Higgs and Antimatter explosive yield

[Varon]

http://science.discovery.com/tv/through-the-wormhole/episodes/what-are-we-made-of/

Discovery channel is running a very excellent episode on particle physics & the LHC hosted by Morgan Freeman and they mentioned something which I want to inquire further.

It is mentioned in the program that if the higgs field suddenly vanish, all particles (like electrons, etc.) will travel at the speed of light?? Is it true? So if the electrons and quarks in my body would suddenly be without higgs influenced. I can fly at or near the speed of light??

Half gram of antimatter is said to produce explosion like in the hiroshima nukes. So how many pounds of antimatter would it take to destroy the entire planet? How do you calculate it? This would make a great future defense against comets or meteors on collision course to earth, as well as make a excellent planet destroyer weapon to be deployed on other planets beyond the solar system.

 

[Bill_K]

It is mentioned in the program that if the higgs field suddenly vanish, all particles (like electrons, etc.) will travel at the speed of light?? Is it true?

Varon, I'm afraid what this mostly illustrates is that if you assume something that is impossible to begin with, you can conclude anything you want. If the Higgs boson is an essential part of nature, and that part suddenly disappeared, who can say what else would need to change, or what the resulting universe would look like.

 

[Varon]

Varon, I'm afraid what this mostly illustrates is that if you assume something that is impossible to begin with, you can conclude anything you want. If the Higgs boson is an essential part of nature, and that part suddenly disappeared, who can say what else would need to change, or what the resulting universe would look like.

I'm just asking what if a stationary electron suddenly loses the higgs coupling. Would it suddenly accelerate to the speed of light?

Hmm.. how come the photon keeps on running at speed of light and doesn't slow down. Is it because it has no higgs coupling or it's because of certain properties of the photons?

 

[Bill_K]

I'm just asking what if a stationary electron suddenly loses the Higgs coupling. Would it suddenly accelerate to the speed of light?

I understood the question, and I'll repeat my answer. Designing a universe is not like picking items from a Chinese menu. Everything is interrelated, and you can't just ask questions like "What if there were no electrons?" because maybe that makes the entire universe impossible.

For instance, some particles carry charge. But as far as we know, massless particles can't be charged. So there's more to it than just everything moving at the speed of light.

 

[Varon]

I understood the question, and I'll repeat my answer. Designing a universe is not like picking items from a Chinese menu. Everything is interrelated, and you can't just ask questions like "What if there were no electrons?" because maybe that makes the entire universe impossible.

For instance, some particles carry charge. But as far as we know, massless particles can't be charged. So there's more to it than just everything moving at the speed of light.

Ok. So I wonder why photons run at full ceiling of spacetime speed? Beside no mass, maybe it's because it's a light. But neutrinos also run at the near ceiling speed. So mass may be what's slowering it down. But a charge particle like electron without mass.. i wonder how fast can it run automatically relative to c. Hmm...

 

[Drakkith]

Ok. So I wonder why photons run at full ceiling of spacetime speed? Beside no mass, maybe it's because it's a light. But neutrinos also run at the near ceiling speed. So mass may be what's slowering it down. But a charge particle like electron without mass.. i wonder how fast can it run automatically relative to c. Hmm...

With no mass it could arguably travel at c. But it has mass. So it cant!

I bolded, underlined, italicized, and maxed the font size on that because that's the key here lol. Electrons have mass, so they cannot travel at c. Attempting to figure out if they could if they had no mass is a waste of time.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Half gram of antimatter is said to produce explosion like in the hiroshima nukes. So how many pounds of antimatter would it take to destroy the entire planet? How do you calculate it? This would make a great future defense against comets or meteors on collision course to earth, as well as make a excellent planet destroyer weapon to be deployed on other planets beyond the solar system.

What do you have against planets in other solar systems?

There was another thread recently about destroying the Earth https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=501339. To quote myself from that

I doubt one could, the Earth is ~6 billion trillion tonnes of matter. To completely break the Earth apart would require you to overcome the Gravitational Binding Energy of all the mass of the Earth, that would require 2.23E32 joules of energy.

That's the amount of energy needed to entirely destroy the Earth. You may be able to chip it away bit by bit but I'm pretty sure that would require just as much energy over time.

Using good old e=mc2 we can work out that we would need roughly 1.25 trillion tonnes of matter and 1.25 trillion tonnes of antimatter. However that is assuming that none of the energy is wasted i.e and explosion on the surface will radiate most of the energy up and out.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that the current rate of antimatter production is on the order of 10 nanograms per year. To produce 1.25 trillion tonnes would take a trillion, trillion years and cost $78,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So...good luck with that