What is false vacuum decay?
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Empty space has a tiny amount of energy in it all the time. (Why is… complicated. So much so I’m not sure I can explain it myself. So we will skip that part.). This tiny amount of energy shows up in what are called “virtual particles” that pop into existence for incredibly short periods of time. They disappear because they’re formed in “matter-antimatter” pairs, so the energy that goes into making them comes back out when they bump back into each other.
This whole thing seems to be stable, with the particles popping in and out at a specific amount, having a small-but-necessary energy involved. (Again, why it is needed is hard to explain, but it has to do with how quantum mechanics works and how forces are applied over distances, so trust me, it’s important.)
But what if it’s only kinda stable? What if the vacuum could exist with less energy than it has now? If it could exist with less energy, that would be even more stable, so it would want to do that.
Vacuum is not decaying all the time, so we know that the state it’s in is stable… ish.
But like a bit of paper, it’s in a stable setup right now, but with a bit of a push, it could move to a lower energy state (in paper, that’s ash) and change how it works.
Thing is? If that happened, our current laws of physics would not necessarily work anymore. As I said above, the current vacuum energy is needed to make quantum mechanics work. Without it, things might be slightly different… or they could be “atoms can’t exist” different.
And if it happened, it would “spread” like fire spreads through a sheet of paper. Only it would spread at the speed of light (probably) and we wouldn’t be able to even see it coming.
That’s “false vacuum decay” in as simple terms as I can get. There’s a lot skipped, and a lot simplified to the point of absurdity, but that’s the gist.
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