What we call empty space is not entirely empty. It's filled throughout with quantum fields —like the famous Higgs, which lends elementary particles their mass.
Such fields are configured everywhere the same —so ubiquitous, we call it “vacuum.” And it's been stable for 14 billion years, give or take.
But it's just possible this vacuum state is merely metastable rather than absolutely so. If a theoretical lower vacuum energy could exist, some point in the universe might eventually lapse into true vacuum, with startling results.
It's highly doubtful that baryonic matter (protons, neutrons) could survive such a transition.
A bubble of the true vacuum, churning through spacetime in a widening gyre, things would fall apart —new paradigm consume the old.
Cosmos re-emergent, from its own body: offspring eating its way free —leptons leaping!
Electrons (that's if they survived) liberated from their atomic prisons, from making circles in that yard…
The structure of spacetime itself rewritten within the expanding sphere. The very concept of time redefined——
The term is “false vacuum decay” and its possibility is well known, though incompletely understood.
How could we even tell if our false vacuum had already, somewhere, failed?
Say it happened nearby: in the Centauri system, just 4.31 mean-light-years away.
Expanding outward at the speed of light —driven by the energy differential between false vacuum and true— the bubble's edge reaches Earth some 52 months later. The first —and last— we'll know of it.
No warning is possible, because the destructive front approaches at light speed. We won't have time to say: Well, finally...
But the likelihood that a truer, more vacuum-y vacuum might form next door to the only beings capable of anticipating it? Seems low.
One could only expect such a nucleation in our vicinity if it resulted from our own bungling experimentation.
Someone fooling around with zero-point energy —in hot pursuit of perpetual motion— is as likely an eventual cause of the demise of the status-quo as anything.
But it probably remains outside our power to fuck up quite that badly just yet, so:
- The bubble forms naturally, somewhere in the interstitial void, between galaxies
- Forms right now, out there, just seventeen billion light-years away
Well, here's the thing:
It can never reach us.
I hear you shouting, inappropriately, Bullshit! Because you know that we see, today, galaxies farther away than that:
Our visible universe extends some 46 billion years! I hear you say.
But the universe is expanding. And that expansion is accelerating. The bubble's edge, moving at c, will remain beyond what we call the cosmic event horizon.
In the far future, our weird descendants may see no galaxies beyond our Local Group. Unless we keep good records, they'll never know how small their universe has become.
At large enough scales, even now, spacetime's expansion is faster than light. This is somehow allowable because nothing moves:
Everything only gets farther away.
Maybe vacuum decay has already occurred, maybe more than once. We don't know how big the universe is.
But if it happens far enough away, we might all yet be spared.
dM
20260805 Reading, PA
I decided to become more involved with SFWA ( you may know it as the Science Fiction Writers of America, but the name has changed, while the acronym hasn't) so I "volunteered" —always a mistake, really.
As a full member, and because I teach in Game Design and, yeah, specialize in Interactive Narrative, I've been invited to contribute to the Game Writing committee —and as I've worked a bit in publishing, to the committee running the brand new Games and Comics Quarterly magazine.
So far I've mostly done nothing. I mean, I cast a sort of vote on the cover image for vol.2 of the magazine... And proposed a panel for a coming event:
An Arrow in the Knee: NPCs, the writer and AI —which, lemme tell you, reopened the can of worms that is AI, today, in the writerspace.
But these are not my worms! This is not my can!
I'm just interested in helping those seeking professional development to wrangle all the freakin worms let loose upon the world by AI. Heck, I'm not even the messenger!
Don't Shoot!
dM
20260729 Reading, PA