Oct 6, 2017 09:08 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/did-our-cosmos-em...ng-bubbles
EXCERPT: [...] This scenario describes what would happen under the laws of physics as we understand them today. But Arkani-Hamed thinks that there might be additional effects in play at extremely high energies, far beyond anything that physicists can probe using the Large Hadron Collider, which discovered the Higgs particle. If so, we might be safe from a bubble disaster for much longer than even the previous calculation indicated. According to the cosmologist Andrei Linde at Stanford University, we might see bubbles forming inside our visible Universe only after 10 (raised to the power 10^34) years. That’s a 1 followed by 10^34 zeros, a number far too large to write out.
The additional high-energy physics effects would also change the conditions inside the bubbles, in a rather intriguing way. In this case, we expect the vacuum energy inside the bubbles to be less than the current vacuum energy density of 7 x 10-30 grammes per cubic centimetre, but it might be greater than zero. Such a bubble would still expand forever. The positive density inside the bubble would be less than outside, and the negative pressure inside would be less negative than the negative pressure outside, so the more negative pressure outside would still win and pull the bubble wall outward forever. The wall would again quickly accelerate to nearly the velocity of light.
But inside the bubble, life would no longer be so miserable. The low positive vacuum energy could theoretically decay into particles. The inside of the bubble could become a self-contained bubble universe. As the bubble expands forever, the volume of this universe would increase without limit, and it could theoretically form an endless number of low-energy ‘galaxies’ or other objects inside. Suddenly, the bubble starts to sound less like exotic theoretical speculation, and more like the kind of physical reality that we know....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/did-our-cosmos-em...ng-bubbles
EXCERPT: [...] This scenario describes what would happen under the laws of physics as we understand them today. But Arkani-Hamed thinks that there might be additional effects in play at extremely high energies, far beyond anything that physicists can probe using the Large Hadron Collider, which discovered the Higgs particle. If so, we might be safe from a bubble disaster for much longer than even the previous calculation indicated. According to the cosmologist Andrei Linde at Stanford University, we might see bubbles forming inside our visible Universe only after 10 (raised to the power 10^34) years. That’s a 1 followed by 10^34 zeros, a number far too large to write out.
The additional high-energy physics effects would also change the conditions inside the bubbles, in a rather intriguing way. In this case, we expect the vacuum energy inside the bubbles to be less than the current vacuum energy density of 7 x 10-30 grammes per cubic centimetre, but it might be greater than zero. Such a bubble would still expand forever. The positive density inside the bubble would be less than outside, and the negative pressure inside would be less negative than the negative pressure outside, so the more negative pressure outside would still win and pull the bubble wall outward forever. The wall would again quickly accelerate to nearly the velocity of light.
But inside the bubble, life would no longer be so miserable. The low positive vacuum energy could theoretically decay into particles. The inside of the bubble could become a self-contained bubble universe. As the bubble expands forever, the volume of this universe would increase without limit, and it could theoretically form an endless number of low-energy ‘galaxies’ or other objects inside. Suddenly, the bubble starts to sound less like exotic theoretical speculation, and more like the kind of physical reality that we know....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/did-our-cosmos-em...ng-bubbles
