Death and the Higgs Boson – Talking Mortality with a Physicist

For Dr. Mark Kruse, a Duke University physicist specializing in high-energy particle physics, mortality is often on the mind. Not just mortality of the individual, but mortality of particles and even the mortality of the entire universe, which Kruse says in 100 trillion years or so will possibly go dark.

Digital Dying recently spoke with Dr. Kruse about what happens to consciousness after the brain dies, the possibility of extra-dimensional ghosts and whether or not life will exist at the end of time.

I understand that most of the universe is dark matter and dark energy, and everything we are observing in the universe is only about 5 percent of its actual makeup, might ghosts and supernatural beings exist in that other 95 percent?

I think everyone wants to believe in ghosts because it means there’s something else after our death, but that’s wishful thinking. Even though these extra dimensions are not visible they don’t affect us. They wrap around any given point, and that can have consequences for how very high energy particles interact, but not how large macroscopic bodies interact. But I am always of the opinion that we don’t understand everything. We are like ants under a rock trying to understand the universe, and whether we’re ever going to get anywhere, I’m skeptical. If we knew the answers and everyone understood the answers there wouldn’t be thousands of different religions and thousands of different viewpoints.

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Can studying high energy particles like the Higgs boson help us understand consciousness and what happens to consciousness after death?

Consciousness is a bizarre thing, but essentially everything that we know is just neurons in our brain. They give us these memories and feelings, what we think of as consciousness. It’s an interesting question; could we build a machine that has consciousness? Some people think that eventually we will. I think about things like near death experiences, and everyone talking about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. But who knows what a dying brain is doing, and what it does to your senses. All matter is always changing from one form to the other. In some ways mortality is the very fundamental form of existence. Nothing lasts forever. When we die our physical bodies decay into the ground and we turn into some other form of matter, some other form of energy. The actual protons and neutrons that make up my body will be doing something else. Unless something happens on earth, those protons and neutrons might last millions of years.

Do you think there is an afterlife, or when we die are we just dead?

My existence is based on my memories, my memories are my existence. Our brain is holding our memories and when that’s dead those memories are gone, unless there is something really bizarre. And I suppose that’s how people associate the afterlife with the Higgs field, the idea that the Higgs field could be some energy field that holds our consciousness. That’s farfetched but I’m not going to say no. Anything is possible. If everyone is struggling with this in their own way, who am I to say who is right and who is wrong. And if people find a way, then that’s fine. One person calls it god, I call it some equation.

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You talk about the Higgs field, and I have read much about the Higgs boson particle, but remain confused, can you describe this all to me?

We are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms and atoms are made of electrons and protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons themselves are made of quarks, which come in two flavors, the up quark and the down quark. Art, the sun, your computer, you and me, everything is made of up quarks, down quarks and electrons. That’s it. When you put it all in perspective, it is just bizarre. And in addition, everything we can observe in the universe is only about five percent of its makeup. The rest is so called dark matter and dark energy, and we have no idea what it is, but we know it exists because we can see the gravitational effects of it. And yet there is no particle in our standard model of physics that can account for it. So there has to be a grander theory that contains a candidate for dark matter. The Higgs field is required to give all the fundamental particles that make everything up (including Dark Matter) their mass. If the fundamental particles that make us up had even slightly different masses, we wouldn’t exist. One property of the Higgs field is that it can in a way tangle up on itself, producing a Higgs boson. It is the particle manifestation of that field.

Could life exist in a world without mass?

Without mass there would be no stable matter. Particles with no mass travel the speed of light (like photons—the particles of light) so it wouldn’t be possible to combine forms of matter such as protons, neutrons, atoms, etc.. Perhaps some sort of existence would be possible but I don’t know what it would look like. Maybe the whole universe could be a single “living” entity. There certainly wouldn’t be individual life forms. It’s possible in the very distant future that that is where the universe is heading anyway. As the universe continues to expand and get colder and colder, possibly in 100 trillion years or so all the stars will burn out and the universe will tend towards a state of random scattered particles. It’s hard to imagine that any sort of consciousness could exist in that state, but who knows.

How do unanswered questions in physics affect how people view death?

I grew up going to church every Sunday and just thinking, what is this? Why are there different religions? I came to the conclusion very early on and I still abide by it, that we are the only species that can forecast our own mortality. But we also have a survival instinct. So our instinct is to create something to stop that mortality. And that’s where religion comes from. In some sense we ascribe to religion or god what we don’t understand, even going on back to the caveman. The sun would rise and they would think, what the hell is that? As we understand more and more there is less of a need for religion. But there are fundamental questions as to why the universe came into existence at all. It would be so much easier for nothing to ever have happened.

Are we living in Middle Times? Do you think there is some revelation or theory coming down the line that is just going to blow our entire world view apart?

Who knows how primitive we really are. We have 99.9 percent the same genetic makeup as a monkey, but we are very different from a monkey. What if it went the other way? We could be so far away from understanding anything. We are the first species to start understanding and thinking about some of these questions. But we could be the first species in some long evolutionary line.

How do you convey to children that not only will they one day cease to be, but the entire universe will one day cease to be?

I actually have three year old twins and as they get older I am really starting to think about how I’m going to broach these sorts of questions. Even 10,000 years from now nothing is really going to matter. No memory I had is ever going to exist. That sort of thinking drives people to suicide, and you don’t want people jumping off bridges because they think that life is futile. You don’t want everyone thinking that once they die that’s it and nothing that they did in their lives is really that meaningful. I like observing the twins and seeing the development of the human brain. For example, the girl in particular loves the moon, and she gets very upset when she can’t reach up and touch it. I want my children to be able to explore and think about things, there are a lot of good things in life, too. You can have morbid thoughts in life and you can have depressing thoughts and on the flips side there are a lot of Eureka moments. There are points, when even though I don’t understand anything I get this amazing wave of hope.