Theory HEP Seminar

The Fate of the Universe

Matthew Schwartz

Harvard University

Will our universe end in a Big Crunch? Not likely. Will it expand forever, leaving cold emptiness? Possibly. In fact, with current data the most likely scenario is that somewhere, far far away, a wall of energy is plowing towards us at the speed of light, destined to collide after some exponentially long but finite time. This talk will discuss the phenomenon of tunneling in quantum field theory and it's implications for the Standard Model of particle physics, and our universe.