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When we’re faced with so many massive questions here on earth that are pressing and require immediate response, it’s so easy to forget how fragile, wonderful, and unlikely our very existence is. However, to remind us of this we have cosmologists who can unintentionally fill us with a type of existential dread that would make H.P. Lovecraft blush… one of those is the concept of vacuum decay, or bubbles in spacetime caused by a variance in the Higgs field of our universe. Lost? So were we, but long story short, you appreciate the finer things in life a lot more when you realize that all of existence can simply blink away at any moment.
Right now as you’re reading this, scientists are refining the ability to detect and confirm the existence of these bubbles or clusters of bubbles which could be responsible for both the creation of and eventual destruction of our universe by basically re-writing the laws of physics.
Spacetime Bubbles Containing Universes
In 1997, we were treated to the artistic vision of Men in Black which (spoilers) depicts whole galaxies existing in marbles. It’s kind of a crazy realization to have that twenty-four years later cosmologists and physicists can look at that philosophical imagining of the universe and realize that it isn’t that far off.
These unusual “bubbles” of nothingness would represent the factual expression of a theory in quantum physics called “false vacuum decay”. The theory follows that there are at least two different quantum states of the ever-present universe-permeating Higgs field, a universal constant field that gives all subatomic particles mass and is, therefore, one of the building blocks of existence.
The idea is represented graphically like this:
There are two quantum states in the baseline measurement of the Higgs field, a “true vacuum” where the energy value of the field actually hits zero, and the “false vacuum” where the rest-state of the energy field is above zero. The theory goes that our universe may exist in the non-zero “false vacuum”, and because of quantum field theory, the universe will always, if given an opportunity revert to the true vacuum state. That means that if a connection was ever created either accidentally or naturally between the two states one of two things would happen: it would be so tiny that it would blink out of existence almost instantly, or it would be large enough to overcome the “surface tension” for lack of a better term, of the bubble and expand infinitely at the speed of light consuming everything it touches, in a field that simultaneously fries anything inside by super-energizing the particles within and then resetting the laws of physics. Long story short… everything dies almost instantaneously, from microbes to stars. It’s the quantum physics equivalent to rebooting without saving first.
Becky Ferreira of Vice explained it another way,
“The bizarre bubbles are manifestations of a concept in quantum field theory known as false vacuum decay. Consider a vacuum that is in a stable state, but that still contains slightly more energy than a “true” vacuum that occupies the minimum energy state in the universe. This “false” vacuum could be somehow kicked into the true vacuum state of minimum energy, and this transition—or decay—would cause a bubble of true vacuum to form (or nucleate) and expand out into space, consuming everything around it.
Some models suggest that our universe was born as a true vacuum bubble that exists within a multiverse containing many similar bubbles, while others posit that we currently inhabit a false vacuum that might one day be destroyed by the advance of a true vacuum bubble.”
Ferreira also revealed that Dalila Pîrvu, a doctoral student at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is leading a team that has shed new light on the formation and interactions of these theoretical bubbles by running more advanced computer modeling including new variables that previous methods haven’t. And it revealed something interesting: these bubbles would seem to form in clusters not randomly, and that could help scientists learn how to find the real observable phenomena that confirm their existence.
“No one has really treated this problem this way,” said co-author Jonathan Braden, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), in a joint call with Pîrvu. The code can “simulate really complex dynamics and apply it to this problem in a way that had not been done before.”
Matt O’Dowd covered this for SpaceTime on PBS, check it out. But be warned, you’re not going to be able to put your mind back in its box after this one.
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