3 ms·
Actually something like that may indeed happen, but spontaneously, see about vacuum decay here [1]. Roughly speaking, the vacuum we know is meta-stable and even
by nuccy 7y ago
Actually something like that may indeed happen, but spontaneously, see about vacuum decay here [1]. Roughly speaking, the vacuum we know is meta-stable and eventually it can reach its zero state, but such change in any point in space will trigger a neighboring point to do the same and so on, so there will be a bubble expanding with a speed of light. The biggest problem is that the laws of physics of such vacuum are different and what is stable now will be unstable then, so atoms/molecules/anything made of them can no more exist. The worst is if this theory is correct, then such a bubble may already started to expand somewhere in the Universe and we will not know about it until it actually reaches us.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum
- tempay 7y ago> the vacuum we know is meta-stable It's not fully known if this is the case or not. If the standard model is accurate (which is a big if) then it's probably metastable but there is some still room for debate. See page 52 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.08124.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.08124.pdf