What if the universe isn’t as stable as we think? What would it be like flicking a cosmic switch? Imagine setting a sea of gasoline on fire?
- Physicists believe our reality might be living in a “false vacuum,” a fragile state that could collapse at any moment.
- To understand how vacuum decay would happen we need to understand 2 principals
- Enery levels.
- Stability.
- Energy levels – a core principal in physics is that everything has energy levels.
- The higher the levels, the more the energy is in the system.
- Wood for example has a high energy level – it can be burned, a process that releases the chemical energy stored in its molecular bonds and turns it into heat.
- The ash left over is at a lower energy level that wood before.
- Stability – everything in our universe tries to move towards it’s ground state – in which it is completely stable and has little energy as possible.
- A ball on a hill is unstable and has a lot of potential energy, when disturbed, it will roll down into a valley and loose it’s potential energy in the process.
- The ball is now in its ground state and stable – it will remain like that.
- Everything in our universe follows these 2 principals – if something has a lot of energy – it’s unstable and wants to get rid of it and become stable and reach it’s gound state.
- This is true for every system even in the wired world of quantum mechanics.
- If our understanding of physics is correct then our universe gets it’s properties from quantum fields – rules of universe – tells particles how to behave and interact.
- Like everything in the universe they want to be in the lowest energy level posible – vacuum state.
- A fields that pretents to be stable but not really not is called a false vacuum.
- The Higgs Field is responsible giving particles their mass, which rules how almost everything in the universe interacts.
- What would happen is the Higgs Field is in a false vacuum?
- It would be like a piece of wood drenched in gasoline waiting to set the universe on fire.
- A random spark like quantum tunneling could release the potential energy of the Higgs Field.
- This could happen at anytime without warning – if at any point in space this vacuum decay starts, there is no turning back.
- As the Higgs Field crushes into the lower energy state, it releases a vast amount of potential energy.
- This energy pushes the space around it over the barier releasing more potential energy.
- A sphere of the new stable Higgs Field, or true vacuum, grows at the speed of light in all directions – imagine it like setting a sea of gasoline – the size of the universe on fire.
- This sphere is surrounded by a shell of energy that devours everything it comes into contact with – whatever it touches is eliminated from existance – the bubble will continue to grow forever, deleting the universe on its way.
- There is no way to be warned, since it’s so fast – our destruction would be instance – in a fraction of a second earth would be gone.
- We simply don’t know what vacuum decay of the universe might be, it might be a shadow of what it is now or not.
- Don’t be worried since false vacuum is a speculation based on our current understanding of particle physics which might be wrong.
- Vacuum decay, right now no one can say it’s a thing that is real or just a scary idea.
- But if one of the spheres or multiple spheres have started decaying the universe is so big that they might not reach for billions of years. If they are far away they might not be able to reach us because of the expansion of the universe and speed of light is not that fast enough on the scale of the universe.
- The very stability of space and time is not guaranteed forever, the fact that life arouse and flourished is a remarkable achievement. we cannot prevent vacuum decay, but we can continue to learn it, and in doing so we have to understand both the fragility and beauty of our universe – explore and wonder at this strange fabric of reality.