The new finding is based on tests at the Borexino facility in Italy, which was trying to prove the exact opposite. The fact is that electrons don’t seem to break down. They may survive the Big Rip, the hypothetical end of the universe, but with “different properties.”
Electrons don’t have “components,” smaller parts, but are themselves components. So in theory they don’t have anything to break down in to. So there’s a whole yotta thinking going on about what this finding means. Nobody, in fact, really knows if electrons break down or not, and it looks like quite a wait to find out.
Let’s start with the obvious — electrons can outlive the universe? So what do they do, go to retirement homes and look around for equally broad minded protons, raise families of muons and quarks, or what? Host game shows? This ongoing existence idea doesn’t have a whole lot of explanations in existing models, and throws more than a few spanners in to the idea of entropy, the so-called heat death of the universe.
Rewind a bit, and you also have the possibility that we’re living in a universe full of used electrons, some of which may no longer be under warranty. Actually, the theory of conservation of energy sort of fills this gaping hole, provided you don’t want to get picky about things like how it does that. In theory, energy is never lost, simply translated in to other forms.
The theory of physical immortality of anything simply isn’t in the script for modern science. It existed in various forms in ancient philosophies, metaphysics, and what some people call actual thinking by real people.
It doesn’t exist in pedantic theory, however. The degree of pedantic omniscience in physics on every known subject is well known. This is the science which called all other sciences “stamp collecting” in the 1980s and hasn’t yet managed to define its new hobby horse, “dark matter,” after 20 years. Dark matter has an implied existence, proven by its implied effects on matter.
If you need any more scatterbrained non-definitions, check out the latest findings, which include the idea that dark matter killed the dinosaurs. Well, it was either that or a non-existent star called Nemesis, the ho-hum product of many Chariots of the Gods-like books. This is the science with a monopoly on thinking? Not any more.
What this finding means is that the nature of the universe, past, present and future, has a lot more tricks up its sleeve. The theory is that this finding really means there are a lot more laws of physics and a lot more thinking to be done on the subject(s) of physical existence.
If this universe is just an unruly electromagnetic bubble (How quaint — electromagnetism… just like in the movies.) then the passage of materials from one state to another, like gases escaping from a soap bubble, is pretty easy to understand. The thinking starts when you consider “what next” scenarios. Maybe the materials interact with some other type of materials, maybe not. Maybe they synthesize a sort of “hybrid” universe.
Wanna wait around while someone finds a nice, plodding reason for the new findings? You’ll be waiting a lot longer than 5 quintillion years.
