Sunday Times 2
Could studying the universe destroy it?
Knowledge is power – or at least that’s what we’ve been led to believe.
But knowing too much could accidentally trigger a countdown to Armageddon, according to two U.S. physicists.
The scientific theory suggests we may have nudged the universe closer to its death just by looking at it.
Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and colleague James Dent, claim that astronomers have sped up the process over the past two decades.
This is because they’ve dared to measure dark energy, the mysterious force that is driving galaxies apart.
The researchers, who first proposed their idea in 2007, argue that continuous observation of the universe might put it into a state that will destroy us all.
Their theory relates to a strange property of quantum physics which controls the behaviour of subatomic particles and possibly the whole universe.
Quantum systems can shift a particle’s energy state at random, for example, when a radioactive atom decays.
Some scientists think the universe is overdue for a quantum energy shift that would cause everything to cease to exist at any moment.
If a collapse occurs, it won’t exceed the speed of light, so we’ll probably see it coming, according to Esther Inglis-Arkell atiO9.
The reason for a collapse, says Professor Krauss, has to do with the strange way quantum states are affected by someone looking at it.
In the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, a cat in a box whose fate is decided by subatomic particles is both alive and dead until someone lifts the lid and observes it.
Only then is the cat discovered to be either ‘alive’ or ‘dead’.
According to a law known as the ‘quantum Zeno effect’, whenever we observe or measure something at the quantum level we set its decay clock back to zero.
The physicists calculated that observing the effects of dark energy may have reset the universe’s decay clock.
The good news is if we stop looking, the universe could shifts to a state at which its decay much slower.
The same concept applies to the start of the universe. Professor Kraus recently told Radcliffe magazine that the universe sprang from nothing.
He says we just happen to live in a universe with the right set of laws to support human life – we wouldn’t exist otherwise.
‘The answer to the question, why is there something rather than nothing, is really quite simple,’ Professor Krauss said. ‘Just wait, there won’t be for long.’
© Daily Mail, London