Higgs Field Manipulation

[Rabid]

Let’s assume that the Higgs Boson exist.

For a Sci-Fi setting, we will imagine what technological aptitudes the capability of altering the “density” of the Higgs Field may bring.


First, we will assume that altering the density of the Higgs Field come from the use of an “exotic” (black box, no explanations given) device that only consume energy in the form of electricity. We can also envision, for Sci-Fi flavour, that it could necessitate the use Antimatter or “Black Matter”, or some form of Unobtainium, in order to function.


Such a device could project a field of varying shape able to decrease or increase the density of the Higgs Field, in effect respectively decreasing or increasing the mass of the objects inside the field.


Here are some thoughts on how such an effect could be exploited :


KE Shielding :

The effectiveness, as a mean of destruction, of a Kinetic Energy Weapon come from the product of the Mass of the projectile time its relative Speed to the object.
By reducing the mass of the object, we reduce its Kinetic Energy, and thus we reduce its effectiveness as a weapon.

The question is : would such a field also work against explosions ?

Depending on the answer, and the chosen availability of such fields generators on the setting, it could justify the generalized use of lasers, and possibly missiles, on the battlefield against armored targets.

The disadvantage of such a field, though, is that depending on its shape (say if the vehicle is included in the field itself or not), an entire 60 Tonnes+ MBT could see its mass reduced to only a few kilograms - which means that in certain situations it could be literally blown off far away in the airs. Rocket jumps ?


Blackholes generator :

By greatly increasing the density of the Higgs Field in a given region of space, you could by certain means generate a singularity, a miniature blackhole, or even generate wormholes.

It could allow you to create artificial gravity in spaceships (the singularity used to power the drives also being the “piece of equipment” that provide artificial gravity to the ship).


“Cheap” SSTO :

This one sounds trivial :

Reduce the mass of the cargo, of the fuel when it is in the tanks, and of some parts of the structure. The mass of the craft at take-off would be greatly reduced, thus allowing for an easier take off without having to summon more “exotic” solutions (reaction-less drives, antigravity, etc...).

You could however offset those advantages by saying that generating such a field require a great amount of energy and some sort of unobtainium, which would mean that it would be feasible to lift enormous amount of cargo in space in a limited number of flights, but that it however wouldn’t be cheap (thus justifying the existence of less optimal but more cost effective solutions like a space elevator, or things like that).

A vehicle designed with such a mechanism in mind would look like a beached whale when its Higgs Field Manipulator is knocked out/in maintenance/running out of fuel (possible plot device).




Do you have any remarks ? Other possible uses in mind ?

[Rabid]

Here’s another possible use :


Blackholes Killer :

The inverse of the Blackhole Generator, the Blackholes Killer would greatly reduce the density of the higgs field around and inside the blackhole (if Relativity allows it), thus reducing its mass to the point where the singularity “explode”, pressure/density winning against gravity.

You could also make stars go Nova with such a weaponized field, thinking about it...

[doom3607]

I don't think you can blow up a black hole since it's kind of hard to make the radius of the event horizon fit inside the mathematical point that is the singularity. Go ahead, try and make a radius less than zero.

I have two uses of my own, though.

1) Planet killer. Minimize the mass of a planet enough and even convential explosives should be able to achieve Death Star style effects.

2) Ship launcher. Build a big ring that can modify its own mass. Line a ship up with it, some distance away. Then make the ring very very massive. The ship will start falling into the gravity well. When it's just passing through the gate and about to start losing the kinetic energy it gained from falling in, turn off the field and suddenly the gravity well is gone, letting the ship fly off at full speed.

[Rabid]

1) Planet killer. Minimize the mass of a planet enough and even convential explosives should be able to achieve Death Star style effects.

I don't think that explosives themselves would do much damages. However, the sudden loss of gravity resulting from the mass-lightening (so to say) would change the equilibrium that hold the planet spherical (the hydrostatic equilibrium, I think it's called)
In effect, it could mean the biggest earthquakes you have ever seen, and even maybe even the fracturation of the mantle, with hot magma jumping from the new formed faults and submerging all the world's surface.

Maybe not a planetary annihilation, but you have at least achieved a BDZ.

However, I think the power requirement to play with the Higgs Field on a planetary scale must be ludicrous.

2) Ship launcher. Build a big ring that can modify its own mass. Line a ship up with it, some distance away. Then make the ring very very massive. The ship will start falling into the gravity well. When it's just passing through the gate and about to start losing the kinetic energy it gained from falling in, turn off the field and suddenly the gravity well is gone, letting the ship fly off at full speed.

Interesting idea. Like a coilgun, but using gravity instead of magnetism. Very interesting idea, I have to say. Thanks for suggesting it.

It could allow the creation of exotic KE weapons with projectiles made of things that aren't magnetic (suck that, Magneto !).

[Serafina]

So basically this is standard sci-fi gravity manipulation, except with a hypothetical scientific explanation - and it actually differentiates between mass and gravity, but then again most sci-fi mixes that up anyway.

[Rabid]

Basically, yes.

I wanted a way to manipulate "gravity" (in a way) that wasn't too silly, and that could be put in a "hard" (relatively speaking) sci-fi setting with a bit of handwavium :

"How are we able to fly this giant hulk into space ? Simple, we reduce its mass ! [...] How do we reduce its mass ? Well, a bit of messing with the Higgs Field, and voilà ! [...] How do we mess with the... What the hell is this question ? Do you expect me to be a quantum physicist or something ?! We do it, and that's all !"


So, I just have to say that the LHC proved the existence of the Higgs' Boson, that researchers made a bit of research (duh!) in the field after the discovery, and that after some time a way was found to manipulate the Higgs Field.

About the energy required in order to manipulate the Higgs' Field, I could just say that a great part of the energy come from quantum stuff, and that the electricity/"black matter"/Unobtainium fed into the system only serve to harvest the quantum stuff used in turn to power the Higgs' Manipulation Field.

Finally, with the ability to manipulate mass and thus gravity, it could allow some forms of funky FTL drives.

[doom3607]

But if and only if you could reduce mass to zero while avoiding... weirdness. Namely the magnetism inherent in all the atoms ripping the ship apart or makit it go boom or crunch or whatever. That would be... unpleasent.

[Sarevok]

Fascinating...

So if LHC research pans out we could have some fancy science fiction technology right out of Star Trek ?

[Whiskey144]

So if LHC research pans out we could have some fancy science fiction technology right out of Star Trek ?

Based on the OP's description, it's closer to Mass Effect.

And, AFAIK, LHC research isn't actually looking into things like this. It's simply the OP trying to (fairly reasonably, IMO) cloak handwavium with hard-scifi-ish terminology.

[Rabid]

But if and only if you could reduce mass to zero while avoiding... weirdness. Namely the magnetism inherent in all the atoms ripping the ship apart or makit it go boom or crunch or whatever. That would be... unpleasent.

You can't reduce mass to zero. You could, however, reduce the mass of a 100 KT and more ship to only a few grammes, if you were to put enough energy in the system and if your generators were big enough.

As I see it, the more you want to change the Higgs' Field density from its normal state, the more energy you'd have to spend, in a logarithmic fashion when you want to increase mass, and in an asymptotic way when you want to decrease it.

So if LHC research pans out we could have some fancy science fiction technology right out of Star Trek ?

Based on the OP's description, it's closer to Mass Effect.

And, AFAIK, LHC research isn't actually looking into things like this. It's simply the OP trying to (fairly reasonably, IMO) cloak handwavium with hard-scifi-ish terminology.

I don't know the background of Mass Effect enough to answer this part, but you are right on the part about handwavium.

The thing is, I want to tell a story taking place in the 24th-25th centuries, with a humanity still centered about Sol, but which is establishing its first "real" colonies in others stars systems, with maybe one or two worlds outside of the Craddle (the Sol solar system) with populations in the triple digits millions peoples.

And for this I needed an excuse to justify a FTL drive developed in the "close" future that wouldn't pull too much on ones suspension of disbelief. Warp drive / Wormholes gates seems like a good compromise here, when you have a technologuy that allow you to mess with mass.



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EDIT :

Edited a "you", "your", "you're" error. Shame is fixed in the quote of the below post.

[Whiskey144]

I don't know the background of Mass Effect enough to answer this part, but your are right on the part about handwavium.

In ME, the titular 'mass effect field' can be used to decrease or increase the mass of any object, depending on the charge the field-generator material, 'element zero', is subjected to.

[doom3607]

Yeah, but then they had the Normandy creating a gravity well in front of it to tow itself along, with nothing there. So it's not quite the same. And Rabid? You cannot fly at lightspeed without zero mass, infinite acceleration, or infinite time.

[Rabid]

@ Doom3607 :

Tell me something I don't know, eh ? I don't intend the ships to reach the speed of light, not even 0.1 C. The FTL Drive will work by folding the "spacetime continuum" around the ship, so that it is the space around the ship that travel around the galaxy, and not the ship itself.

They will have sublight drives, sure, but those will only serve to maneuver inside gravity wells and to reach points in space where the activation of the FTL drive will not be hazard for those around.

[doom3607]

Ok, and the magic engine works... how? Come to think of it, someone did the math on that sort of engine. It's kind of impossible.

[SpaceMarine93]

Science Fiction Author Stephan Baxter made this suggestion for more near future usage of Higgs Field: Use specially designed particle accelerators to literally rip the Higgs Field away from substances placed inside the accelerator with substantial amount of energy, than shut it down briefly for the Higgs Field to naturally return to the substance, in the process generating an even greater amount of energy in return.

[Rabid]

Ok, and the magic engine works... how? Come to think of it, someone did the math on that sort of engine. It's kind of impossible.

*wave one of his hands dismissively and shrug*

A wizard did it.

Science Fiction Author Stephan Baxter made this suggestion for more near future usage of Higgs Field: Use specially designed particle accelerators to literally rip the Higgs Field away from substances placed inside the accelerator with substantial amount of energy, than shut it down briefly for the Higgs Field to naturally return to the substance, in the process generating an even greater amount of energy in return.

How exactly are we supposed to harvest the "excess energy" in this process ? Heat ? Explosion ? Magnetic field/Gravimetric potential ?...

[Simon_Jester]

Any proposal to control or manipulate the inertial or gravitational mass of objects by playing with the effects generated by the Higgs Boson is, for practical purposes, magic.

It's probably also something that will look (in hindsight) about as weird as talk about falling into a nuclear reactor turning you into a superhero look to us today.

This is unfortunate, but what it boils down to is that there isn't such a thing as a well understood mechanism by which we could do these things, the way there are well understood mechanisms for how a Dyson sphere or a coilgun or an Orion drive would work.

Past that point, it really depends on what flavors of magic you want. The entire field of soft science fiction hinges on varying brands of magic; it's fun and legitimate, but don't get too caught up on trying to make your magic scientifically justifiable. And don't let others who are caught up on that stop you- I'm looking at you, Doomy.

[narrows eyes]

[doom3607]

*hides*

A wizard did it? OK then. Objections withdrawn. Hope you find the ship launcher idea useful, at any rate.

[Rabid]

Yes. Yes I will. Maybe not exactly as you have stated it, but the idea of a "gravity-gun" big enough to toss around things as big as spaceships or asteroids will surely be exploited.

[sirocco]

I thought that as long as an object had a mass it wouldn't be able to travel at or above light speed.

So to have real FTL, you'd really need to remove totally the mass of your object and maybe even manage to have negative mass. Is this what you aim to?

[Rabid]

*pinch the bridge of his nose*

Yes, yes I know.

Look, I don't want to make the ship itself travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. No. What I want to do is to warp the space-time continuum around the ship so that it is the "bubble" of space-time around it that travel around the universe ; the ship remaining "still" relative to the space-time continuum inside the "bubble".

If I'm not bullshitting on a subject I know nothing about (which I may be), this is basically what a Star Trek Warp-engine is.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Messing with the Higgs field also gives you an interesting possiblity in stellar engineering. Suppose we come across a solar system, with a brown dwarf (a lump of hydrogen a bit too small to become a star), but with planets at the right distances to be habitable and so forth. Easy, use your Higgs field manipulator to squash the core of the brown dwarf until it gets hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion. Boom, one solar system.

Or, suppose your star has become a red giant and is in the process of dying. It isn't massive enough to fuse Carbon so it's a dead lump at the core. No worries, give it a squash and you might get another fifty million years of life out of the star. Plenty of time to evacuate the solar system, even without real-FTL.

Of course, you could use it to destroy stars as well. Tweak the higgs field in the core, so a (for instance) 5 solar mass star suddenly only has the gravity of a one solar mass star. Boom, supernova.

[Rabid]

Yes, a possible use for such a device.

Obviously, though, you'd need a properly gargantuan amount of energy and Unobtainium to do something like that. Plot-point !


"Our Star-Killer in within reach of the enemy star, our fleets are protecting it against any enemy counterattack. We only have to wait for our Unobtainium reserves to be refueled, all of those not assigned to our stardrives having been exhausted on the last operation, twelve days ago.

This should be done within four weeks, at the current production rates in the Empire, shipping speeds factored in, with a projected 15% loss from enemy raids on our convoys, and with another 10% of safety margin."

[Eternal_Freedom]

Well, If you wanted to use a stellar explosion to total orbiting planets or ships, you would not need a full supernova. A relatively small reduction in the "effective" mass of the core should be enough to truly fuck things up. Best I can figure it goes like this:

-Small reduction in mass of stellar core
-Suddenly, the core is no longer in hydrostatic equilibrium
-The gravity pulling in no longer balances explosion pushing out
-If it is a brief reduction, a pressure wave will expand from the core, possibly, perhaps even probably resulting in some badass solar flares and CME's

[Rabid]

I have no doubt this would seriously fuck-up any planets in the Goldilocks Zone, but would this be sufficient to at least knock out fleets of spaceships designed to withstand Megaton+ nuclear warheads detonated point-blank against them ?