Two most dangerous numbers could signal the end of physics

WASHINGTON: A deeply disturbing and controversial line of thinking has emerged within the physics community.

It's the idea that we are reaching the absolute limit of what we can understand about the world around us through science. “The next few years may tell us whether we'll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe, for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer,“ Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research better known as CERN said during a recent TED talkin Geneva, Switzerland.

Equally frightening is the reason for this approaching limit, which Cliff says is “Because the laws of physics forbid it.“ At the core of Cliff's argument are what he calls the two most dangerous numbers in the universe. These numbers are responsible for all the matter, structure, and life that we witness across the cosmos.

And if these two numbers were even slightly different, says Cliff, the universe would be an empty , lifeless place.The first dangerous number on Cliff's list is a value that represents the strength of what physicists call the Higgs field, an invisible energy field not entirely un like other magnetic fields that permeates the cosmos.

As particles swim through the Higgs field, they gain mass to eventually become the protons, neutrons, and electrons comprising all of the atoms that make up you, me, and everything we see around us. Without it, we wouldn't be here.

We know with near certainty that the Higgs field exists because of a groundbreaking discovery in 2012, when CERN physicists detected a new elementary particle called the Higgs boson. According to theory , you can't have a Higgs boson without a Higgs field.

But there's something mysterious about the Higgs field that continues to perturb physicists like Cliff.

According to Einstein's theory of general relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics the two theories in physics that drive our understanding of the cosmos on incredibly large and extremely small scales the Higgs field should be performing one of two tasks, says Cliff.

Either it should be turned off, meaning it would have a strength value of zero and wouldn't be working to give particles mass, or it should be turned on, and, as the theory goes, this “on value“ is “absolutely enormous,“ Cliff says. But neither of those two scenarios are what physicists observe.