For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this b quark paper that we were writing at the time…. Later…I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.”BaBar’s window on the weak force

So it looks like we can add a few more images to the list, while looking to Lubo’s link. Genus figure, appear to look like a dog bone with holes in the end?:)

Best,

I hadn’t read the paper yet. Thanks for pointing these figures out. It’s a great drawing. The big question is if it was intentionally happy, or just an accident.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.2832.pdf

To answer your first question: yes, it has to be inside our light horizon to be a threat. It’s exactly the fact that it has not happened yet that lets us put a probability bound on when it could possible happen in the most pessimistic scenario. Our past lightcone keeps on getting bigger, so the fact that inflation pushes stuff out is not as important in this case.

Regarding the LHC: it does not achieve the energy densities that would even get you close to being able to push through to the other vacuum. As comparison, in nature there have been high energy cosmic ray events that can produce collisions with much higher center of mass energy than anything possible at the LHC. None of these events have produced a nucleation, and nature has done it way more times in our past lightcone than the LHC will ever have an opportunity to observe in collisions.

(Let’s hope no one gets the idea that something like the LHC could cause a nucleation!)