What is vacuum decay ? What happens if vacuum decay is triggered?

Once the "vacuum decay" appears, it means that the universe has officially blown the horn of death, and the true vacuum bubbles it produces will expand rapidly at the speed of light, and will swallow all the stars in the solar system in five hours, and it will only take four years to swallow the nearest star to the sun, and it will take less than 150,000 years to swallow the entire galaxy.

What is vacuum decay?

As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the famous physicist Dirac pointed out that our universe is not empty, it is more like a boiling quantum ocean, where ghostly particles suddenly appear and disappear quickly, which makes our universe not a real vacuum as it thinks, it is a pseudo-vacuum, a pseudo-vacuum state with a higher energy level than the true vacuum. Since in the quantum world, the high energy level will always fall to the low energy level, so the current pseudo-vacuum may fall towards the real vacuum at any time. All it takes is a key, an event whose energy reaches the level of genesis or just a quantum tunneling that happens by chance.

When this key appears, the true vacuum bubble may appear, it may start with only one atom in size, but it will soon expand to a very large size, and the pseudo-vacuum energy level surrounding it will quickly fall towards it, becoming a true vacuum state, and any matter that falls into it will be destroyed, the speed of expansion of this true vacuum bubble is the speed of light, because the universe is large enough, even if the vacuum decay has begun somewhere in the universe, it will only come to us in the extremely distant future.

In the short story "Chaowen Dao", Liu Cixin's soul character Ding Yi and many of the world's top physicists are preparing to conduct an experiment, their experimental tool is "Einstein's equator", a large particle collider that circles the equator, and can reach the genesis energy level for experiments. Ding Yi and many physicists dreamed of finding the grand unified theory with the help of Einstein's equator. And the day before the experiment, the unthinkable happened, Einstein disappeared out of thin air at the equator, and such a huge scientific facility disappeared only overnight, which is by no means humanly possible.

This matter is done by the "risk collectors" in the universe, their task is to monitor the intelligent civilization in the universe, in case they do something that may destroy the universe, Einstein's experiment at the equator will reach the creation energy level, the risk solver believes that it may induce vacuum decay, leading to the decline of the universe, so they came to stop it.

Now, vacuum decay is still only a theory, and the energy levels that humans can achieve today are far from the theoretical requirements, so there is no need to worry, even if vacuum decay has begun somewhere in the universe, it will take a long time to reach us, if it is far away from us.

The vacuum is unstable, and the quanta at the higher energy level always have to jump to the lower energy level, which is the essence of vacuum decay. Scientists say that vacuum decay could destroy the quantum in the universe, causing it to expand, and eventually destroy the universe!

If a vacucheum decay is triggered by an accidental cause, the universe will be destroyed, and a higher vacuum may be created at the same time.

If there is a vacuum decay, then the vacuum bubbles will spread at an astonishing speed, and even swallow up all the planets in the solar system, not only the universe will be destroyed, but we humans will also leave.

Vacuum decay will turn the entire universe into a state of almost destruction, and it is very likely that the entire universe will return to the way it was before the big **, in short, everything will have to start again.

Vacuum decay, then there will be new changes in the universe. Maybe the whole universe will be destroyed in one fell swoop, which is a particularly terrible thing. Then this universe is a particularly large place, which means all decay.

The occurrence of vacuum decay will cause the gravitational pull of the Sun to increase rapidly, which means that the planets around the Sun will be affected, including the eight planets, but such a time is relatively long, at least for human life.

That's just a possibility. Eureal air bubbles form in a pseudo-vacuum environment, causing the entire universe to shift to a lower energy state. For our current universe, it can be regarded as destruction.

Because the vacuum bubble contains an extremely large amount of energy, which is enough to change the structure of the entire universe. Note that this structure is not a spatiotemporal structure. But I doubt that a cubic meter of vacuum, for example, contains dozens of orders of magnitude of energy larger than the entire universe.

So Hawking is just speculating, not necessarily taking it seriously, after all, a mature theory has not yet been formed. Another reason is that the Higgs particle is the most special elementary particle, so it should not be speculated on by the decay of other particles. Transition from micro to macro a bit.

For example, black holes are also celestial bodies, but can black holes be understood using general celestial theory? Hey, obviously a new theory needs to be rebuilt.