False Vacuum Decay

[antred11]

I may take some flak for this comment, but honestly I kind of feel that who ever came up with all these extremely weird quantum related theories must have been smoking some really powerful stuff.

[CreativeVisionary92]

Imagine if our universe is made out of false vacuum! We're screwed without warning...

[infinitenight2093]

what? I don't understand why everyone is freaking out. I was under the impression that we were living in a true vacuum. If I'm not mistaken, the birth of the universe took place such that there was an initial high energy state in which the four forces became separated. As well during this time, the universe underwent inflation (IMO chaotic infl.) and rapidly expanded. However, during the splitting of the forces I though THAT was when the universe was a false vacuum. FVD already took place!...?

[xCmOn3yx777]

scary shit, thankfully its very unlikely to ever happen but still scary

[wunglaub]

It's been awhile since I've studied the effects of Witten's bubbles on unstable spaces. Pretty neat simulation! What program do you typically use for displaying such calculations?

[maltrizek]

@wunglaub C++ calculations, a modified version of FermiQCD, then output of numeric lattices and rendering in opendx. Then you can splice the the rendered frame in Quicktime Pro or any photo to video rendering program.

[Mrcryptidsarereal]

can somebody put this in words a simple man can understand?

[Sunoco]

@Mrcryptidsarereal It's hard to explain, but imagine the universe is a bottle of beer in the freezer. If you nudge it just a tiny, tiny bit, nothing much happens. If you bump it a little too hard however, the whole thing instantly freezes. It's a similar concept, except the bottle of beer is our entire universe.

[Mrcryptidsarereal]

@Sunoco ok so i get something changes on a cosmic scale. what happens to the universe, for example, gravity won't exist or dna is made of plutonium or something?

[BokanProductions]

So this false vacuum decay is possible but it wont happen?

[sariasari]

Please tell me it's not going to happen in our life time. I get so scared whenever I hear about a new end of the world theory.

[PsychoJosh]

It probably won't ever happen, period. That's what theories are. Just theories. Scientists always have to consider the worst case scenarios, however unlikely or even impossible they might be.

[Midnightblue32]

Gravity has a theory too. Same for Evolution. Likewise for Wave Particles... Theories aren't just anything.

[PsychoJosh]

Be that as it may you're just talking about the few theories that came to be known as fact. There are literally millions of theories that are not and possibly will never be conclusively proven, and this is certainly one of them.

[Midnightblue32]

Gravity is still poorly understood, and the Big Bang is likewise unproven, but likely. My point is that every Theory is possible, or it would not be a theory. A theory is not, and never has been simply a guess at what may never be.

[pruje]

I'm not a scientist but I am facinated by stuff like this. When I first read about this I got a tingle down my spine...it is a really terrifying thought.

But then I came to the same conclusion as

PsychoJosh...the universe is very big, and billions of years old, with a lot of extreme and weird stuff floating around and crashing into other weird and extreme stuff. If it hasn't happened so far, I doubt it can happen at all.

[maltrizek]

Pruje, that is actually a very good observation on your part, strongly energetic interactions would certainly catalyze a transition. The observation that most commenters missed is that these theories are currently applied to much more down to earth applications, such as phase transitions which can be created in a lab, such a superconductivity and magnetic transitions in exotic materials (condensed matter for example).

[PsychoJosh]

This is never going to happen. It's statistically impossible. Given the age of the universe, if it hasn't happened by now, it never will.

[LibrettoDelMar]

well the sun is gonna shine forever then because it did for billions of years. Plus you cannot state the probability of it...it may be low, but not zero. You could the nalso "prove" that it will happen. Because the probability is different from zero. And the universe might last forever.

[PsychoJosh]

The thing is the universe has already existed for an infinite amount of time in the past; the fact that we percieve linear time is just an illusion contrived by us for our own psychological survival. The sun is completely different, it's subject to entropy just like any other material object. It will one day go supernova.

[tab2goku]

@PsychoJosh

our sun won't supernova. it will expand into a red giant and then shrink to, I believe, a white dwarf. Can somebody explain the whole false vacuum decay thing in laymans terms?

[patrickardahalian]

what the hell are you guys talking about? and gimme some of what you are smoking too LooooL

[snowman555555]

The vacuum decay theory is only a weird implication of the quantum physics theory. We know today that the quantum theory is only an approximation of our universe and is not able to fully describe it. Its application sometimes results in unsolvable and illogical paradoxes. The vacuum decay theory is one of these phenomena. It is expected that new quantum gravity theory (M-theory perhaps?) will solve these paradoxes and there'll be no room for the vacuum decay theory.

[maltrizek]

Vacuum decay is actually as common as your beer freezing instantly when you put it carefully in the freezer and then bump it, phase transitions, both quantum and classical happen all the time. There are both mundane and exotic applications of these phase transitions theories, the mundane ones are most certainly observable.

[theinsane102]

So, what causes vacuum decay?

[thexgoodxdays]

yo could this vacuum decay happen in our lifetimes? what happens if we live in the true vacuum state? is there anyway to prove we live in a false or true vacuum state?

thanks comment me back

[GreyZone7]

Look at Wiki False vacuum

"The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has been considered. If a bubble of lower energy vacuum were nucleated, it would approach at nearly the speed of light and destroy the Earth instantaneously, without any forewarning."

[Thomasfyren2]

Thus far we cannot know if we do actually live in a false vacuum. It is a possibility which scientists are definately going to explore.

Is a decay going to happen in our lifetime? No.

Some scientists say that it is a possibilty, but they say that no matter how slim the chance is. As a scientist if it is possible for you to win the grand price in 10 different kinds of lottery every week for the next 20 years, and he will say yes.

The possibility exists, but is it going to happen? No.

[Thomasfyren2]

If a bubble of lower energy is to be nucleated, you will have gather an enourmous amount of energy in a very tiny place.

We don't know how much, nut we can conclude that nothing has sufficed thus far, otherwise we would not be here.

Just think of a supermassive black hole.

A mass thousand times that of our sun bunched up in a single point, that's a lot in a tiny place. Yet that was not enough to nucleate a bubble of lower energy.

[Thomasfyren2]

And recently, astronomers have witnessed 2 supermassive black holes fusing together in a collision between 2 galaxies. The impact created a gravitational wave of such power, that this new hole was kicked out of the new galaxy. If we try imagining how much energy there was involved in this process, we would probably just become dizzy. Yet it was still not enough to spark a metastability event.

[Thomasfyren2]

This kind of stuff seems very threatening and overwhelming first time you hear of it, but if you sit down and think a little, things don't look that bleak anyway. There are far greater threats to us right now, like pollution and terrorism.

I felt a glimpse of my own mortallity when i first saw this, but i turned it into something positive by discovering how much my loved ones actually means to me, and realized how much i want to and can do with my life.

[GreyZone7]

You are surely right that this is the last thing we, with our puny lifespans, need to worry about. But in theory, such an event could have already happend Thousand of Millions of years ago. Since its propagating with lightspeed, it depends whether it happend within the observable (for us) universe, or outside. Due to inflation and expansion, certain regions may never be reached by such an event.

[supersandor]

I read in a book that some people hypothesize that another phase change could occur over the next 10^1000+ years like the one in the early universe and send the vacuum into a still lower state. It would be very bad for life if there was any around, like a H-bomb going off in every cubic millimeter of space throughout all space.

[makokun9]

But the point is, what would exactly happen? Would everything dissapear, be destroyed, or be totally altered? In a few words, if it struck us, would we be completely gone, or our structure would change and turn into something we can't even imagine? Or, is life simply impossible in the case of such event?

[supersandor]

Nothing would survive the energy liberated, though space may cool off later. Could life form again in the aftermath? Maybe. But after such a phase change, the fundamental constants of nature may be different in this new lower-energy space. Like Planck's constant or the speed of light for instance. So the question is, could life exist with different values of these constants? Maybe. But nothing that was living before could survive in that new space even if it survived the blast which it wouldn't.

[makokun9]

Oh, that was very educational. Thank you.

[2dtorus]

oops i just saw it :)

[2dtorus]

hey do you have a arxiv paper? i would like to see your lagrangian and classical eqs of motion thanx

[mtheoryrules]

Oh thanks.

[mtheoryrules]

Is this with gravity or without?

[maltrizek]

without gravity.

[litoxsnoozer]

amazing!

[makokun9]

So... is this basically what the end of the universe would look like?

[maltrizek]

This is more similar to the early universe just after the big bang after the inflaton has finished, then the fields will seek the optimal vacuum and possibly many of these transition event could have happened in the multiverse scenario...

[Briancmwilliams]

It's true that this is likely the cause of the big bang, but it is theorized that the big bang didn't dispel enough energy. Then bubble nucleation could alter our solar system and end human life.