How to destroy the universe

Since the beginning of time, people have dreamed of destroying the sun.
- C.M. Burns

But why stop at the sun? Yesterday was Earth Day, and I decided that it would be appropriate to spend today behind the story of how to destroy not only the Earth, but, in fact, the entire Universe as a whole. To do this, we need to go to the very beginning, just before the Big Bang.

The big bang happened when the universe was hot, dense, full of energy and expanded very quickly. Also, the Universe was spatially smooth, with uniform temperature, and full of matter and antimatter. She could look something like this:
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But the thing is that we need something that will lead the Universe into such a state; something that will trigger the Big Bang. What makes the Universe smooth? What makes the temperature in the universe to be the same everywhere? What creates fluctuations due to which stars, galaxies and clusters are formed through gravitational collapse? What pushes all those strange things that could exist before the Big Bang?



The best theory is cosmic inflation, which says that the Universe has passed through a period when space expanded at an exponentially increasing rate. This expansion pushes everything, eliminating it from what we know as our Universe. It takes the shape of the space that it had and levels it. It takes a small homogeneous area and stretches it, giving each point of the Universe one temperature. And inflation takes tiny fluctuations of the quantum scale and stretches them throughout the universe, creating fluctuations that allow stars, galaxies and clusters to form. This theory even gave correct predictions of the amplitude and spectrum of these fluctuations ten years before we could measure them!

Therefore, in order to destroy the Universe, we only need to force some small point to expand exponentially, even a very small fraction of a second ( ^10-30 seconds), and this will completely remove everything that we know and create a new Universe. Reminds phoenix.



Someone might argue. We can say that you can not do this, it will be a game of god. Listen, people - if you want to destroy the Universe, you somehow have to put up with certain things.



And how do we do this? In a sense, it's as simple as rolling a ball on a hill — you need enough energy. We need to create a particle called inflaton, which leads to inflation, with such energy that the Universe begins to expand again. If we make inflaton with low energies, such as are used in large accelerators (such as 10 ¹² eV), we will not be able to pull it from the bottom of the valley:



Supermassive black holes emit cosmic rays with energies of the order of 10 ²⁰ eV, so we definitely need more energy. If we can get to 10 ²⁶ eV, we are guaranteed to achieve success - that is, raise the inflaton up the hill. If you raise it high enough, inflation will begin! This is how you can destroy the universe!

We just need a larger particle accelerator, or stronger magnetic fields. With a ring accelerator 1 km in diameter, equipped with 4 Tesla magnets, we can achieve energies of 10 ¹² eV. Therefore, to achieve the required energy, we need a ring with a radius of 10 ¹⁴ km and the same magnets, that is, an accelerator ring with a radius equal to the distance from us to the nearest star. Therefore, support the study of particle physics and the development of stronger magnetic fields, or we will be doomed to celebrate the beginning of many more days on Earth!

Some of you were upset when you read in one of the posts that string theory is basically unverifiable. In fact, you only need to build a powerful enough accelerator. Interestingly, the energy that is enough to destroy the universe is not enough to test string theory (this requires energy at 10 ²⁸ eV).