{"id":209677,"date":"2025-03-25T01:25:59","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T06:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/might-the-proton-decay-in-other-places-or-at-other-times"},"modified":"2025-03-25T01:25:59","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T06:25:59","slug":"might-the-proton-decay-in-other-places-or-at-other-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/might-the-proton-decay-in-other-places-or-at-other-times","title":{"rendered":"Might the proton decay in other places or at other times?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/might-the-proton-decay-in-other-places-or-at-other-times2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Does the proton decay? While this was a famous prediction of Grand Unified Theories (GUTS) developed in the 1970s and 1980s, experimentalists have ruled it out\u2014or rather, put lower limits on its mean lifetime of about 10<sup>34<\/sup> years. That\u2019s 20 orders of magnitude greater than the age of the universe.<\/p>\n<p>But two physicists have been wondering: Could the lifetime be different in other places and at other times? Could the proton have decayed faster in the past? Could it decay faster somewhere else in the universe? They have reimagined some physics processes assuming the proton does decay and calculated possible lifetimes of around 10<sup>18<\/sup> years. That\u2019s only eight orders of magnitude beyond the universe\u2019s lifetime. Their work was recently <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/PhysRevD.111.035026\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in Physical Review D.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople had previously asked various questions of the type, \u2018Are the fundamental physics parameters measured on the Earth the same elsewhere in the universe?\u2019\u201d said Peter Denton, a co-author at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York in the U.S. \u201cOne case that hadn\u2019t been investigated was the stability of the proton. Earth experiments show that the proton is incredibly stable, but those only apply here, in our part of the galaxy, and now, over the last several decades. What if proton decay depended on time or space?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Does the proton decay? While this was a famous prediction of Grand Unified Theories (GUTS) developed in the 1970s and 1980s, experimentalists have ruled it out\u2014or rather, put lower limits on its mean lifetime of about 1034 years. That\u2019s 20 orders of magnitude greater than the age of the universe. But two physicists have been [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}