaren_ by Nilsson,
where various entities try to prevent some kind of being from sabotaging
the laws of physics using "poisoned information").
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
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