Vacuum decay, a process that could end the universe as we know it, may happen 10,000 times sooner than expected. Fortunately, it still won’t happen for a very, very long time.
We could stay at the nonzero default for eternity, were it not for quantum mechanics. A quantum field can “[tunnel](https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-tunnel-shows-particles-can-break-the-speed-of-light-20201020/),” jumping to a new, lower-energy value even if it doesn’t have enough energy to pass through the higher-energy intermediate settings, an effect akin to tunneling through a solid wall.
For this to happen, you need to have a lower-energy state to tunnel to. And before building the Large Hadron Collider, physicists thought that the current state of the Higgs field could be the lowest. That belief has now changed.
According to the article, 1 Gpc^3 volume would have an expectation value of 10^700 years before that happens. The Observable Universe is approximately 10^4 Gpc^3 volume and approximately 10^9 years old, for comparison.
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So, an advanced sentient species could trigger the death of the universe by forcing one single Higgs boson to tunnel to a lower energy state? If that isn’t a good premise for a hard sci-fi novel, I don’t know what is…
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Vacuum decay, a process that could end the universe as we know it, may happen 10,000 times sooner than expected. Fortunately, it still won’t happen for a very, very long time.
We could stay at the nonzero default for eternity, were it not for quantum mechanics. A quantum field can “[tunnel](https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-tunnel-shows-particles-can-break-the-speed-of-light-20201020/),” jumping to a new, lower-energy value even if it doesn’t have enough energy to pass through the higher-energy intermediate settings, an effect akin to tunneling through a solid wall.
For this to happen, you need to have a lower-energy state to tunnel to. And before building the Large Hadron Collider, physicists thought that the current state of the Higgs field could be the lowest. That belief has now changed.
Read more: [https://www.wired.com/story/vacuum-of-space-to-decay-sooner-than-expected-but-still-not-soon/](https://www.wired.com/story/vacuum-of-space-to-decay-sooner-than-expected-but-still-not-soon/)
According to the article, 1 Gpc^3 volume would have an expectation value of 10^700 years before that happens. The Observable Universe is approximately 10^4 Gpc^3 volume and approximately 10^9 years old, for comparison.
So, an advanced sentient species could trigger the death of the universe by forcing one single Higgs boson to tunnel to a lower energy state? If that isn’t a good premise for a hard sci-fi novel, I don’t know what is…