String Theory includes bubbles of nothing. In these a vacuum phase transition takes and the bubbles then spread through the Universe eventually eating all of space-time.
Fotka od Hans Braxmeier z Pixabay
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What could be a better thing to forget about your real-world terrors than physics that describes a possible end of the Universe? Fake news, elections, arguments with your partner even the coronavirus - all seem insignificant in comparison with the destruction of space-time itself. Giuseppe Dibitetto and Nicolo Petri from the Spanish Universidad de Oviedo and Marjorie Schillo from the Swedish Uppsala Universitet recently published a preprint of their theoretical research about bubbles of nothing.
It is your standard ghost story. According to the quantum theory, a false vacuum exists. This is a metastable state that uses the local energy minimum and can be very stable and last for a very long time. But! If your Universe - or more precisely its Higg's Field - is in a state of a false vacuum than one day a bubble of a more stable vacuum could form in it. This bubble would then spread at the speed of light eating space-time until it ate all of the Universe.
If you take a look around you, then you will see that nothing like that has happened in the past roughly 14 billion years since our Universe started or at least it hasn't destroyed all of the Universe so far. Luckily, there is some good news. Most physicists consider this to be an improbable scenario. Nonetheless, the topic is quite sexy and sci-fi that experts still keep researching it. For example, Dibitetto and his coworkers think we could learn a lot of the theoretical bubbles of nothing that could destroy the Universe as if we understood the mechanisms than maybe we could find a way to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics.
The bubbles of nothing are one of the examples of spacetime bubbles in which the Universe has different properties than outside the bubble. Theoretically, there could be bubbles of dark energy in which this quite strange energy has a different value than in the rest of the Universe. And in the case of the bubbles of nothing, there should be nothing inside of them - as their name suggests - as they would pretty much have no inside.
So, what are the chances of our Universe bein eaten up by these bubbles of nothing? Well, if the Universe has the four dimensions we are used to - length, width, height, and time - then most likely not. The bubbles of nothing only exist in the equations of the multidimensional space of String Theory. But for scientists who study String Theory, these bubbles have value as they help them describe the workings of a string universe. And it seems that either these bubbles of nothing either do not exist or they are extremely rare. And at the same time, the science shows us that an expanding bubble of nothing is a decent way to describe a mysterious part of our Universe's evolution - the cosmological inflation.
At this moment, it seems that we do not have to fear bubbles of nothing that would eat the Universe. Truthfully, String Theory is not even mainstream among theoretical physicists at the moment. But, if you are interested in the creation or the destruction of the Universe then you should keep your eye on bubbles of nothing.
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